Right now, my self-esteem is as fragile as glass. Anything that can be taken two different ways WILL be seen as negative, and zeroed in on. I'll have to fight that battle.

My problem is something called Impostor Syndrome, link to follow. When I succeed, there is a tendency to tell myself I didn't earn it. I just caught a lucky break. Yesterday I posted a link on my Facebook page about a young beautiful woman seeking to marry a rich man, thinking her beauty alone was enough to offer him. People have pointed out to me that the *only* thing I did to get off government assistance was to be *fortunate* enough to marry a man with adequate income. The fact that he must have seen something positive in me if he wanted to marry me is overlooked. In other words, I caught a lucky break.

When I passed my driver's test, with a 90 out of 100 at that, (70 needed to pass) I was absolutely certain I didn't really do all that well. The examiner had just given me a break. I am reasonably confident that if I were to take the same test today, I would pass it comfortably, but I still remain convinced she overlooked some points she could have taken off. A year later, I still have a tendency to wonder who the heck I'm trying to kid, when I drive myself somewhere.

And now with the job search, that same persistent thought is, "I'm wearing a mask. I'm pretending. I am not actually a normal, functional, adult human being. I'm just faking it. If anyone hires me, it will be because they're desperate, or I have them fooled into thinking I am somehow competent." I want a job badly. I am tired of having to ask Mike for the money to buy this or that. I feel like a child asking Daddy for allowance. I can tell myself all I want to that we are a team, that my job is to be homemaker, and I'm entitled to part of his income as my pay, but then that nagging little voice answers by calling bovine excrement. "Yeah, you just keep telling yourself you're competent. That's cute. Look at her, pretending to be normal!" Will I ever overcome this?

Impostor syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[steadyrecovery]

I suffer from this same syndrome. I also have a problem with self-sabotage. I recently discovered a 12 Step group for this (telephone meetings) called Self Sabotagers Anonymous. Their web site is miseryaddicts(dotcom). The book they use is called "When Misery is Company" by Anne Katherine. It's an excellent book, but the questions are very difficult for me to answer/journal about. I'm only up to question 3 and I've had the book for 3 weeks!

I don't know.....Wikipedia says it's a reaction to CERTAIN situations...I took that to mean something triggers it.

I think it's human nature to criticize those that have it better than us....

I am like you as far as self-esteem and over the top self-effacement. If 99 people tell me something good, then I will focus on the only one that says anything negative. I can even twist good things around until they're negative. I have been this way my whole life.
I do tend to believe those people that I trust. I think trust is key. And I don't label myself.....that's damaging in itself for me.

I think productivity is very important for self-esteem. While you're job hunting why not volunteer somewhere? It helps a lot, for me, with my depression.

[Webgoji]

Originally Posted by sophiesmom

If 99 people tell me something good, then I will focus on the only one that says anything negative.

See, this is something I don't understand. If I hear something positive about me I'm on it like a fly to stink. I'll get the 99 something bad to 1 good and then people don't understand why me self-esteem is so bad.

Take my wife. She hears all the time how pretty she is and honestly I've never heard a word to the contrary. But she's convinced she's fat and ugly.

I, on the other hand, can count the number of times I've been told I'm attractive in my 41 years on two hands and four of them were my own mom.

I just don't understand ignoring input and focusing on something else ...

[Jawbone263]

It's not that input is ignored. I know for me - I do the same thing - I can be told 99 times I rock but the one person who says yeah you suck is what I focus on.

My self-esteem has always been low and the depression doesn't help. To the OP I can relate to your feelings - I feel like a phony all the time. Especially at work or even sometimes with friends.

I put on my fake face at work and get through the day. And then when I get home I beat myself up about all the things I potentially screwed up (like everything some days) so when you do something right - it does feel like a lucky break - that I was undeserving.

It's hard to break out of that mindset. I'm sorry you're having a hard time. My T told me that I need to remember that I can't control the past or future or the way others think of me. I only have a small circle of control and that as long as I know I did the best I could then that's what matters.

I hope you find some peace soon. Hugs.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thanks for the support. Webgoji, I think I can comment on your wife's dilemma. She probably is very beautiful. However, women have been traditionally held to this impossible beauty standard. It's like I've seen several people point out. "Don't worry if you don't look the women on the magazine covers. Even the women on the magazine covers don't look like the women on the magazine covers." Thanks to makeup, fake hair, shapewear, and Photoshop, that's true. What shows up on the cover is not at all what the woman looks like in real life, but we've been conditioned to think of that as the beauty ideal, and think we fall short by comparison. As if that's not bad enough, actresses in Hollywood are called "fat" if they have any curve to them at all. Even Ashley Olsen, when her sister Mary-Kate was being treated for anorexia, had to endure being referred to in the media as "the fat twin." On what planet is she actually fat?

Myself, I've been told since third grade that I was fat. At the time, I wasn't. I was well within the normal weight range for my age, height, and level of maturity. I outweighed my average classmate by a good ten pounds, but I was already in puberty and stood a head taller than everybody else. I didn't take any of that into consideration, and what's more, neither did they. Everybody knew what everybody else weighed, because back in those days, for school health records, they weighed and measured everybody right there in class with all of their classmates watching. Because I was the heaviest--as I would be, since I was also the tallest and the most developed--based on numbers alone, I was promptly labeled "fat." It was the dieting behavior in the years since, especially the tendency to starve myself until I couldn't stand it anymore and then eat everything in sight, that packed on the pounds until, by my senior year in high school, I really was overweight. I thought I was fat all along, but I look back at pictures now, and see that I wasn't. I didn't actually cross into the "obese" category until my children were born. Now that my thinking and my eating patterns have been corrected, I've lost a substantial amount of weight, but I still look in the mirror and see the same grossly misshapen blob I always saw, no matter how inaccurate that image is. Obviously at almost fifty, I cannot possibly have the same body I had when I was eight, twelve, or sixteen years old, but I've seen the same image in the mirror my entire life. Nowadays, I can look at a woman who wears the same size clothing that I do--heck, she can even be wearing my clothes, and they're tight on her where they're loose on me--and she doesn't look all that fat to me, maybe just a little plump, but I look extremely fat to myself.

As for tuning out compliments, that's conditioning too. Everybody is trained, basic manners, you don't hurt people's feelings by coming right out and saying their butt really does look big in this. You say it looks just right. So, knowing that people do give false compliments, we are quick to think, "Oh, you're just saying that." But a rare jackhole will say something rude. For example, I've had many a conversation, both in person and online, ended abruptly because somebody didn't like what I said, and to shut me up threw in, "Yeah? Well, you're fat." To which my conditioning has programmed me to think, the one giving me the grief is telling me the truth, while everyone else is handing out phony compliments out of politeness.