What if it’s true that I’m just not good enough?

What if it’s true that I’m just not good enough is a question that I’ve often asked myself. Even since discovering why I feel not good enough, I still often believe that it’s true. This post looks at why we can feel this way.

Five-year-old me knew I wasn’t good enough. The girls colouring at the table in year 1 seemed to know it too. They were good, clean, perfect; I was bad, ugly, dirty. That’s how I remember it at least. When they didn’t let me sit at their table and colour along with them, I knew exactly why, and I probably deserved it.

But if those girls had welcomed me to their table (which many others did), it would’ve felt like it was out of charity and pity and I could never be like them.

What I’ve just described follows a pattern that I’ve lived throughout my life – even sometimes now too:

If something bad happened to me, it was because I was bad. If someone treated me badly, it was because I was bad. If I felt I didn’t fit in, it was because I was bad and everyone else was good. If someone was nice to me, it was because they were good and I didn’t deserve their goodness (and it just highlighted my bad-ness more strongly).

I could feel it deep in my bones. You could tell me all day long that I was good but I’d know deep down that you were wrong and if you only knew the real me then you’d reject me (and the fact that you were being kind to me anyway meant that you were good and I could never deserve your kindness).

It’s like there was a hierarchy. On one level was everyone in the world except me. On the level way, way below was me.

Why am I not good enough?

It took me until my early thirties to learn that the hierarchy didn’t actually exist outside of my mind – true story.

Up until that point I was asking the wrong question. Instead of ‘why am I not good enough?’ I should have asked ‘why do I not feel good enough?’

And the answer was shame.

You see, I was good enough all along but I just didn’t feel it.

I still believed everything shame told me about myself and others. I still believed I just wasn’t good enough. But now I had a name for it and knew there were others like me.

This type of shame – chronic shame – has a protective function. Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory says that when we experience stressful situations, we automatically go into one of two nervous system states: sympathetic – which is associated with the fight or flight response – or dorsal vagal – which is associated with the freeze response. There is also a third nervous system state – ventral vagal – that we reside in when we feel safe. (Fawning and appeasement are also responses to stress but Porges theorises that these involve a combination of all three nervous system states). Our nervous system response to stressful situations is not a deliberate choice, it comes from a primitive part of your brain designed to keep you safe.

When we have experienced trauma, we can get stuck in sympathetic or dorsal vagal state, and that becomes our default state. This means that we automatically default to that state whenever something stressful happens (and another part of our brains – the amygdala – is on high alert, meaning that we can be in a stressed state most of the time, and rarely – if ever – feel safe).

Chronic – or toxic – shame is most closely associated with dorsal vagal – or freeze – state, which is most common in complex childhood trauma. So it makes perfect sense that someone who’s experienced childhood trauma would feel a deep sense of shame most of the time, and that this shame would be resistant to logic and words because it’s deeply ingrained in our bodies.

So as a five year old, my brain saw being rejected by those girls as a major threat, sending me right into my default nervous system state of dorsal vagal/freeze. Instead of fighting back (like telling the girls they’re horrible and calling them names) or fleeing (like just walking off), I automatically internalised the rejection and made it mean that I’m the one at fault – shame.

Getting free from shame

So back to the title of this article: what if it’s true that you’re just not good enough? I can tell you all day long that it’s not true and you are good enough just as you are but I know you won’t believe me because of your deeply ingrained nervous system state. But now that you’ve learnt a bit about your nervous system response, I wonder if you still think that you’re objectively just bad, or whether you would consider that this might be a response to trauma?

I’m not saying that everyone is all good, and I’m not denying that you’ve probably done some bad things – we all have. But this sense of a hierarchy, the idea that everyone is just better than us and we’re bad inside – that’s shame talking and it’s trying to protect you and keep you safe.

If this type of shame starts in your nervous system (and your amygdala and your limbic system and your hippocampus) then just telling yourself that you’re good isn’t going to change much, there has to be a deeper, more embodied and holistic way of dealing with shame.

Well, just realising that it’s shame is a huge step in the right direction. It won’t make the feeling of shame go away but it will help you to see it for what it is and challenge your beliefs.

But if you’re ready to go one step further and start healing the shame in your body and bringing yourself back from dorsal vagal/freeze mode to a ventral vagal ‘safe’ mode, you might be interested in my FREE course.

On this free, 7-session course you will learn:

• Ways shame can show up (and more importantly, how it shows up for YOU)
• How to recognise behaviours that are rooted in shame
• How to spot what zone you’re in (safe, challenged or overwhelmed)
• Which tools to use in which zone
• Longer-term strategies to help you heal

In addition, you will be able to:

• Build a unique-to-you shame-free strategy that you can refer to time and time again

Sign up now for FREE

Where I’m at now

Just because I’ve done a lot of inner work to get free from shame, doesn’t mean that I never experience shame, just that I’m now much better equipped to deal with it when it arises. Even now the shame can sometimes feel so real. Only a few months ago on my counselling training, my trauma was triggered and I felt huge amounts of shame. Again, there was the hierarchy. Everyone else in my group was good and I was bad. I didn’t belong. I felt like I would be forever indebted to those who were showing kindness to me because they were so good and I would never be good enough.

It was only afterwards that I realised that I had been triggered into a dorsal vagal shutdown/freeze state by something that my classmate had innocently said.

The reason that I’m sharing this with you is because I want you to know how I responded.

While I was feeling shame during my course, I actually shared with my classmates that I was feeling shame and that I felt I didn’t belong. Their acceptance of me led to connection which helped me to start to come out of the shame. (I realise that this is a huge step for many of you and that’s ok, you don’t have to tell other people that you’re experiencing shame).

Then, as soon as I realised what the trigger for my shame was, I started to ground myself by noticing all the places where my body met the chair I was sat on. I also started to silently talk to myself with compassion: ‘it’s totally understandable that you feel this way bearing in mind everything you’ve been through, of course that would’ve triggered your trauma and shame.’ I then took some longer, deep breaths.

This was just the my preferred tools to ground myself and get back into my ventral vagal ‘safe’ state, but there are many different grounding tools available. I’ve created a list of different ideas for grounding yourself when you’re experiencing shame or trauma symptoms that you can access in my free course.