28 March 2016

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Here Comes Success…

It’s possible that, on paper at least, we can appear to have achieved success – even wild success – and yet feel little in the way of connection with it. You might be surprised to hear that this situation isn’t particularly rare, although there can be many causes for feeling this way.

One contributing factor might be growing up in an environment where nothing we did was good enough for one or both of our parents. Got an A? Why wasn’t it A+? Got a scholarship? Well, there’s plenty of unemployed people with scholarships out there.

Another factor might be the way we feel about ourselves; like a variation of the above example except turned inward for some reason, where a verdict of “not enough” is heard no matter how many hurdles we might jump, no matter how many digits our income may increase by.

It is not rare to be “successful” (that is to say, financially well-off, with a good job in an interesting career…or perhaps it’s just doing the thing we always thought we’d do, no matter how much we get paid) and yet feel alone, and directionless. In other words, feeling like there’s a disparity between how we feel and how we think we should be feeling.

If this describes you, then perhaps you might benefit from examining our ideas about yourself, as well as your emotional connection to the world, with a therapist. Just a thought.