Successes and Failures - How Do I Stop Victim Blaming Myself

[Freddyt]

Are you comparing current majorly depressed Ecdysis standards to previously higher functioning Ecdysis standards of success and failure?

Change your definition of failure.......

 

[Paige]

I seem to have a core belief that goes something like this:

If I have/ achieve a success in life, that's proof that my childhood abuse and the abuser were wrong. I'm a decent person.

If I have/ experience failures in life, it's proof that my abuser was right. I'm a bad person and I deserve to have bad things happen to me.

Anyone else have the same pattern?

Anyone been able to stop this pattern?

When I was younger my parents only praised me when I did something outstanding. If I did something good but not great, it would be ignored or waved off. Not even in an aggressive way, just genuine indifference. As a child, I took it as sort of a challenge, but the more Outstanding I forced myself to become, the more it became expected of me rather than praised. The indifference morphed into criticism which over the years morphed back into ignorance. Now I lay in bed when I get home from school or work and I feel like I'm rotting as I think about all the things I want to do, but physically cannot force myself to. The weight of expectations is just too heavy. Something that has helped me is mapping out what success looks like to me day to day. Success can be getting an A in school, working towards a promotion in work, or it could be smaller things like mastering a meal or taking your pet out on a walk. But no matter what it is, Success isn't something that happens overnight, and if you are constantly raising your expectations of what success is you will never be satisfied with where you are in life, or who you are. A small thing that helped me is actively doing something wrong everyday. Making "crappy" art specifically I've found. I found that while doing this I've become less afraid of failure. This doesn't always work as well as I want it to, but it is freeing to realise yourself of expectations even if only for a little bit. I don't know if this helps, but I hope you find something that does!

 

[Tinyflame]

Yes for myself I'd say there comes a point in time where the only living-choice alternative is to accept how I did in a given moment or how I am, and accept it won't be, or might not be, or isn't acceptable in other's eyes, regardless of who owns those eyes.