It can be a good grade taken in an exam, a work project that has brought the desired results, an important personal goal, even a solid and loving couple relationship: the point is that, regardless of how has been built, the emotion that accompanies these situations is a mixture of dissatisfaction, discontent and indifference.
If you've stopped reading this post, my words probably sound familiar to you. Perhaps you too, in the face of an alleged success of yours, pause more to think about what you could have done more or better in that situation, than about what you are actually experiencing or what you have really achieved.
This is also the reason why you tend to project your thoughts more on future plans rather than present events: as soon as you reach one goal, you are already thinking about the next one, without giving yourself even a moment to feel proud of yourself, at least a little time to enjoy your win.
In short, feeling deserving of a success is not a contemplated possibility and it remains a desire that is difficult to achieve.
Basically, it is a process of self-evaluation regarding someone’s past, background and personality.
We treat ourselves as we have been treated
Stop and think. How were your enthusiasms received when you reached a small or big result as a child? What reactions could you observe when, as a teenager, you reached the milestones that were important to you? Did you breathe indifference? Is it the same way you treat yourself today?
Probably yes. Because we tend to treat ourselves in the same way we have been treated, to address the same words and looks to each other that we have received, to have the same expectations that our reference points had towards us. So, if over time, being in relationship with the people important to you and understanding and interpreting their words, their looks, their silences, their reactions, you have developed the idea that what you do or get, however electrifying, it's never enough to get valuable recognition, you may continue to be indifferent to your successes.
In this way, you not only run the risk of losing sight of your abilities, but also of transforming the good results you achieve into any actions, maintaining a devaluing attitude towards you, ignoring your efforts and supporting the idea that not only what you do, but maybe you too are not worth enough.
When you have to deal with imperfection
From an early age we tend to make our own the expectations that we perceive the figures that are important to us have towards us. But what happens when these expectations are many and even excessively high - in short, impossible to meet?
What happens when, for example, a parent encourages their child by reiterating several times that he is so intelligent, brilliant and special, that he can achieve anything he wants and even effortlessly. In practice, then, it will hardly happen. Because like everyone else, that child will not be perfect or perfectly handsome: he will encounter difficulties, he will realize that it is not always so easy to get what he wants, he will make mistakes, he will feel frustrated and could generalize the experiences by equaling them all, regardless of the level of performance achieved, doubting oneself and one's "real" abilities.
Coming to terms with your imperfections can be quite tiring if from your first significant relationships you have breathed a perfect and infallible image of yourself, which over time you have made yours. The risk you run is to continue to remain faithful to it, giving up to downsize your standards of perfection and rejoice in the results that, although considered successes by the people around you, do not meet those criteria.
Understanding what it was to start changing what will be
Knowing why you cannot grant yourself recognition or why you expect so much from yourself is useful to the extent that it allows you to give meaning to the difficulty you still experience today, that is the treatment you usually reserve for yourself, even when you would like to recognize yours instead. you deserve and enjoy them as well.
Giving you the opportunity to understand why today you find it hard to be proud of what you are able to do, it can be useful for you to look for and welcome an alternative in the present, and to choose with which eyes to look at you, which words to dedicate to you, how to welcome your mistakes and also your successes.
