8 Steps to Getting Rid of Not Good Enough Stuff
Most people have asked themselves, “Why am I not good enough?” many times throughout their lives. We all have Not Good Enough Stuff, but very few of us know how to get rid of it because it requires a deep healing of the soul. Holding onto our Not Good Enough Stuff prevents us from living a peaceful and happy life.
In order to begin getting rid of your Not Good Enough Stuff, you’ll need to understand where it came from. Click here to read about the Creation of Not Good Enough Stuff.
If you are ready to heal and get rid of your Not Good Enough Stuff, then you are already beginning your healing journey. You deserve to say yes to the question, “Am I good enough?” How many times have you heard that, if you aren’t aware that a problem exists, then you can’t fix it?
Healing Not Good Enough Stuff
Before I give you the steps to take to get rid of your Not Good Enough Stuff, I want to make sure you understand that this will probably be one of the most difficult things you’ve ever tackled. However, I can guarantee that it is also one of the most rewarding. You have to be willing to really look at the hard stuff in your life to get that deep healing of the soul.
Healing can never be lost, forgotten or taken away from you. Repeat that! Often, my clients feel like they are right back where they started, but that is never true. You will never be back to where you started.
Now, what may happen is that you feel you are at a similar place in your healing. As I’ve mentioned, your healing cannot be lost. What does happen is that you are able to go deeper into your healing each time you feel you’ve arrived back at the same place.
So, are you now wondering about these steps for getting rid of your Not Good Enough Stuff? Just one more thing before I tell you the steps! Take a deep breath and understand that there is no time limit on how quickly you complete these steps.
In fact, you should allow yourself a very long time so that you truly get a deep healing of the soul through each step. Each step could take several months or longer, but there is great value in the time spent on each step.
8 Steps for Getting Rid of Not Good Enough Stuff:
- Read this post, The Creation of Not Good Enough Stuff. Allow yourself to truly analyze your entire life connected to where your Not Good Enough Stuff came from.
- Make a list of all of the areas in your life in which you believe you are not good enough and the negative “message” you tell yourself for each area. Be as specific as you possibly can.
- Create a list of the people and institutions, such as society, religion, social media, family, etc. where you falsely learned that you are not good enough or how you are “supposed” to be.
- Now, write down whatever evidence supports those beliefs as truths. Chances are that there may not be any true, hard evidence for most of your not good enough beliefs.
- Create a list of the evidence that shows those false beliefs are not true.
- Make a commitment to yourself to keep progressing through these steps. Revisit steps as needed and add to the lists when you recognize things as they pop up. Bookmark this post so you can easily find it.
- Practice self-care for at least 10 minutes after you spend any time working on these steps.
- Find a licensed therapist to help you process all that will ABSOLUTELY “come up” while doing this work.
How to Work Through These Steps for Your Not Good Enough Stuff
Now, take another deep breath because these steps can be incredibly overwhelming! Reminder number Two: there is no certain amount of time in which you should complete these steps. If you truly want to believe you are good enough, you will take the time needed to complete these steps.
For myself, I still have to walk back through these steps when my Not Good Enough Stuff creeps up. These steps can allow you to continue your healing throughout your entire life. Again, healing can never be lost!
Are you now wondering, if I am a therapist and creator of these steps, why do I still need to revisit these steps? That’s because our Not Good Enough Stuff gets so ingrained in us, that it is hard to make it completely go away.
However, it can greatly decrease, which can allow you to have that happy, peaceful life you may believe you will never have. Even as a therapist, it takes continuing effort to minimize my Not Good Enough Stuff, but don’t let that scare you.
I know all too well how it feels to think that I will never be happy. There are now days where I stop and think about how happy I am, the amazing life I have created for myself and the pride I have in myself for doing the hard work in these steps.
Explanation of the Steps for When You Question, “Why Am I Not Good Enough?”
So, let’s dig into these steps. Number one is self-explanatory and very important. Don’t bypass this step because it will prevent you from doing the other steps in the most effective way possible. Click here to read The Creation of Not Good Enough Stuff.
Number two requires journaling, which many people hate or find difficult to do. Here is a quick post on how to journal and keep yourself committed to it. Do not let this step scare you off and DO NOT SKIP this step. Please do not skip any step or else you will get lost and frustrated.
Don’t we have enough of the feelings of being lost and frustrated without adding to that? Also, thinking about things I tell you to journal about is not the same as journaling. Nor does it give you the same benefit. If you want to heal, you will do this step as I recommend. If you’re not ready to journal, that is perfectly ok. Just save this post and return when you can commit to that and the other steps.
Here are some examples of what you might write for Steps Two and Three.
- Belief: I am not good at relationships. Institution: Society
- Belief: I should be thankful for what I have. Institution: Religion, Society, Family
- Belief: I am not a good parent. Institution: Family, Society, Social Media
Challenging Beliefs for a Healing of the Soul
Step Number Four may be a struggle. Writing down the evidence that validates your beliefs from Step Three can be confusing. Our Not Good Enough Stuff can often point us to strong, false evidence that we may think proves a belief to be true.
Start analyzing and digging for valid evidence that supports your beliefs being true. You will probably find little or no evidence if you are really honest with yourself.
Let’s take a deeper look at that using the examples from Step Two. “I am not good at relationships.” Some might say that multiple failed relationships would be evidence to validate that as truth. WRONG!
The truth here might be that you never experienced a healthy relationship and/or you were never taught how to have a healthy relationship. That does NOT mean that, at your soul level, you are not good at relationships. So, you can probably throw out failed relationships as your evidence if you have that belief.
Belief Number Two is big for so many parents! Yes, there are some bad parents, largely due to incredibly high piles of Not Good Enough Stuff that they don’t know how to heal. However, almost all parents I know have never intentionally harmed their children. So, if you are looking for evidence to support this belief as true, keep that in mind.
Here are some possible pieces of evidence that you might believe make you a bad parent instead of believing that you are good enough.
- I lose my temper with my child.
- I don’t discipline like I should.
- My child (or anybody else for that matter) says that I’m a bad parent.
Please tell me about a parent who has never lost his or her temper with his or her child! Occasionally losing your temper says nothing about your parenting ability. It says you are human and being a human is hard. It is NOT a reason we should ask ourselves, “Am I good enough?” So, we screw up lots! If you don’t think that you discipline like you should, please tell me about the parent who has discipline down perfectly. I would truly like to meet this parent.
Now, for all of you parents out there who have had your child say, “I hate you,” that happens. Just like being a human is hard, being a young human is often even harder. Children discover ways to hurt their parents because they are angry, sad or whatever emotion it may be. Children struggle to identify, process and “work through” their emotions. The words they thrust at you do not serve as evidence that you are a bad parent.
I don’t even think that addressing what somebody else says about you as a parent is really even that important. What is important is to remember that you are doing the best you can in each moment of parenting. THAT is what matters!
Nobody truly knows how you are parenting because they only see glimpses. If they are judging you, I promise that is because it’s easier to do that than take a look at their own struggles. So, sorry to burst your bubble, but, again, this kind of evidence does NOT support your belief that you are a bad parent.
The Belief that You’re Supposed to be Thankful for What You Have is Damaging
Oh, how I despise the classic, “be thankful for what you’ve got and be happy that you have it” garbage that is shoved down our throats at a young age. As a kid, I used to want to tell my mom that she should pack up the food I didn’t want to eat and send it to those starving kids in Africa she was always talking about when I wouldn’t eat all of my food. Being a child, that made perfect sense, but, of course, I didn’t realize you couldn’t just send that food on over to Africa like that.
The mentality of the belief that you should be thankful for what you have is so dangerous because it pushes us further into Not Good Enough Stuff. Think about it this way: If I have all of these things that are supposedly so great, then why am I still not happy?
That thought takes you further down a path of believing you are so screwed up. No matter what you have done or what you have in life, that does not equate to happiness. There are many people with very little in life who are happy and those with seemingly everything who are not happy.
So, your possessions, experiences or other things like that do not remove anxiety, depression, trauma or any of your struggles. Hard work on a continued healing journey heals that.
Lovingly Accepting Some Beliefs are True for Healing of the Soul
Are you beginning to understand how to do Step Two? Are you wondering about some examples of the belief being true? Sometimes there is valid proof that those beliefs are true.
I am not good at planning or organizing. Due to that, my days and life can look quite chaotic to others. There is a lot of evidence that proves this is true. I jump from project to project, thought to thought, task to task and any other way you can word that. My husband jokes with me when I am constantly searching for things because I never put anything in the same place.
If I try to follow a routine, I either get bored and stop or forget that I was trying to stay on a routine in the first place because it just doesn’t work for me. Now, these are valid pieces of evidence to prove I am not good at planning or organizing. I “learned” that I am “supposed” to be organized from society, family and my Southern, white culture. So, I used to beat myself up for not meeting that expectation and not being good enough at it.
Once I began to realize that that says NOTHING about my soul or that I am not good enough, I could start healing that false, negative belief. For many years now, I have discovered that I absolutely love how my mind works and that I don’t plan or organize well. I have figured out what works for me and it keeps me interested in all of the different things I am doing for a little time here and then a little time there.
Institutions that Say You are Not Good Enough
Here’s a little side note about the institutions from which we learned a lot of our Not Good Enough Stuff. Are those institutions even able to consider the intricacies of our personalities and what is truly best for us?
Most of the time, those “institutions” use fear tactics in their attempts to make us all be some uniformed group of people. I can promise you that there is not one single “institution” that has known or will ever know what is best for me and my life.
How to say “YES” to the “Am I Good Enough” Question
Let’s return to the steps now. We are at Step Five. This step can be hard because it requires us to challenge our negative beliefs about ourselves. You may need to spend a good bit of time on this step. Reminder Number 3: take however long you need for this entire process!
If I were to give you tons of examples of how to do this step, it would be pointless because it needs to be very individualized for what works for you. I can’t, nor will I, do all of the work for you! So, I’ll give you one quick example from my own life illustrating my belief that I was not good at relationships.
After analyzing many family, friend and romantic relationships throughout my life, I realized that, as I got older and did more work in my healing journey, I noticed that I got better at teaching myself what I needed in relationships as each one ended. Again, most of you are like me and were never taught about healthy relationships. So, I had to teach myself. That never meant that I was bad at relationships.
It just meant that I was learning and growing through each one to get me closer and closer to being able to have a healthy relationship with another person. Consider this, would you tell a baby learning to walk that he or she is a bad walker? No! So, why do you do that to yourself?
Practicing Self-Compassion for True Healing of the Soul
We are all like babies learning to walk. We WILL fall down. We will get “cuts“ and big “boo-boos” along the way. However, just like a baby learning to walk, we will learn how to be good at relationships as we continue to grow through each relationship we have.
Having some “bad” relationships never meant that I was not good at relationships. Simply, it meant that I needed to learn how to do it. That does not attach a “good” or “bad” to it!
Please keep the image of a baby learning to walk in your mind as you look for your own evidence to prove your beliefs are wrong as you work on Step Five. I sure hope I don’t hear about any of you shaming yourselves here for not knowing how to do something you were never taught!
Steps Six through Step Eight do not need a lot of explanation from me. Don’t mistake those for not being important though! If you stop at Step Five, you will probably find yourself in a really rough place that can be avoided.
Final Thoughts
Wrapping it up here! If you have read all of this in one sitting, you deserve some rest. So, let yourself put this down and just relax your body and breathe for a few minutes, reminding yourself that you are good enough in every aspect of your life.
There is a lot of information in this post and your head might be spinning from that. Don’t forget to save this post so that you can refer back to it as you begin moving through the steps.
Please comment below if you have any questions or thoughts about this post. I (Mary Beth) will do my best to respond.
Also, commenting can allow you to join others in this Not Good Enough Stuff Community. We all have so much to learn from others. So, don’t hold back on commenting because there are others out there who could benefit from what you have to say!
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DISCLAIMER:
This site is only intended for people who are truly willing to look at themselves with an open mind and have the ability to truly be vulnerable with themselves and others. Please understand that this site is in NO WAY THERAPEUTIC ADVICE. However, this site can be very beneficial in learning the causes of your Not Good Enough Stuff. This site is not intended to provide or replace medical or psychiatric treatment. Mary Beth HIGHLY RECOMMENDS finding a licensed therapist to help you process the information from this site and all that you learn about yourself. Visit Psychology Today to find a licensed therapist in your area.
