How often do you look at something you’ve done and just know it wasn’t nearly good enough? For me it’s a daily struggle. Part of it is my attachment style. The way I connect to others is a combination of anxious avoidance. I’ll avoid what might reject me, but if you haven’t rejected me, I’m going to over analyze every conversation, action, and the minutiae of your gaze at me.

I grew up with a need to manage my parent’s emotions. I felt responsible if they weren’t happy or laughing. I had no idea that their life before me had more control over them than I ever could.

It took decades to learn what it meant to have someone else’s inner turmoil projected onto me. It was only in the last handful of years that I learned most people can only give what is inside of them, so if I was given a verbal lashing, it really had nothing to do with me.

My hyper focus outside of myself meant that I wasn’t caring for my needs. I couldn’t identify what my needs were. How I was doing was connected to how others around me were doing. I would lose myself in someone else, making their dreams and ambitions my own.

Depending on the teacher, this made me an amazing student. I wanted to make my teachers happy. As I got older, my teacher’s weren’t as connected to me and I was more interested in my peers and what they thought. This can be an exhausting way to live, so after a while, isolation felt better.

Failure became an act of self sabotage. My internal drive was to do everything in excellence so I wasn’t to blame for everything that was out of my control anyway. It was a feeling that no matter what I did, it wouldn’t be enough, so I might as well have failed spectacularly. My drive to be the best also told me I wasn’t, and sitting in my failure was part of knowing I wasn’t doing enough.

A lot of it comes from my Mom. I am blessed to have her intelligence, resilience and tenacity. The rest was my need to fit in, weaving seamlessly through the different relationships as the chameleon that was able to be the person that was needed.

My way of being means I’m looking at how to do an amazing job, how to not fail, and how to do better than I did before. It’s as if my survival depends on how well I can get a job done. It’s about managing a situation without asking for help. Not getting it done myself feels like failure, and not having immediate answers also feels like I’m still failing.

In short, allow me to introduce you to my Itty Bitty Shitty Committee.

It’s a chorus of voices that tell me I’m failing, falling short, not doing enough and not measuring up. Chorus sounds fun, but really these voices are angry and hurtful. It’s so loud I can’t think beyond what I honestly know to be true. The really sad thing is these aren’t even my voices. It’s psychic residue of emotional abuse and neglect that I haven’t cleaned out of my head. Let me step back a second. I don’t actually hear voices in my head. But I certainly act as if I do. It’s more a feeling, and an unconscious response. It’s like trained dogs. You start with verbal cues, but eventually you can give them a gesture or look and they want your praise, so they obey.

These voices were born from pain avoidance. The first time you touched a hot surface and suffered a mild burn, the memory of that burn lasted longer than any potential scarring. Each time you thought a surface was hot, you quickly touched it, hoping to not burn yourself, or you reached for a potholder. This was an automatic reaction.

It’s unrealistic to think knowing that you’re reacting to your history is enough to make you shift your perspective and change course. Just as you had to learn from your past, and probably had that lesson reinforced, you get to unlearn these patterns. You’ll still want to react to these nudges, but strengthening your healed voice will allow you to choose a response, rather than react to a situation.

No one forgets that first time your heart breaks in love. We were young and he wasn’t ready to speak what was on his mind. Part of him was afraid to let me down because he cared about me on some level. He didn’t want to be the bad guy. He also loved how I spoiled him. I packed a lunch for both of us throughout high school and even put his straw in his juice pouch because he could never figure that one out on his own. He also couldn’t make the layup in basketball practice and these things made me feel like I could take care of him. The other part of him had no interest in being with me. At all. He was like a boy dog, sniffing every scent that he could catch on the wind.

When he ended it, he gave me other reasons to break up. One of the reasons was his Mom didn’t like me. This was true, but for years after him, I would do my best to be liked by my boyfriend’s Moms. Divorce taught me that even if she did like me, in the end, she had to choose her son. And he knew to use her dislike of me as a weapon because he understood how much it hurt to not have her love. I would have spared myself so much pain if I had decided she would or wouldn’t like me, but that had little to do with who I am in this life.

It’s all about avoiding pain. If it’s pain from rejection for not being good enough, that’s an easy fix. Avoid people. Push them away with your oddities. Make your performance into your voice. Be better, and have no idea what better looks like because your measure against someone else’s ideal was all wrong.

I’m here to tell you, that’s just not true. You’re doing better than you think you are. Most people aren’t watching what you do because they’re focused on themselves. If they’re tearing you down and you really aren’t failing, it’s probably about making themselves look better.

I’m still working on the internal mechanisms that make me behave as though I’m caged and happy here. It helps to understand why I behave the way I do. It’s about listening to my fears and deciding whether or not they’re valid. It helps to bounce these things off of others or write them down.

Part of my Dad’s trauma comes from the horrors he witnessed as a young man in Vietnam. The itty bitty shitty committee in his head and muscles is far stronger than mine in so many ways. Growing up, he always had several thick rubber bands around his wrist. His PTSD makes it feel as though the war was just yesterday. His mental and emotional flashbacks are sometimes visual and physical. Pulling a rubber band out and snapping it painfully has helped him to remain present. It’s physical, but often includes him saying, “stop” firmly.

The point is that committee can rule your life. You have to pay attention to what they’re saying and decide that what they think they know isn’t relevant to your life. You are enough. You deserve a life beyond your dreams. Ask for more and know you can have what you want, but it might mean you have to stop holding yourself back.