This transcript was created using AI and has been lightly edited. Please forgive transcription errors. Thank you!

If you're tired of feeling never enough, of constantly being derailed by your own fears or the reactions of others, then you are in the right place. I'm Deb, a licensed psychologist, and this is Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to women who've spent their lives trying to stay within the lines of what's acceptable, who've never felt good enough and who are ready to break free and bloom. Let's talk about how you can build a solid foundation connected with your strength and your wisdom. Before we start, I need to make sure that you know that the information I share with you is just that. It's just information. It's not meant to be a prescription for what you should do or meant to replace the advice of any of your healthcare providers. It also doesn't mean that we have a professional client-therapist relationship.

 Hi there and welcome. In this episode, I want to explore a struggle which seems to be ubiquitous to the female experience, the struggle to feel good enough. I use that descriptor of ubiquitous as it was one a client used this morning in talking about the female experience, the striving to be good enough. 

The striving to be good enough may be common in the male experience as well. And I really can't speak to whether that's true or not. And what I do know from my experience is that not feeling good enough seems to plague most of us as women. I know it has been a source of pain and strife in my own life. And it is something I hear again and again from the women I work with.

 After hearing a couple of clients bring up this struggle this week, I started to wonder, good enough as compared to what? Or how do we know when we're good enough? I feel curious as to whether you have an answer to that. Do you know when you'll be good enough? Or does the finish line seem to keep moving so that you never seem to get there?

I suspect it is the latter. When I was working on my book, Never Enough, so many women said to me, I really need that book. Or people have said, your title really captures it for me because I never feel good enough. As I was thinking about this episode, the thought that kept going through my head was enough of what?

As I've shared in my previous episodes, my suspicion is that all of us as women have a deep-seated fear of not measuring up, related to our history of needing to be with a man in order to survive. A great deal of time and effort was directed at ensuring that women had what it took to attract, and keep a man through their looks, their domestic abilities, and their abilities to please. 

I wonder if this is why the whole concept, this whole fear of being enough is so nebulous. Because it's not a current fear, and instead is an old fear living in our subconscious—one that has been passed down through the generations because it once carried with it life or death consequences because we as women were unable to live independently. We didn't have the rights that allowed us to do so. 

I wonder if that fear is still alive and well inside of us propelling us to do more and be more, even though the end goal is no longer there— that of securing a place with a man who had the rights and abilities to keep us safe. 

So the fear is there, propelling us forward, keeping us constantly striving, afraid to stop and rest, and without any clear finish line in sight, as the goal of being chosen is no longer what we need in order to be safe.

All of that is simply conjecture based on my understanding of the brain's preference for holding on to things related to survival and my years spent trying to help women figure out what will give them a sense of having arrived. Having arrived at that place where they can stop striving so much and simply relax while never seeming to be able to come up with an answer to that question, and instead continuing to flounder in feelings of not being enough.

For many years, the focus of my work and the trainings that I did focused on helping women reach their goals. Whatever goals women brought in, that's what we worked on. And yes, that was important work. And what I started to notice was that one goal seemed to lead to another, or that a goal that in the beginning seemed like it would be satisfying or would bring peace didn't turn out that way. 

Getting a promotion didn't bring the relief it was thought to bring. Losing weight didn't change the body in the way it was hoped to do. Having a relationship didn't bring the security that was expected. There was always another goal or some way in which the current goal wasn't enough. There was a continued constant striving to be better.

And achieving the goals women set out for themselves didn't seem to make the difference that women were expecting. Even though women dreamed of having time to themselves to relax and do the things they enjoyed, there seemed to be a great deal of fear in doing so. I'm wondering if you relate.

I wish I could hear what you have to say. I think for most of us, at least in my experience, we feel good enough when we feel approved of, either by people important to us or by societal standards. So we feel good enough when we perform well at work, as a mother, in keeping our house clean, having children who are well behaved when we're fit, when we're thin and fit, when we have a lot of friends. Ooh, that's a lot. And I bet that's not the half of it. 

I'm sure many of these standards feel like personal goals rather than an attempt to measure up to the expectations of others. And I'm sure that many women do determine what they want for themselves based on their values and their purpose in life. For instance, some women choose motherhood and others choose a career in science because of a desire to further our understanding. And some women choose both. 

And I imagine some of these women remain immune to societal pressures or the expectations of others. And I suspect that this is a fewer number. How do I know that I'm being a good mother or contributing to the field of science without making comparisons? How can I know if I'm truly contributing without comparing what has been done and what is being done or whether others see value in my work.

In some ways, this episode is a continuation of the topics from the last two episodes on our common tendency to appease in relationships and also to feel responsible for the feelings of others, both of which keep our attention focused outward on the needs and the reactions of others. Focusing outward makes it hard to feel secure. If I measure how I'm doing by your reaction, I might as well be on a roller, as the reactions of others always say more about what's going on for the other person than they do about me.

And that's because of how the brain processes information. We can be on a high, believing we're doing well and good enough one moment because of the reactions of others, and in the next moment plummet to feeling an utter failure. I wonder if this has happened to you. I know it sure happened to me.

I've asked for feedback on something I was working on and received glowing feedback one day, only to share that same information with the same person on another day, expecting their continued support only to be faced with questioning and disapproval. 

It left me reeling and like I had no idea what I was doing. In truth, I did know what I was doing and the difference had to do with the brain state of the other person. Although at the time, I didn't know that was true or I didn't recognize that. 

If at our very core, we have deeply wired a connection between our worth and the reactions of others, it's hard to hold on to being okay in light of differences or disapproval. 

And we're constantly bombarded with information that is jam-packed with stimuli ready to trip us up by triggering this wiring, that connection between our worth and the reactions of others, whether it's by photos on someone else's social media page, a disapproving look from a co-worker or an employer or a friend, a child misbehaving at school, or a body that looks nowhere near the way I believe it's supposed to look.

 How can we ever feel good enough if who I am is determined by how others see me? Even if I was to impress someone today, there's no guarantee they'll feel the same way tomorrow or even this afternoon. We are on a constant unending treadmill or maybe like maybe in like one of those endless pools, I think that's what they're called, where you're swimming against the current. 

So you never really get anywhere, which has always sounded like torture to me. And which I think is a pretty good description of constantly striving and never getting to the place where we can relax.

And so coming back to the question of being enough, I'm not really sure what that means in today's world. I think I have a better idea of what it doesn't mean. And that is allowing that deep-seated fear, connecting our worth with the approval of others, a wire which once kept us safe, and which no longer serves us to continue to blindly run our lives. So here's what I think, and I'd love to hear your reactions.

I think we need to tap into our female wisdom and recognize when this old fear is lighting up and remind ourselves that we no longer need to ride the fears that are encapsulated in that wire, that we are strong, capable women with rights and privileges, with the rights and privileges to decide our own futures and to work toward those goals. We don't need to be chosen to be safe.

Here's what I mean by connecting with our female wisdom. If a friend of yours was in tears because she wasn't invited to a gathering and was connecting with the fear of not being good enough, what would you do? Would you say, yep, I bet that's it. I bet they didn't think you were good enough and that's why they didn't invite you? I doubt it.

I'm imagining you might, first of all, offer compassion and understanding, maybe saying something like, of course it hurts not to be invited. Compassion by its very nature highlights our shared suffering, our humanness. We're no longer alone fighting to be enough. It normalizes our struggles.

And then I'm imagining you might help her to realize that not getting invited has nothing to do with her worth, right? How could her worthpossibly be defined by other people with their own insufficiencies or inadequacies and by whether they decided to invite her or not. 

This is what I often refer to as a crossed wire, wires that have gotten crossed or tangled together based on old fears being matched in the brain with current situations.

Her brain has likely matched not being invited with that old wire connecting worth and survival with being chosen. The brain is constantly scanning for anything related to survival and errs on the side of caution, or it's better to be safe than sorry. It's better to think it's true rather than to ignore it and be in danger or be killed. And in this case, that overgeneralization, that matching that the brain did, doesn't make any sense.

Wouldn't you just naturally help a friend or daughter recognize when these crossed wires are lighting up through your kindness, compassion, and wisdom? I wonder what would happen if we as women could start to first feel compassion when we feel that fear of not being good enough or even when we notice ourselves striving to the point of exhaustion, and then identify that fear as an old wire no longer useful to us today, one that only engenders fear and leaves us on a roller coaster or swimming in one of those endless pools.

 If we could tap into our wisdom and name the wire, I wonder what possibilities might open up for us and for our blooming.

I think I'll stop there and leave you with that thought. And until next time, take good care and bye bye.

This has been Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to supporting you in blooming into all you are meant and wish to be. If you enjoyed it and gained value, please consider leaving a review, as it will help other women to find it and please share it with anyone who would benefit from it. And if you would like to be notified when new episodes become available, be sure and follow on your favorite podcast app. Until next time, how will you light a candle of self-acceptance? Because you deserve to be you, even if others disagree.