[Life Warrior]

Gita,

So you have this deep sense of guilt for somehow not being good enough, and you feel that you need people to tell you that no, you are good enough, you're fine, to get rid of this guilt? Are you not good enough for yourself? Or someone else? Where do you think this sense had come from? Somewhere in your past you had internalized this feeling and through validation you're looking for a way out of it, to finally confirm what you had known all along, that you are just fine and are a person of tremendous inner strength.

I've discovered that I am dealing with the same things myself. For me it stems from the way I was raised by my parents and was not given the freedom and support to be myself, and was constantly being compared with my sister for not being good enough as her. I've also realized that later on I've used this feeling of guilt and incompetence to justify my not taking responsibility for myself, thinking that I was just not meant to achieve great things in this world, not live for myself, and suffer for my not being able to live up to other's expectations.

But through developing my freedom to be myself and create wonderful things in this world and taking responsibility for all my creative actions I've been able to see that this need for appreciation is just an illusion. To me it has long been a way out of finally standing up for myself and saying, "Yes I am good enough for myself, and not for you, and what are you going to do about it?" To internalize such an intention takes a lot of strengh, but I had realized that I've had that strength inside of me all along.

And once you are past it, the funny thing happens is that you are able to focus not on the need to confirm or deny your own vulnerability (because it was always an illusion to begin with), but to actually enjoy using your strength and creative freedom to do great things in this world, and share your experiences with others -- not for validation of how good you're doing but for the uniqueness of the moment itself that you are creating together.

dulaney0330 said in another thread, "I have learned that loving and accepting myself really means going back to my inner child and wrapping my arms around her. I need to love and accept the little girl who was abused, neglected, and ridiculed."

Maybe we need to do that our own inner child, accept that all these feelings of incompetence rest in our past and are not us any longer. We have become different people long ago, and starting fresh by focusing on the joy of using our inner strengh and freedom to bring great things in this world we may be able to finally shed this nagging sense of guilt and not being good enough for others because the things that created them did not matter to begin with and had stemmed from illusionary fear and not from joy.