Day 9 Critical of myself

I'm coming to understand that it is time to stop being so critical of myself and letting go of a big chunk of the pressure I've put on myself during my life.

People have always told me that I have such high standards, and I always saw this as something good. This led me to study a top degree at a top university landing influential roles in multinational companies. Until I collapsed.

The collapse made me inquiry into my upbringing and the reasons why I had such unbalanced attachment styles. I realised that my mother put a lot of pressure on me growing up and that as a child I pushed myself to the edge to get the conditional love that she offered to me. I was constantly rewarded for performing, and not just for being. I came from a family with lots of siblings so we all had to compete for my mother's love through achieving success - I never thought how harmful that was until now. I kept living those patters in my adult life, trying to get approval from managers who seemed never satisfied with my performance as there could always be something more I could do. I have lived my life criticising many aspects of myself on an ongoing basis as fuel to push myself to become better and worthy of love (unconsciously running the story from my upbringing and my relationship with my mother). This patter led me to develop narcissistic personality traits, where I would constantly show others how good I am, and take pride in my looks and the size of my muscles to find external validation, the tricky thing was that whenever I got that validation, I would look for someone else who had higher standards and would work hard to get their validation. As you can imagine, this is an endless tunnel. All of this left me quite isolated, sure, I had a top job, money and great looks but was quite miserable inside. I just didn't know how else I could 'push' myself to feel better. That's when I collapsed and my body developed all sorts of symptoms to tell me to stop.

I'm much more gentle now with myself, although I can see myself still running old patters I now can identify when I am there and can calm myself down. I'm focused on discovering my essence and loving myself for who I am inside, and not for what I achieve or how I perform. My relationships these days are with people who can truly see me for who I am, and that's wonderful. I still have an inner critic inside of me, but we are doing a bit of work to get to work together in a more constructive way.

 

Thanks so much