Name: Why We Think We Are Losers (But Actually Aren't)
Uploaded: 2024-05-31T04:38:12.000Z
Duration: 4 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Some of us are continually haunted by a sense that we are losers.

But there is an inner critic inside who has a very different verdict.

This critic is extremely assiduous and determined.

They'll get into an argument with our best friend to insist that no, despite what they think, we really are awful.

They'll disregard the evidence of a promotion or a surprise birthday party and keep returning to the same theme.

If they are inaccurate, why do they go on as they do?

To find an explanation, we have to go back in time.

Early on in our lives, those of us with a harsh inner critic are likely to have faced a very troubling situation.

Someone close to us, it might have been a mother or a father, didn't seem to especially like us.

They were cold and forbidding, they often got angry, or they simply disappeared and maybe married someone else in another country.

Or else they fell into depression or became an alcoholic.

This is the question that would have faced the younger version of us, though we forget this now.

It's very hard for a child to deal with a vacuum of explanation.

The mind has to try to find some way of accounting for things, because otherwise the mystery threatens to be unbearable.

Unfortunately, the childish mind doesn't have an accurate grasp of adult psychology or the workings of the grown-up world.

Nevertheless, it is an energetic and vibrant machine, and eventually it is likely to land on an explanation that feels very powerful and that in time ceases to reveal that it is just a good guess rather than an iron truth.

The bad thing that has happened to me has done so because I am bad.

It's almost certain, we hasten to add, that this is not the right answer to why things unfolded as they did, but that's not the point.

This was the answer we landed upon and that felt most plausible.

A child will prefer to think that it lives in a rationally ordered world where things happen for logical reasons, even if this means having to think that they are bad, rather than take on board the terrifying notion that things happen that are entirely unfair, entirely undeserved and entirely reprehensible to the interests and hopes of a child.

Better to insist that one sucks than to have to believe in an amoral, chaotic, senseless universe.

It's easy from here to see how the child who decided that they suck, to be precise, who had to conclude that they sucked in order to make sense of an unbearable pain, then grows up into an adult who continues to maintain, in the face of any evidence to the contrary, that they are dreadful, that all good news about them is merely a cover for hatred, that everything nice is undeserved and that they are, despite key bits of evidence to the contrary, a piece of excrement.

The way to break out of this prison is to realize that we are made up of parts.

It is a part of us that was formed early on in response to a particular situation.

We might now thank it very politely for its work because, at an early stage, it did in fact do a rather good job of making sense of life.

At a cost, it was responsible, we might say, for getting us to the next stage.

But at the same time, we can now afford to take our leave of this helpful but profoundly mistaken part.

You did something bold, and you meant well, but now you threaten to ruin what remains of the rest of my life.

It's time to say goodbye to the critic and assess reality through a fairer, less biased, less uninformed lens.

Something bad happened to us that we tried to rationalise by blaming ourselves.

We aren't awful people, and we don't deserve an awful future.

 We just came from a rather difficult place.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why We Think We Are Losers (But Actually Aren't)

scenario

depression

reveal

situation