PART ONE OF THREE: THE NOT GOOD ENOUGH SERIES
Perhaps the story you’ve been carrying was never really about you.
There’s a particular kind of woman I meet again and again in my practice; maybe you’ll recognise her, maybe even in yourself.
The capable, competent, reliable woman who others seem to naturally lean on. She holds down her career, holds together her family and her marriage, holds confidences and support for her friends, sometimes all four at once. She looks fine on the outside. She knows how to put on a good face, smile and stay strong. What choice does she have?
But she’s exhausted. Deeply exhausted. And when she’s alone, there’s the questioning, and the judging.
Why do I keep ending up here — anxious, worried and exhausted?
Why can’t I get this relationship right?
Why am I always so hard on myself?
Why do I keep putting everyone else first?
Why can’t I seem to get on top of things, no matter how hard I try?
Over more than twenty-five years of practice, I have had the privilege of sitting with hundreds of people, mostly women, and listening to the stories that have quietly shaped their lives. Every person who comes through my door is unique. Yet beneath the remarkable variety of their experiences, I have noticed a thread running through the centre of almost every conversation.
Beneath all those questions, if we listen carefully enough, lives a quieter one. One that most people have never said aloud.
What is wrong with me?
Where does this self-judgement come from?
I don’t believe anyone is born asking that question.
When you watch a young child, before the world has had a chance to leave its marks, you don’t see someone doubting her worth. You see a child who laughs freely, cries honestly, and moves through life with an unselfconscious wholeness. She doesn’t wonder whether she deserves to take up space. She doesn’t seek permission to cry out for what she wants. She demands what she wants, and she wants it now. She doesn’t question whether she is enough. She simply is.
Somewhere along the way, that changes.
Not because the child changes, but because life happens.
A parent is distracted or overwhelmed. A teacher compares you to someone else. A sibling receives the praise you’re longing for. Families move through loss, illness, conflict or quiet uncertainty. Your feelings are dismissed. Your needs go unmet. The sting of criticism, the fear of rejection.
None of these moments have to be dramatic. Often, it’s the accumulation of small experiences, interpreted through the eyes of a child who doesn’t yet have the capacity to think: “My parents are stressed. My teacher is struggling. The adults around me are imperfect human beings.”
The child lives within her emotional body, without rational judgement. She experiences life based on how she feels. And if the circumstances, the environment and, consequentially, the feelings don’t feel right, then something must be wrong. She feels it internally, and so she reaches the only conclusion available to her;
“There must be something wrong with me.”
And that single belief, formed in childhood, often without a single dramatic event, changes everything.
Children don’t yet have the capacity to understand that the adults they love are carrying their own unresolved wounds, their own inherited stories, their own invisible burdens. They can’t see the financial worry, the emotional exhaustion, the grief that has nowhere to go. All they know is that something doesn’t feel right, and so they don’t feel right. The perceived judgement and criticism is interpreted as rejection. They feel disconnected because love has started to feel conditional.
I must do better to remain connected. I must be more to be safe.
It is such an innocent conclusion.
And yet it quietly becomes one of the most consequential stories a person will ever carry, unresolved, running in the background, often for the rest of their lives.
From the moment that belief takes root, something subtle but profound begins to shift. The child who once moved through life from the inside out, trusting her feelings, expressing her needs, belonging simply by being, begins instead to look outward. She starts scanning her environment for clues. For signals about who she needs to become in order to feel safe, loved and accepted again.
If being myself isn’t working… who do I need to be?
Some children become the responsible one, discovering that being helpful brings a kind of warmth they long for. Others become the achiever, finding that success earns a recognition that feels, at least briefly, like love. Some learn to keep the peace, to stay small, to anticipate the needs of others before their own feelings can be felt or expressed. Some learn that their authentic self, the full, unedited, gloriously imperfect version of who they actually are, is simply too much. Or perhaps not quite enough.
These were not weaknesses. I want to be very clear about that.
They were acts of survival. Remarkable, intelligent acts of love from a child doing everything she could to preserve connection with the people she needed most.
The difficulty is that those strategies rarely stay in childhood where they belong.
Years later, sometimes decades later, we may no longer be living in the environments that required them. We are no longer children. We have built lives, gathered wisdom, developed extraordinary capability. And yet something in us is still running the old program.
We still work a little too hard. Give a little too much. Find it difficult to say no, or to ask for what we need. We still can’t quite believe that our own worth doesn’t depend on what we can offer or achieve. We wonder, quietly, why we still feel anxious despite everything we’ve accomplished. Why we still feel, in unguarded moments, that we are somehow not quite enough.
Many of the women I work with carry this feeling alongside lives that look, from the outside, like they are working beautifully. They are capable, devoted, deeply thoughtful human beings. They hold their families and careers and businesses and friendships together with enormous grace. And they sit across from me and say, in one way or another: I don’t know why I can’t seem to get on top of this. I feel like I should have figured it out by now.
What they rarely see — yet — is that they are still trying to answer the same question they first asked as a child.
What’s wrong with me?
It is a heartbreaking question. Not because anything is wrong with the person asking it, but because it sends us searching in entirely the wrong direction. We spend years, sometimes whole lifetimes, trying to improve and refine and fix the very person who was never broken to begin with.
Healing, in my experience, rarely begins with a strategy or a problem to solve.
It begins with a moment of recognition. A moment of seeing anew, perhaps for the first time, that the child who developed those coping strategies was not flawed. She was innocent. She was doing the only thing she knew how to do with the understanding she had available to her at the time.
There is something profoundly freeing about truly taking that in.
When we begin to see our younger self with genuine compassion, not the kind that glosses over pain, but the deep, unflinching kind that is willing to look at it honestly, something begins to shift and soften and change. The harsh inner voice that has followed us for so long starts to lose its authority. The self-judgement that has been so relentless begins, slowly, to ease.
In its place, something gentler starts to grow.
I think of it as a return. Not to a person we used to be, but to a deeper connection to self, the quiet, essential part of us that knew our worth long before the world began its commentary. The soul of who we are, before the stories took hold.
That part of you has never gone anywhere.
It has simply been waiting, with extraordinary patience, for the moment you remember it is there.
Compassion does not erase the past. It doesn’t excuse what was painful or pretend that it didn’t matter. What it does is allow us to hold the experience, and ourselves within it, with the same tenderness we would naturally offer any child who had done her very best under circumstances she didn’t choose and couldn’t fully understand. To look at her gently and say:
“It was never your fault.
You are not to blame.”
From compassion comes acceptance.
From acceptance comes the possibility of letting go.
Perhaps that is where every genuine healing journey begins. Not by asking how you can become someone better. But by gently, compassionately recognising that you have spent years trying to solve the wrong problem.
There is nothing wrong with who you truly are.
There never was.
The person you have been searching for has been here all along, quietly present beneath the old stories, beneath the roles and the striving and the self-doubt, waiting for the moment you remember that she never disappeared.
That moment of recognition, in my experience, changes everything.
Because healing is not about becoming someone new. It is about returning to who you have always been.
If this has resonated, The Gift of Self-Worth is a natural place to begin — or continue reading with Part Two of this series.
Order The Gift of Self-Worth · Book a session · Read Part Two