Everyone has limiting beliefs. Especially ‘I’m not good enough’. We are hard-wired to think like that in the limbic brain. This is so we fit into the tribe and don’t piss too many fellow tribe people off. Thus not being kicked out of the tribe and being eaten by a sabre-tooth cat or something. What happens is we work through this limiting belief with the conversations in our head. ‘Not good enough for what… exactly?’ is a good way to call out the fact that it’s bull shit.
However, a limiting belief can mutate, ‘Nothing I do/think/have/am is EVER good enough’. ‘I as a person is not good enough’.
Now, this is a bigger problem. It could have started in childhood when with having the theta brain, that acts as a sponge for information up to the age of seven. Terrible teachers and rubbish parenting, circumstance, can bring this about. It can start as an adult too if you are repeatedly bullied, or if you suffer from others bias, or if you have a partner who gaslights you. This turns ‘having a wobble’ of confidence into a wall of shame and guilt. It lives on a spectrum and fluctuates. At this stage, you need help and support to break it. Amazing friends, or a loving partner or someone like me, who can break patterns of thinking. I understand this deeply, as this was me. The person who got me out of this was the singer Helen Reddy, she took up hypnotherapy and we did an exchange of talents in a hotel room in London. She stopped my damaging self-talk, not with hypnotherapy, but by pointing it out (over and over again!). She also made it clear that not being in your power as a woman was a crime against other women. It didn’t happen overnight, it took me years to undo the programming, but that’s because I did it alone with a library of self-help books. A bit like coming off drugs, and you’re about to see why. Becoming aware of your thoughts is the first step to absolute freedom. Helen Reddy gave me that first step, I’ll be forever grateful.
The final stage is ‘addiction to self’. This is when you become addicted to your limiting belief. When you have a negative thought or find something in your external world that proves your limiting belief, you get a shot of dopamine in the brain. Even though the thought was negative the dopamine feels SOOO good. It comes with an emotional drop that only taking crack can give you. So you need to get the next hit. This means that you surround yourself with people who can confirm your limiting belief. That might be people that you see as being ‘better than you’ or people who are abusive towards you.
So if that belief is ‘I’m not good enough’, you will seek out and find people who agree with you. You will also tell them how to treat you. This will be in your body language and in the way we speak about ourselves. Strangely an ‘addiction to self’ can show up as an addiction to helping other people. You can give and give but you won’t allow yourself to reserve, because you don’t believe you’re worth it. You make them actors in your story of self-loathing and no matter what they do to help you, if you’re set on being a victim they will end up as your persecutor even when they are trying to be your hero. You will stone wall love when you see yourself as not good enough for love. This leads to loneliness, this is now more proof that you were right about yourself, you ARE NOT GOOD enough. Dopamine hit – whoop!
You will find evidence that you’re not good enough. Every small mistake you make will be another dopamine hit. WHOOP!
People are not daft, they see the pattern and at this point, they try and get help. They come and see people like me or therapists of all kinds. Dealing with the limiting belief will not solve the problem. You can’t make someone believe they are enough, because we are hard-wired to not believe we are enough. That will always fluctuate and we learnt to live with it and not allow it to hold us back. It’s when we need the limiting belief to keep us safe. There as so many side benefits to believing we are not enough. It can protect us from so much of lives pain and disappointments. We can also enjoy the attention and the effort people put into us. No-one likes a powerful wanker and we are so not one of those in our victimhood.
Not being enough becomes our identity. We have no idea who we would be without it, but one with we do know is that a world where all of our dreams come true is a scary place.
So the limiting belief provides us with dopamine, safety, identity, and a reason to be liked by other people. None of these is to be sniffed at.
There does however come a time of realisation with you know that dopamine is overrated and often leads to comfort eating, that you’re not safe as your broke ass, attract the wrong partners and friends, that this isn’t your identity, that it’s a fake ‘you’ that you created to feel safe and there’s deep loneliness when you are not seen for who you are, which is not this twat you have been leading everyone else to believe you are. You also then find that most of your friends are with you because of what you do for them and how you make them feel and that, they never knew you at all.
My friend Dr David Hamilton in his book ‘I heart me’ says that there are stages to self-love: I’m not enough, I’ve had enough and I would add a third ‘I’ve got this’.
You have to have had enough of being ‘I’m not enough’. From that place, you can truly let go of the addition to self that’s holding you to a limiting belief that doesn’t serve you.
This is why it’s so similar to giving up a drug. This is your rock bottom; this is the point when you ask for help and support; this is the point where your new phase of life starts. You come up from your humble knees. No more begging for the love you will no doubt reject if you found it. No more being a people pleaser and on your knees take that comment as you will. No more playing the victim to please an audience who are not even looking towards you. I’ve had a fucking nuff!
Stand up, because even though all of this might feel like a waste of your potential and everything you could have been up to this point, you are not dead yet. There’s so much life force in this pain. There is so much power and vitality in this kind of transformation. Besides, it will change the lives of those around you who watch you do it and be in awe of you. There will be those who will fear you, or fear losing who you are to them, ‘my sad little friend’. They may want you to stay in your box. F*ck them, you will lose them and believe me that’s fine. I have lost a lot of friends over the years. Some of which I miss, some outgrew me and I held them back and some just needed to f*ck off.
You’ll come to the point as you stand, that it was so much more exhausting being on your knees than it will be to thrive. That you were never safe down there and that a safe life isn’t a full life.
That not being yourself doesn’t lead to more love, but less love and the wrong kind of love. You don’t suddenly switch your authentic self on. You grow into yourself, taking with you all the life force you created up to this point and as you grow into your authentic self, your power grows too.
Be the inspiration.
