“It strikes me to understand that behind my low self-esteem, anxieties, and resentments is my self-image that I am unimportant.” If this resonates with you, this exercise may be valuable to you.
Self-Observation on why I feel unimportant
- This is a childhood trauma I have. I have had this self-image ever since I can remember.
- Sometime early in my life I developed this image that I am not important. This has become a big part of how I relate to my life.
- I have all kinds of smaller and bigger issues with success and getting what I want. This is because I developed low self-esteem. Since I feel somewhat unimportant, I do not think that I deserve to be successful. So I resonate with situations where I play this out.
- I do things like overexplaining almost everything. I want to win other people’s acceptance this way because then I feel safe…
- I also let people do things that throw me even deeper into my self-doubt.
- Maybe I have made myself insignificant willingly. As a tool to justify why I can never really get what I truly want – at least this was my perception.
- When I do become important then I feel shame.
- Now that I observe this image about myself, I understand why I feel contempt, resentment, and anger many times.
Chain of thoughts coming when I am able to go deeper
- I feel abandoned and lonely. This is also a little bit of good news because I have a vague idea of what I am missing.
- This feels very true: I lost connection and I developed this idea that I must not be important if this break happened.
- What is strange is that I understand that this is my problem – I mean that I think I am abandoned – but still what I want is to feel important.
- I am juggling between wanting to feel important and wanting to restore connection. ‘Wanting to feel important’ to me has to do with getting what I want. ‘Feeling connected’ is a different thing. I know this is more important, but I cannot describe why.
- I connected these two things: Feeling neglected and needing to feel important. ‘My sense of self-worth is dependent on how much people love me…’
- Now I understand that my need to feel important is a symptom and the root cause is my feeling of being abandoned.
- Right now, for me, the hard thing is to see that it is important. I got used to being alone so much.
- Actually, I see that this loneliness is helping me to connect with myself at a deep level. Things aren’t as bad! And anyways, I am not looking for some half-cooked connectedness, or some puffed-up pride.
The above self-observation exercise is just one possible flow of associations. It is meant to stimulate you and by no means it is implied that it is about you.
(If you are new to the concept of self-observation or looking for some practical guidance then maybe read this article: How Self-Observation Works)
