What’s wrong with me?

Do you ever get that feeling? That horrible belly churning sense of, ‘there’s something WRONG with me. I’m not RIGHT, I don’t fit, I’m not doing this the way it’s supposed to be done’. I think this is such a common feeling and yet one we rarely admit. Sometimes we just carry this sense of ourselves without even realising it. It can be mixed up with shame and guilt and feeling totally unworthy and I think we need to talk about this more openly.

There is nothing wrong with any of us. I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done, there’s nothing wrong with you. You might have made some mistakes, done some really stupid things, have deep regrets about the choices you’ve made, but none of these things make you wrong. Your behaviour may have been wrong, but you as a person are intrinsically good (of course there are exceptions to this, clinically diagnosed psychopaths who feel no empathy or regard for others, but I’m trusting that’s not you reading this blog!). Sometimes we haven't done anything wrong, but the sense of us being wrong is given to us by others -  we aren’t what they believe we should be. 

We need to give ourselves a break. The mistakes we’ve made do not define us. We can choose to carry them around like heavy bags for the rest of our lives, or we can choose to make amends (if necessary) and then let them go. I understand of course that this isn’t easily done. So often I hear people define themselves by their behaviour. ‘I’m so stupid, I’m useless, this is just like me to do something like this, there must be something wrong with me if I keep on behaving in this way’. It can be really hard to separate ourselves from this negative thought or belief, but it can be such a relief when we do - ‘I am not wrong, what I did may have been wrong, but we all make mistakes’. 

If you feel you keep repeating unhealthy patterns of behaviour, or making the same mistakes over and over, you might need some help in unlocking these patterns. That’s not because there’s something wrong with you, just that familiar patterns, even if unhealthy, can be incredibly hard to break on our own for a multitude of reasons.  The best thing about getting older is that we can unlearn. We can change and we can grow, I witness people doing this very thing every day. Life is too precious and too short to waste hating ourselves or believing we are wrong.