What Do You Do When You Don’t Feel Good Enough?

22 October, 201929 October, 2019Marissa

Have you ever read one of those self-help books, articles, or blogs that encourages you to think you’re enough? That who you are is “good enough” and you don’t have to keep trying to measure up to an impossible standard?

I’m sure for some people this is encouraging. But what about when you don’t feel good enough?

If you’re really struggling with feelings of unworthiness, then just hearing assurances that you really are good enough isn’t going to help much. Positive affirmations have their place but they can’t dislodge or replace thoughts that are really rooted into your mind. They’re not a substitute for personal growth work and (in some cases) getting help from a professional therapist.

So what do you do when you feel like you’re unworthy? How do you change things when you think you aren’t “good enough” and this belief is part of what defines you?

Figure out where this thought came from

When you struggle with ongoing feelings of unworthiness, combating the voice that says “I’m not good enough” can often be easier when we understand where it’s coming from.

Therapist Karyl McBride says, “this message of unworthiness” usually “goes back to the family of origin” (“Do You Feel Not Good Enough?”). At some point, someone or something that had a deep impact on your formation as a person put the message “you’re not good enough” inside you. It may have been deliberate or accidental, but the fact remains many people picked up the idea that they’re unworthy from other people while they were growing up. Read more →

Classics Club Update (1/2)

7 August, 20196 August, 2019Marissa

Almost five years ago, I committed to reading 50 classic works of literature in 5 years. I’m starting to worry I won’t actually finish my Classics Club list by the August 18 deadline, despite the fact that I’ve already read more than 50 books this year alone. They just haven’t been the right books for the list (even with swapping out some of the titles for ones I’m more interested in now).

I’m not out of time yet, though, so I’m going to keep trying. Part of the agreement includes blogging about each title, but since this isn’t really a book blog I’m not going to write a whole post about each book I’ve read. Instead, here are a collection of my thoughts on six of the twelve books that were still on my list.

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been on my list since the beginning. I’d read some of her mother’s work and had seen an on-stage version of Frankenstein as well as a modernized YouTube series, but this was my first time reading the original novel. It wasn’t entirely what I’d expected, though the format is familiar from reading other books from this time period. The story is told as if Victor Frankenstein is sharing his research (along with a cautionary tale) to the explorer who found him pursuing his created creature toward the North Pole.

Probably the thing that fascinated me most was the role Frankinstein’s psychology played in the story. Published in 1818 — 38 years before Sigmund Freud was even born — Mary Shelley explores the idea that Frankinstein’s path was shaped by his environment and his childhood as much as by the conscious choices he made. Did he make himself into the monster that created this creature? Or did was he a tragic product of his past? The story seems unsure and leaves us to answer that question for ourselves. Read more →

Cultivating Patience For Spiritual and Personal Growth

31 July, 201930 July, 2019Marissa

Patience isn’t something many of us want to take seriously. We joke about how impatient we are. We fume when stuck behind a driver going even a few miles per hour below the speed limit. We abandon time-consuming projects for something faster and more interesting. We gobble up as much instant gratification as we possibly can.

Impatience is easy. Patience takes work. And, as with many things, the option that requires some hard work is by far the most rewarding. Cultivating patience can improve our health and our relationships. It’s also an important tool for personal and spiritual growth, which is the context today’s post is going to focus on.

This article is a follow-up to Monday’s post titled “‘Are We There Yet?’ — Dealing With Impatience In Spiritual and Personal Growth.” If you haven’t read that yet you’ll probably want to before continuing with this article. Just click the title to open it in a new window.

Defining Patience

If you research the word “patience,” you’ll find that it comes from the Latin word patientia, which literally refers to the “quality of suffering.” In modern usage, we define it as “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.” Related words include forbearance, tolerance, self-restraint, resignation, stoicism, fortitude, and endurance.

I’m no linguist, but one of the languages I have studied a little is Biblical Greek and in doing so I discovered something about patience that I find fascinating. In the Greek New Testament, there are two words for patience. “Hupomone (5281) is exercised toward things and circumstances, while makrothumia is exercised toward people” (Spiros Zodhiates, The Complete WordStudy Dictionary, entry 3116). Both are key to experiencing growth and cultivating a more patient lifestyle. Read more →

“Are We There Yet?” — Dealing With Impatience In Spiritual and Personal Growth

29 July, 201928 July, 2019Marissa

Our journeys often seem very long. Whether you’re a little one in the back seat of the car thinking we should have made it to the pool by now, or a young person waiting for the end of high school, or an adult hoping for a breakthrough in your career, we can all get impatient. “Are we there yet?” we ask, because it feels like by now we should be.

We ask this question for all sorts of things. Journeys by foot, by car, by plane. Journeys of faith and personal growth. Relationship journeys, career journeys, learning journeys. We get impatient and we want to see how things will turn out.

Are we there yet?

Why aren’t we there yet?

When will we get there?

But are these really the right questions, especially for journeys of spiritual and personal growth? Maybe instead of impatiently pushing through the in-between times or abandoning one goal for another, we should focus on seeing what we can learn from the journey.

Impatience and The Cost of Growth

In his excellent article “The 7 Laws of Impatience,” Jim Stone, PhD, states that “Impatience is triggered when we have a goal, and realize it’s going to cost us more than we thought to reach it.” Here are some examples:

You’re trying to get a new type of job, and you realize you need additional schooling to qualify for the position(s) you want. You realize that achieving this goal will cost more than you expected in terms of time and money.
You’re working on a creative project, but get distracted by some other project. Achieving your first goal is going to cost putting the other goal on the back-burner.
You start a personal growth journey toward a goal such as reducing anxiety, improving your social skills, or to stop procrastinating. As you work on this goal, you realize this issue goes deeper than you expected, is going to take longer to work through, and/or might require counseling. Now achieving that goal will cost more in terms of time, vulnerability, and emotional resources.

When something like this happens, we get impatient. To quote Dr. Stone again, “Impatience motivates us to reduce the costs of reaching our goal, or to switch goals.” In some situations that can be a good thing, such as when we’re working on a project that’s going nowhere and it would be more efficient to switch goals. But in other cases it’s not helpful. Read more →

Personality Type Myth-Busting: Are All Introverts Quiet?

24 April, 201923 April, 2019Marissa

I think most people would tell you that one of the defining traits of introverts is that they are quiet. It’s even the name of one of the most popular introvert books — Quiet: The Power of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. This also happens to be the book that first got me started on studying and embracing introversion, and it’s still one of my favorite books.

But in the midst of this “quiet revolution” that’s pushing for greater acceptance of introversion, we might get the idea that all introverts are characterized by being soft-spoken people who rarely talk. However, that’s not entirely accurate and that’s not what really what Susan Cain meant when she named her book Quiet.

Confusing Introversion and Shyness

One of the most common mistakes regarding introversion is to assume it’s the same thing as shyness. But introversion is simply a description of how about 50% of the population’s brains are “hardwired.” It’s a preference for the inner world and a need to recharge in solitude. Shyness, on the other hand, is related to social anxiety. Read more →

Your Memory Doesn’t Work The Way You Think It Does

16 January, 201915 January, 2019Marissa

We tend to think of our memories as pretty reliable things. We might joke about how forgetful we are, but when we do remember something we assume that it’s accurate.

I was 12 years old on September 11, 2001 and I vividly remember hearing about the terrorist attack. I was in our family minivan with my mother, sister, and little brother when the news came over the radio. I wasn’t quite sure what had happened, and was more worried that my mother was going to drive into another car on the crowded in-town roads because she was so upset. We continued on to the roller skating rink where we’d been heading, skated for a while, and then stopped when the announcement went out over the loudspeaker. Several people gathered together to pray, but we stayed off to one side praying just as a family. I felt scared, confused, and very alone.

That’s probably not what actually happened, though. Another thing I remember is starting a diary because I was sure that this was such a pivotal turning point in our nation’s history that decades from now some historian would care about what I wrote. I can’t find that diary anywhere, so I have no way to compare my memories now against what I recorded back then. But if I’m anything like other people, then only a little over 50% of these details I remember are accurate. Read more →