I feel worthless like a waste of space

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WhinyS
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16 Jan 2013, 10:18 am

I have suffered from low self esteem for years, but only that makes sense to me. I feel like I deserve that. Even when I try to have mental arguments to try and think otherwise, I lose. I feel like a loser.
And self doubt, it keeps me from even trying to work towards achieving something. Because I just know I'll not be able to do it. Since I've failed in past and might fail again, it seems better to not even try and just prevent the embarrassment.
I hate my life and everything about it. Even though I try to make others like me, I'm the one who hates me the most. I don't even deserve anything that I have.
No matter what I read, say, I can never convince myself to think otherwise



answeraspergers
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16 Jan 2013, 11:24 am

You have belief system issues.

I ripped this out of my book for you..............

1.) “I don’t matter/I’m not important/I’m worthless”
“Children have more need of role models than critics” - Joseph Joubert.
This belief comes down to what you believe about your intrinsic value as a human being. This is about your level of self-belief and something therefore that is within your boundary. For those that possess real self-belief, this belief is not even a faint neurological trace in the mind. However for others, whose best opponent is themselves. This belief is quite real and sinister.
A tennis player must possess real self-belief or he will never be a real champion. The anxiety at key moments of the match will impede performance and when all is said and done, at the very top levels, victory occurs first within the mind of who has the largest self-belief. Those who beat themselves up over a bad shot attack their own self-belief instead of compassionately observing objectively. They erode their own self-belief from having anger and judgement and not love and compassion towards.
True self-belief is built on love and compassion towards the self and self-loathing is built upon fear and judgement. If every single act of self-interest is a struggle and every act of self-sabotage somehow a sweet vivacious joy. This belief makes people good at looking just good enough – but never really achieving their potential. Success invites too much unwanted attention and scrutiny. Success brings threats to stability and security, whereas constricting the expression of your gifts is somehow “dignified self-restraint”, its internally vivacious and strangely secure.
Many people that struggle with this belief find that it originally stems from “the interpretation of unmet childhood needs as abandonment”. To a child its greatest fear is abandonment. A child is utterly dependent and defence-less, it relies on others for everything. To get our needs met as children (and adults) we need others. These are just a few experiences that everyone invariably experiences at some point growing up but they all create abandonment wounds:
-Being hungry and no one feeds him.

-Being left to cry in a crib or playpen – a literally toxic plastic experience.

-Being left at a young age to care for oneself, a parent, or other siblings.

-Being emotionally abused - ignored, yelled at, shamed.

-Being shamed or teased emotionally – especially regarding sex.

-Being hit yelled at or excessively chastised - when the child has no clue what they did or ability to separate themselves from the reason for the anger.

-Being used by a parent to gratify their own needs – the “would have been champion” pushy sports parent springs to mind.

-Having a parent or caregiver who is emotionally unavailable or incapable.

-Being unseen or misunderstood by parents or other caregivers.

-Divorce.

As you can see, a child is particularly needy, that’s not a judgement it’s just a fact, a beautiful fact. It’s inherent to the process of having children that they have literally thousands of needs, needs to be fed, to be changed, to be held and touched and crucially to experience some emotional reciprocity. This last need varies across children but when these needs are consistently not met a child loses sense of his of personal value, their needs are not important, the egocentric child thinks they are not worthy of their parents time and attention and that their needs don’t matter, that they don’t matter.

The unrefined egocentric nature of children means that they place themselves as the root cause of all their experience. The ego does not differentiated to the extent that it can interpret not having a need met immediately as being about anything other than them. They are permanently investing their self-belief into their environment and attributing themselves as the cause of their experience – good or bad. Whatever the experience the child always believes they are the cause of what happens to them.

There are no refined ego-defences that can protect you from endless egocentric thinking. There is no relief from thoughts such as:
'My parents were just having a bad day and maybe overreacted'
'My parents lack the necessary parental training in order to teach proper boundaries so they thought by being angry with me and shouting would stop me from doing it ever again!'
“My parents only learnt from their parents. They are using out of date methods because they don’t know better”.

You simply can’t think to question the competency of your parents. You depend on them for everything a thought such as this would result in crippling anxiety. So naturally, you blame yourself. The child is utterly defenceless and reliant upon their parents. They are, to a child a god not a fallible human being. By definition then they were infallible and perfect, they couldn’t be wrong because if they were and we were absolutely dependent then that would have caused even more pain and anxiety than to just blame ourselves.
Identifying ourselves as the sole reason for an experience is a conclusion that can happen in the crib, when babies first attribute cause and effect or later in childhood when the ego takes something “too personally”. The whole period of childhood is building the belief system up for life and how your parents responded to that task. If your parents were mostly dismissive or didn’t meet your perceived needs, then children employ coping strategies to deal with the short term emotions of a need going unmet. They take the emotion out of the equation by concluding “of course my needs are not met – I don’t matter”. It makes perfect sense.
If this happens over a long enough timeline, then this belief can be heavily reinforced. In a typical day you may have expressed a need 50 times and been denied on virtually every occasion, even rounding down that’s 18,000 “rejections” a year. At that rate, by the age of six that’s over 100,000 times the child has experienced a form of abandonment. Worst still, the occasions where you did get attention that itself may have been another form of abandonment. It may have been inappropriate, heavy handed or critical. The parent may have consistently discounted the child’s thoughts, opinions and contributions.
As the maturing brain simply just believes what it hears the most, that this experience gave rise to a sabotaging belief like this one, is of little surprise. When needs are neglected, children are given the message that their needs are not important and they lose a sense of their own personal value. The implicit message taken on by kids is that they are not worth their parents' time and at a fundamental level, the child sees himself as not being worthy or important.
Your parents have their own lives and worries, from their perspective and perhaps lack of emotional intelligence, your needs and worries were sometimes considered less important than you considered them. They were worried about themselves and most commonly about money. Just because your needs were not attended to properly as a child does not mean that you as an entity are not important. It was an ego based interpretation, not a fact.
Importance or worth is not some objective characteristic that people are inherently born with. It’s just a choice. If an adult person is important to other people, whether it is emotionally or otherwise it is because they have made themselves so through their actions and words. Before you can achieve any of this, you must first be important to you because without that, other peoples mirror neurons will sense that in you and at least consider treating you in the manner in which you treat yourself. The world will be your mirror reflecting back at you your beliefs.



WhinyS
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16 Jan 2013, 2:16 pm

My mom used to say that parents only love kids who study well and get good grades. The memory is still fresh in my mind from when she said that first. I've always felt like the unwanted child (an accident).
It is(or at least seems) impossible to remove it all from my head. I've tried so many ways to convince myself to love me but I end up hating myself more. I try and try to tell myself that I'm important, but I just can't.



answeraspergers
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16 Jan 2013, 4:44 pm

i dont want to post the whole thing

basically, you have lots of negative limiting conditioned beliefs that make you feel s**t

You gotta explore them and reframe them.

I had the same thing, my parents had plans for many kids until i "put them off".



Last edited by answeraspergers on 17 Jan 2013, 8:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

WhinyS
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16 Jan 2013, 10:25 pm

Is there a way to overcome the conditioning or whatever the reason could be?



answeraspergers
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17 Jan 2013, 10:41 am

Yes there is!

Im working on explaining it further but basically its belief change