A reader wrote me after reading my post, “Fear of Success and How Kids Become Bullies”. How does one deal with this fear of success and continual self-sabotage?

I think our fear of success may come from a deeply ingrained belief that we don’t deserve to succeed. This then motivates us to continually sabotage our own efforts when we appear to approach something we value and love (ex. a personal or professional goal, supportive relationships). Our childhood experiences may have led us to adopt this erroneous belief, especially if we were abused or bullied.

My personal fear of success comes from my inability to keep “besting myself”, which came from a place of “lack”. Thus if I do something well, then in order for me to feel like I deserve love, I needed to do even better, which may be very difficult and therefore I’d fail. Sometimes to avoid this, I simply avoid the opportunity altogether. If there’s no way to succeed, there is no way to fail.

So, how do we stop this vicious cycle? We already know “how” to do it. Our mental capacity to move forward and our mental block to keep us where we are - come from ourselves. Somehow we’ve grown comfortable allowing the mental blocks to win each time, even when this gives us pain. Sometimes we are conditioned to believe that we deserve pain, and continual pain.

One of the ways I’ve found that helps me with my mental blocks is to not resist that I feel a certain way about myself, and then going ahead and doing it anyway. It’s like that saying, “feel the fear and do it anyway.” For example, “For some reason I choose to believe that I don’t deserve friends who love me. Oh well, I’m going to allow myself to be loved by one or two friends, anyway!”

I’ve found that when I spend a lot of energy resisting something, I end up exhausted and still losing to my mind demons. However, if I just let the mind demons talk trash (no resisting) yet still acting anyway, my energy is spent on the action. It takes consistent practice, but it has worked for me.

How have you dealt with the fear of success?

Albert writes about self esteem and three stages of cultivating compassion towards yourself. When you consider the concept that “depression is anger turned inward”, cultivating compassion becomes a critical component of healing the self. For Albert,

“When I found out I was a Highly Sensitive Person – reading the psychological research on the character and biological trait – I cannot describe how healing it was to my self-esteem. Understanding and realising there was nothing wrong with me – it was just a character trait, one the world had shunned.”

I’m also a sensitive person, although I’ve found that with practice, I’ve developed some protective callouses around my sensitive muscle. I’m now better at letting other people’s emotional baggage bounce off me instead of internalizing it. On the other hand, I can get highly stressed and high-strung, and that’s something I’ve learned to accept and work with instead of trying to “fix”.

Andrew writes about shortcut to happiness and two ways to find and maintain happiness: choosing happiness and maintaining happiness as an ongoing process. I was just speaking with a colleague today about a lecture I’ll be delivering in April on figuring out what we want to do with our lives. My colleague said that it’s important to do what makes us happy, and I agreed with the caveat that many of us haven’t figured out what “happy” means for us personally. If you don’t define “happiness” for yourself, you may not recognize it even if you tripped over it. Andrew writes:

Remember there are no shortcuts to happiness. You have to take some alone time and start writing what it is in your life right now that makes you unhappy. Make a big list, and then prioritize all the issues you come up with.

(Let me throw a wrench in this one: if the law of attraction asserts that what we focus on, expands, then would making a big “unhappy” list keep these unhappy things in our consciousness, even if it is meant to help us rid of these unhappy things?)

Rena believes that she is a poster child for Prozac, after being put on medication and light therapy following a failed suicide attempt:

So, to make a long blog post short, I used affirmations, Prozac and the love of a good dog and great family to dump the abusive guy, go back to America and start my own freelance writing business. I look forward to getting out of bed now.

What I found interesting was that in the same blog, by a different author, was a short article on “treating depression with minimum medication” and focusing on managing the environment stressors in the person’s life.

Walter is “a PhD-trained biochemist working in genomics and cancer biology who’s interested in understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms that control health and disease.” He sent an interesting article on the genetics of panic disorder by citing studies looking at the blood cells of people with- and without panic disorder. Walter’s article is written at a level that not everyone may understand, even though most of the concepts on there should have been covered in high school biology - for example, “phenotype, lymphocyte, gene expression, functional cluster analysis”. (I read somewhere that we should be writing at an 8th grade level.)

It’s also important to note that the study cited uses a very small sample size - less than 20 patients in each study group (or “study arm” as clinical trial researchers call them). This was not listed among the problematic factors of a study looking at genes that may be different in people who experience panic disorder, but I think the small sample size is a big problem especially when the study was then used to create a predictive test. The potential consequence is causing people to panic about possibly having a panic disorder and maybe even receiving unnecessary or inappropriate treatment for their (mis)-diagnosis.

Thank you for submitting your best blog articles and personal stories on depression, bipolar disorder, and mental health to my blog carnival. Due to the large number of submissions, I am unable to include all submissions for this edition, but personally visit and read each entry.

Until next time!
Jane

Happy 2008, everyone

This year is a special one for the Mental Health Source Page, because it marks the 10th year of its existence. I created this website in 1998, to share personal stories and resources about depression and bipolar disorder. This website gave me a voice to sort out my personal experiences with depression. Little did I know how much sharing with others helps me find strength and reminds me that I’m not alone. For this, I thank you, readers of this website, for being with me over the years.

I’m a bit late with the blog carnival that was supposed to be published yesterday. Rest assured I will get to this within the week, probably during the weekend. Being a mom to a newborn proved a challenge unlike any I’ve experienced (and I thought going through a PhD program was hard; I think this is harder)! Here’s a picture of my little one when he was 2 weeks old… he’s now 5 weeks old and learning to propel himself on his tummy.

When I was pregnant, I knew that I needed to get ready for sleep deprivation and for this major life transition, but honestly, until I actually experienced it, I did not truly understand sleep deprivation. And of course, given my history of depression I’ve been watchful during pregnancy and now, in the postpartum period, to make sure that I keep healthy. For this I’m very grateful to my husband, for his outstanding support. He took 5 weeks off work to take care of me and to help with our baby. If you are interested in postpartum depression from a first-person perspective, be sure to visit Katherine Stone’s blog.

During the winter holidays, I came upon a wonderful public radio program called “To the Best of Our Knowledge”. Recently they aired a segment on sadness and depression, and whether “normal” sadness has been stripped of its human context and made into a chemically-based disease. You may listen to the streaming audio (requires Real audio player) of the December 16, 2007 program here.