Do You Feel Like You’re Not Good Enough?
Cathy: Someone wrote, oh. You want to finish picking your teeth?
Reid: No, I’m good. Oh! Oh! We started.
Cathy: Someone wrote in and said, I really been trying really hard to be a good fit for someone else because I don’t feel good enough about myself when that doesn’t work I feel devastated. I don’t feel desirable in the way society expects me to be around the guy’s guy. It’s difficult to feel accepted as a man who’s emotionally vulnerable, affectionate and socially reserved especially when it’s passed by for other partners are ignored. Is there anything I can do? This is Reid Mihalko from https://reidaboutsex.com/
Reid: Cathy Vartuli from http://theintimacydojo.com/
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: A great, deep and serious question
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: From
Cathy: Thank you so much
Reid: From a deep sensitive soul
Cathy: Yeah. Thanks for writing in
Reid: You want to go first?
Cathy: Sure. I think the…the thing that stood out for me is that you don’t feel good enough about yourself and I know I struggled with that a lot. I have a lot of insecurities that I can come up especially when life isn’t going really smoothly or I’m not getting my needs met and I think that when I don’t feel good enough about myself, I will notice that I… a lot of the things that sometimes go really smoothly for me, don’t go so smoothly. There’s a… inner resistance to things like it’s almost like my brain is trying to prove that I’m not good enough because I’m holding on to that belief and when I can work through and say wow that beliefs come up again and I see that belief and either work through the…the…the incidents, the experiences I had that anchored that for me or notice ways that it’s not true and kind of counter it. Life starts going a lot easier for me. It’s easier for me to connect with people if I approach someone with the feeling I’m not good enough there’s an energy like a barrier between us and I actually one of the things I do is I bring that up when I feel like I’m too close to people. It’s the kind of reverse switch. If I don’t feel like I feel like someone’s getting too close I’ll bring the… I’m not good enough up as a shield to keep them away like you shouldn’t get too close I’m going to protect you from me. So it’s just something to look out like sometimes we will… humans will reverse something and say you know at….on a surface level, I’m not good enough means that you don’t like you wouldn’t come close like I don’t deserve you.
Reid: Using as a protection mechanism
Cathy: But I…. I sometimes use it as a protection mechanism. So I would invite you to notice if you feel safe being close to people because if you’re working on the thing that you’re using as a shield but you kind of inverted it’s hard to make progress
Reid: Yeah
Cathy: Does it make sense?
Reid: Yeah because you’ll take like a…you’ll make a baby step forward and then every time you…you try to step forward, you can’t you’ll…. you’ll only be able to take a smaller baby step
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: ‘coz to go too far means you actually transformed it.
Cathy: Yes and then your shield isn’t there anymore
Reid: Then you don’t have it anymore.
Cathy: And you need the shield, yeah. So I think that working on the feelings about yourself and clearing as much of that while practicing getting out there, if you don’t feel desirable it’s harder for people to connect with you and you’re not….I…. at least in my experience you’re not going to get as many yeses.
Reid: Yeah. This one’s this is a good question because it goes in so many there’s like it’s like one rabbit hole
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: And then it’s like a go for Burrow it’s like a Meerkat Burrow there’s like 80 different tunnels all at once. For me, the challenge here is so…so culture is giving us bad information. Right? It’s all this bad role modeling you know what it means to be a man? What it means to be a woman? All this like all this gendered stuff and now that you know people are deconstructing gender, there’s even questions about am I Trans enough? Am I queer enough? Am I you know gender non-conforming enough? Like basically, we take the…the cultural bullshit with us into these areas of growth and they fuck with us again in mores … more sneaky ways.
Cathy: Yup
Reid: So, I’m always talking about relationships from the point of view of like what’s a good fit and I’m…I’m talking about life from the point of like self-expression. Understanding that you can’t reboot and install like a completely different operating system culturally speaking as a human being and even if you could, you’d only be picking a different culture’s operating system and that cultural systems going to have bullshit. Living a self-express life being the person that makes you happy whether that is I’m…I’m heteronormative and I want to be a man’s man and I want to date a feminine woman who loves being taken and….and you know. Yeah, all the…you know fairy tale prince is bullshit that for some person it’s their self-expression so it’s not bullshit for them but for somebody else it’s bullshit. When you look at from self-expression are you being the person that makes you happy?
Then from a fit perspective, are you dating people who want to date people like you? Or are you feeling upset that so and so who wants the manly truck driving man who’s stowage in a little different bilious? And they passed you the sensitive heart opened you know new age man for the truck driver like I get while you…why you might be disappointed and sad
Cathy: But they weren’t a good fit to begin with
Reid: But you be you and….and try to now we…now we can switch and let’s go find where the people that you want to date and thrive with actually are?
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: I think that’s more a better use of your time and energies. Now, the land mine of disappointments still there
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: and….and yes you’ve…..you’re avoiding it over here on this lawn but culture has put that land mine in a lot of other places
Cathy: Yeah, yeah
Reid: So how can you start deconstructing that and what makes you happy and but inside of this, which I don’t know if it’s bad relationship or bad cultural advice, there are certain things that people of all cultures tend to find attractive or useful or desirable or….or maybe the opposite of desirable in a certain way is they find certain traits to be less repulsive or creepy.
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: So, confidence
Cathy: Even if it is a quiet confidence
Reid: Yeah because again like culturally speaking confidence means extroverted versus I’m present
Cathy: I can handle what’s happening
Reid: I can handle what’s going on. Being confident, being present whether that’s hard to open or not I think those two things are helpful you know culture bullshit. Youth we’ll guess what? Enjoy it while you got it because it’s leaving
Cathy: Yup
Reid: I’m getting older. When I talk, I see my little throat things that I didn’t see when I was 20 like….like I’m like “oh god, it’s happening.” But like it’s going to happen anyway. So can you be a good communicator? And can you be great at assessing whether people are good fit for you?
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: Like these are skills that I think are going to be useful. You can’t get rid of culture but you definitely don’t….you can learn how to figure out where the land mines are and not step on them.
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: I hope that’s useful.
Cathy: Yeah. I….I really appreciate the thought that went into your question. I think that if you can just turn around a few things that are standing in your way, you’ll start seeing a big difference in how people respond to you because people do when someone’s feeling they’ve….they’re not good enough or not sure why or what’s going on and very few people are going to see enough of us to want to fight through the morass that’s in the way to find out who we really are and it’s a lonely place to be. So if you can work through the things that make you feel not worthy because all humans are worthy of love and connection. If you can work through some of that and let people see who you really are, a bunch of friends of amazing people to hang out with
Reid: And you’re still going to get disappointed for them the other time
Cathy: Yeah. It’s human it’s what happens.
Reid: Yup.
Cathy: So I hope this helped.
Reid: Leave a comment everyone!