It’s Not Just the Wounded Who Feel Unworthy
We all come into this reality to learn certain things. And it’s amazing how similar those things are, in spite of how different we may seem to be from each other.
Like you, I have been reading heart-rending stories by Medium friends who suffered traumatic childhoods. The result of such abuse was that, as adults, they did not believe in their own worthiness to be loved or to experience success in life. My soul goes out to them.
I have a wrinkle to show you in the fabric of life. It explains why my own view of Fate is that it thinks Irony is funny.
The wrinkle is this: Some people who had privileged childhoods and WERE loved, ALSO don’t believe they are worthy of experiencing success in life!
Our self-talk was different from those who had been traumatized, but the result was exactly the same. We kept success at arm’s length by visualizing that we didn’t deserve it!
Our Calvinistic self-talk went like this:
“How dare you pray to God to give you this role in the show (or this position in the corporation?) Don’t you realize how privileged you’ve been all your life, with loving parents and food always on the table? Don’t be such a selfish pig! It’s time that someone less fortunate than you got a break, for a change! So what, if you don’t get this job? You don’t need it — not like this poor other candidate with a family to feed.”
So, our chastised egos were made to back down. Surely a child like me, who had always been given everything he asked for, would be on his way to Hell if he continued to lord it over less-fortunate ones. Surely I needed to learn humility! Surely God wanted me to have compassion for the down-trodden, to give them a chance at success, too.
So, there you have the irony. Whether you were abused as a child or adored as a child, you may still grow up believing that you don’t deserve to be successful.
Of course, not all privileged kids grew up feeling the way I did. Some of them continued to be Republicans.
A human, not an AI text generator, wrote this story. (More Info)