So I'm reading this book You Can't Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought, by Peter McWilliams and this chapter jumped out at me, I'll quote it below because to me it totally answers the JW dogma and how ingrained that feeling of never being good enough, or just plain enough. I would be interested in some feed back if you have any.
Where Does Negative Thinking Come From?
Or
Why Are We Doing This to Ourselves?
Part I page 49.
Why do we use the power of our mind to create a negative reality? If our mind can generate health, wealth, and happiness as easily as illness, poverty, and despair, why aren't we healthy, wealthy, and happy all the time?
If a genie appeared and offered you a choice--health, wealth, and happiness or illness, poverty, and despair--which would you choose? If the former is the obvious choice, why do we sometimes choose the negative? There must be something else--something deeper--generating the impulse to think negatively.
Although you may have another word to describe the phenomenon, allow me to call this spring of negative thinking unworthiness. It's more than just a feeling or a passing thought; it's a ground of being, a deep-seated belief that "I'm just not good enough." Other words for it are insecurity, undeservingness, and low self-esteem.
Unworthiness undermines all our positive ideas and validates all our negative thoughts.
When we think of something good about ourselves, unworthiness pops up and says,
"No, you're not." When we desire something positive for ourselves, unworthiness says, "you don't deserve it." When something good happens to us, unworthiness says (often with our own lips), "This is too good to be true!"*
*(The one I seem to use most often is "Whoa!"--an equestrian term meaning, "Hold it! Too much! Stop all this goodness; I can't take it!"
When we think something bad about ourselves, unworthiness agrees, "Yes that's true, and furthermore......" When we tell ourselves we can't have or do something we want, unworthiness says, "Now you're being realistic." When something bad happens to us, unworthiness is the first to point out, "See I told you so."
Jack Canfield describes unworthiness as a vulture sitting on your shoulder, squawking in your ear an endless stream of "You can't do it!" "You're not good enough!" "Don't even try!" "Who do you think you are?" "You'll never make it!" "Settle down!" "You don't deserve it!" "Somebody better than you should have it!"
Some people cover their unworthiness with a self-confidence and bravado bordering on arrogance.* ("Some people" like me.) Their cover-up encompasses a self-indulgence and self-absorption that are, well, selfish. These people (it appears on the surface) could use a healthy dose of unworthiness. But, in fact, they are merely lost in a desperate attempt to hide--from themselves as much as from anyone else--the fact that they just don't feel worth it. They think the unworthiness is real, not just an illusion, and they respond by concealing it rather than laughing at it. (Did you ever try to conceal a vulture? It can be pretty funny to everyone but the person trying to conceal it.)
If unworthiness is so fundamental, does this mean we're born with it? I believe humans were born to have joy and to have it more abundantly; that the birthright of everyone is loving, caring, sharing, and abundance. All the negative stuff has just been layered on top of our essential core of goodness. (Not that there isn't strong genetic pre-dispositioning--but that's another book.)
Where does unworthiness come from? A look at how children are raised might offer a clue.
Imagine a child--two, three, or four years old--playing alone in a room. An adult, usually a parent, is nearby. What for? To praise the child every five minutes? No. For "supervision." (Did your parents have super-vision? Mine did.) The adult is on hand "in case there's any trouble."
The child is playing and having a wonderful time. Two hours go by. The child is "behaving" wonderfully. The interaction with he adult world is minimal.
Suddenly, the child knocks a lamp off a table. CRASH! What happens next? Lots of interaction with the adult, almost all of it negative. Yelling, screaming ("This was my favorite lamp," "How may times have I told you?" "Bad, bad, bad") and probably some form of physical punishment (spanking, no more playing, "go to your room"). Almost the only interaction in two hours from the adult community was: "You are bad. Shame on you."
As an infant, we get unconditional, almost never-ending praise. Goo-goo ga-ga. Once we grow a little and begin exploring our would, much of our interaction with adults--the symbols of power, love, authority, and life itself--consists of being corrected. Don't do this. Don't do that.
If we draw a picture, we get praise. If we draw the same picture again, we get less praise. If we draw the same picture five times in a row, we are told to try something new.
If we pour jam on the cat, we are scolded. If we pour jam on the cat a second time, we are scolded more severely. If we pour jam on the cat five times, we may begin wishing that, like the cat, we had nine lives.
The more we do something good, the less praise we get for it. The more we do something bad, the more punishment we receive. Some children learn to do negative things just to get attention because they figure (using child-logic) that negative attention is better than no attention at all. To a child, being ignored can seem like abandonment.
Inside, a part of us begins to add up all the times we're called "wonderful" and all the times we're called "bad." The bad seems to outnumber the wonderful.
We may begin to believe we are bad; that unless we do something new and remarkable and tremendous, we're not going to be thought of as good; that we must strive, work hard, and never disobey if we hope to get even a little appreciation; that our goodness must be earned because we are, after all, essentially bad.
Bad, unlovable, not good enough, undeserving, unworthy.
From this fertile ground spring our negative thoughts. Sure, we have a lot of positive thoughts, but we tend to believe the negative ones more. A positive thought, checked against this belief of unworthiness, is labeled "False." A negative thought feels at home. The unworthiness proclaims it true, accurate, right.
Another reason we don't feel quite as magnificent as we might is technology--the mass communication of sounds and images is a relatively new phenomenon.
A hundred years ago or so, if you played a musical instrument or sang with any degree of competence, you would be among the best any of your acquaintances had ever heard. (The phonograph wasn't invented until 1877.) If you danced, juggled, or "play acted," you were in demand for socials and other gatherings. (The first motion pictures weren't shown publicly until 1894.) If you read books or could write more than your name, you were considered a local scholar and called upon to read or write for those who could not--which was the majority of the population, by the way. (In 1880, only 2.5 percent of high-school aged children went to high school.)
Today, all our achievements are compared with the best of the best. We have become accustomed to the highest form of excellence as our standard to judge everything from intelligence ("Did you read about that three-year-old who memorized the entire Encyclopedia Britannica?") to brute force ("So you can lift a car. Big deal. I saw this guy on TV who could pull a jumbo jet--with his teeth!") to absurdity ("You think that's big? I heard about a girl who could blow a bubble bigger than her whole body!")
One wonders, for example, if Beethoven would have been encouraged to follow his musical bent if, as a child, he had been constantly compared to Mozart (who was twenty-six at the time of Beethoven's birth). Mozart made a living composing and performing at age five. Beethoven didn't become a professional musician until the ripe old age of eleven. If Mozart's childhood performances had been shown again and again on TV, one can imagine a seven-year-old Beethoven, struggling with a composition, being told, "Mozart did better than this when he was four!"
With the best-of-the-best as the standard, it's little wonder that our initial inklings of uniqueness, brilliance, and perhaps even genius can be trampled under the crushing hooves of "You think that's good? Well, I saw on TV......"
In fact, we don't even need the critical "help" of others. We make our own comparisons (in which we lose) long before we dare to share our accomplishments or desires with others. With larger-than-life achievements and achievers on all media fronts, it's little wonder we might think our meager initial offerings--and, perhaps, we ourselves--don't make the grade.
No matter how good we may be, we just aren't good enough.
I hope you enjoyed the read, I highly recommend this book!
Kate