Many times, when a client reports feeling unworthy, they may be able to pinpoint specific instances when they received messages that they weren’t good enough.
But there are also indirect ways that this message can be conveyed and passed across generations – even in loving, connected families.
In the video below, Lynn Lyons, LICSW, will tell you how.
Have a look.
So one particular family I’ve had, they’re an incredibly loving, connected family. I’ve known them for a while. There are several siblings, and these parents would do anything for their kids. But they themselves are very critical of themselves.
So what are the first things I’m going to do? When I see this dynamic in a family, where this unworthiness is something that’s being modeled, where I am looking at the parent and seeing their own perfectionism and their own self-criticism, what’s the first thing that I want to do?
The first thing I want to do is some psychoeducation of how things get modeled, sometimes just bringing it to the parents’ awareness and talking about it as a family pattern. I find it to be enormously helpful to talk to parents about what they learned from their parents – what is the generational transmission of this?
The reason that it’s so helpful to do that right from the beginning is because it takes away the blame that they might feel, it helps with their own shame. If these are parents who are really self-critical, and as soon as you come at it and say, “Look, your kid is struggling,” of course they’re going to put it on themselves. But we really want to look at this as a generational pattern.
Then I want to have family sessions to talk about how this thing shows up and what’s the language that they use. We really want to talk to families about, how do we look at this from a perspective of, how do these norms, how do these ideas, how do these strong feelings and social requirements get passed down to families? What is the culture of the family? You’re not doing it on purpose, but what’s the culture of a family that really sets the stage for this?
One of the examples from a family I can remember is, the daughter was really struggling with body image and felt incredibly insecure about her body. And the mom came in, and truly the mom said, “I make sure that she feels good about her body. I give her the message all the time that she has a lovely body, that this is the body that she’s in.”
Then the mom said in front of the daughter, “The reason I want to make sure that I do that is because I struggled with my body issues.” But then in talking to the mom, the mom is horribly critical about her own body. The mom was always beating herself up, looking in the mirror, going on diets.
So I want to talk to the parents and say, “This is about what you model. You are not saying to your daughter directly, ‘You need to lose weight,’ but you are saying to yourself all the time, ‘I’m not good enough.’ And that’s what your daughter is seeing.”
When we put it in that context, when we begin to look at it as patterns and bring it up to awareness, then we can make some progress.”
What drives a client’s feelings of “never good enough” isn’t always straightforward.
That’s why we created this program designed to give you concrete strategies for working with this tricky emotion.
You’ll hear from Pat Ogden, PhD, Dan Siegel, MD; Steven Hayes, PhD; Marsha Linehan, PhD; Ron Siegel, PsyD, and other top experts in the field.
Now we’d like to hear from you. How do you work with clients who feel “never good enough,” especially when the sources of those beliefs might be more subtle? Please let us know by leaving a comment below.
If you found this helpful, here are a few more resources you might be interested in:
Working with Clients Who Feel “Never Good Enough”
Is Your Patient “Feeling” Unworthy? What May Be the Underlying Cause, with Janina Fisher, PhD
Perfectionism – The Drive to be Perfect and What it Costs Clients
It’s equally as important to discuss from a perspective of societal & cultural norms. Where do these ideas, pressures, and social requirements come from that get transmitted within families? i.e. the breakneck competitive culture driven by inhumane corporate capitalism that keeps the “elite to worthless” caste system running on racism, sexism, classism, otherism, etc. Otherwise, it’s still the families’ fault. And we remain sheep in the trance of the power-wielders, instead of enlightened people struggling to widen our identification with diverse fellow citizens to improve our Democratic Republic That’s when we will make some REAL progress!
One of the big drivers that never gets mentioned ever is sexual selection and the fact that i have yet found an area of life not centered around survival and reproduction. Then on top there is both an attatchment based system and capacity for empathy but it has blocks and is also embedded in a brain with also a social rank system (these two systems are what mediate sociability for instance) Plus all the isms are just subtypes of ingroup out group conflict which is a relic of the fact that we evolved from large family clans that at times where often poly, but not always. And then when the Catholic Church declared one could not sleep with their cousin any more (as what better way to do maintain resources in a family than to literally keep it in the family) And as a result the west became highly individualized. Yeah it sucks, though I’m def seeing a need for a more deliberate type of Dunbar village design in society and in cities where people come together and eat meals and break bread together. Then we got to find creative ways to use these evolutionary impulses in counterintuitive ways to try to design a better society. I also do think the more trauma therapy stuff spreads the more people would start questioning things.
A very useful reminder about modelling, thanks Lynn and NICABM.
It doesn’t just happen in families but it is prevalent in society as a whole, through social media, individual, group and national identification and so on.
Learning to notice patterns and then to adapt is an evolutionary trait that ensures survival. Unfortunately humans are losing the skills because of learned behaviours and modelling and becoming victims of their own success.
It is easy since I was raised to think I was not good enough, by working, warring parents, a narcissistic mother, bent on using her own daughter as a pawn to get her needs met. The problem was obvious as this behavior became my emotional albatross, almost textbook. Main problem is to assure my own triggers are only helping me be better at what I do instead or retraumatized by it.
It was easier before the pandemic. Authoritarianism started to be praised when it was something I fought to thwart in my taught parenting classes, trying hard to educate about developmental stages. My schooling was my therapist in so many ways coupled with good therapists when necessary and use these tools from the NICABM keep me grounded for new thoughtful ideas for healing.
There is practical experience in these webinars to help me and my client on a journey to heal. I assure the information is explained throughly to those I see throughout the week. I find all tools practical or experiential methods to help reality. The webinars help me stay grounded, focused on the reality of damaged adults from abandonment and abuse in early childhood.
Even my caretakers, hired to protect me, were sexual abusers. Fortunately I learned the hard way about what was harmful to a young child, how to rise above such attacks. I was a warrior in my own right as I watched these so-called caretakers. Wondered if they had thoughts or just reactions to their own selfish behaviors.
I knew my lack of therapeutic intervention harmed me. I was bent to assure clients be heard, to get out their fears early on. They often respond with a sense of relief that someone is actually hearing them. It is so necessary at a young age to be understood and break through those feelings with the proper tools. All methods were important to me along the way. I like the fact that there are diverse trainings by diverse theories. I studied with many along the way to assure no stone or modern tool was ignored.
Since I had parents broken up early in my development, who cared less about my education, it was helpful to learn as I needed without judgment. If my mother really knew what I was learning, I would have been pulled out of college. She thought I should be a secretary instead of a psychologist and made it clear what a woman should do to make money.
She might have been right about the money but certainly wrong about being satisfied in the work. Took me awhile to realize the damage she caused but fortunately it is most helpful now to forgive her, move on to ongoing helping people do what I was privileged to do. I was left to explore my own needs instead living in her shadow. Often remember Jungian theory on our subconscious needs and all the existential fears that I believe was promoted by Rogers. I forget my true educators but work hard in telling clients where they can get the theories which I believe is so important. Never want to take credit for these great ideas. It is obvious what I was meant to do in life and still stay focused on this purpose as an observer. The damage was done but I try to make the best of that educational curiosity. I still wonder if people think, myself included. That is a joke.
Trust was my main war along the way. Still battle that with knowledge of my nervous system. Staying aware and grounded on how to rise above it all with the help of these webinars, thanks to the work of those at NICABM
Thank you for sharing from your experience. I resonate w similar childhood & self-reliance. My post demonstrates my political organizer road above. Our work is complementary. People don’t think unless they are listened to & affirmed. Blessings!
Years ago I told my Family Systems therapist that I’d always felt guilty of some great crime. She suggested I, a reporter, investigate my family history. I discovered the lynching of a woman and three men, one a preacher, one a cousin of my sheriff grandfather. In a nation built on violence against people of color much trauma, black and white, abounds. It is past time for this reality to enter the world of psychotherapy. The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, A Legacy of Secrets and My Search for the Truth tells my story. The search, the facinf, the telling brought wholeness.
This was a great response and appreciate your sharing your observations. Hope this is a book still available. Would like to contact you if you wrote these books as I have some questions regarding lynching.
Thank you so much fir this short video on not good enough. I am not able to take part in many of the trainings, but my connection with nicabm is a gift of much learning which I pass on to my clients. Thanks to you.
I am retired now, but I used to ask my patient to keep a diary of the good things done everyday. After some time we would go through all that and see the qualities demonstrated by all that. Because, if one just sees one day at a time, all seems very small, but after weeks, you can realize the tendencies to help, to organize, to be true, to work hard, to care, etc…
Hello: I am just wondering at the timing of your intergenerational work, without mentioning the horrible impact it had on our Indigenous and Black cultures, and that this awareness of the ramifications of the centuries of marginalization, has shaped the research. In this very much public presentation some background would be good. I might be misinterpreting this as a student, and mean no disrespect. Much trauma research has been done in global war recovery and such, so it helps to know the context behind this. Thank you.
Im interested in this too.
Appreciate this comment very much. Psychology as a whole in my view has a way to go wrt paying real attention to the impact of social context of brutalized communities and how our development of theory needs to incorporate this. I experienced this first hand in my training and work in South Africa in the 80’s and 90’s. There is in my view no need for you to be apologizing for ‘possible misinterpretation’. I’ve no doubt that Ruth will value your observation (I’m not part of the staff at NICABM and do not know her personally).
I enjoyed your talk and agree with.
How do you break off the generational
Issue?
Very good snippet of this topic…
I’m retired now but listening to thee free videos offered by nicabm
has got me excited about new
approaches for working with
trauma. I worked with a therapist for many years as I deal with refractory major depression and developmental
trauma.She was incredibly skilled and had studied with Pat Ogden
and other somatic therapists as well as having an extensive
background of other theoretical
orientations. Being so depressed for so long made my work really slow and tricky. After a particularly
devastating episode I ended up in hospital having ECT. It worked!
Now I am able to utilize the things my therapist had taught me over the years and I am functioning very well now at age 65. Something shifted. So glad you and all the speakers are doing such amazing work. I passed on the information to my cousin who has struggled with similar issues and raised an only son who will not speak to her.
She is starting to get that concept of inter generational trauma.
Thank you. A therapist friend has purchased the whole program so I’m sure he’ll share it with me if I need some tune ups for myself.
I am a retired medical social worker.
This is interesting, my husbands family is like that, he gets stuck on not good enough and beats himself up! And that is one of the major causes of our fights!
Hi Dalana, that is interesting that you feel the need to ‘fight’ over this issue. There might also be something on your side that needs healing.