Dealing with Fear of Success
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?
Compassion, Happiness, Medication, and Genetics
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
Moving Beyond Blue
Therese Borchard at Beliefnet’s Beyond Blue interviewed me in October 2007. She asked many insightful questions including, “how do you think you know when or if you can go off your meds?” and “What did you do when you relapsed?”
I had no idea that my answers were interpreted as controversial based on the comments that flooded the interview!
For the most part, people understood (correctly) that my answer to the first question had to do with my early perception of what I was going through, when I knew just enough to admit that I had a condition that required medical intervention, and when I was still naive to know that depression can return like a vengeance, as I had personally experienced when my depression relapsed in 2001. Did I genuinely believe I could “fix myself” with one year of vigilant medication therapy and psychotherapy back in 1998? Yes, that was my naive personal belief at the time, based on my rudimentary understanding of my own depression, mixed in with a lot of denial that I would be managing the risks for this condition on a life-long basis. Am I saying that this is what people should aim for? NO!
There were some who interpreted my personal experiences and choices with medication as “anti-medication” and therefore expressed concern that I was advocating against medication. This was, of course, neither my intention nor my personal practice or belief. It would be strange for me to be antagonistic in biochemical intervention when I had earned a doctorate in biochemistry and specifically trained in looking at the biochemical basis of living systems. Those who are regular visitors to this website will find that I talk about medications and medication therapy as often as I talk about other complementary therapies (for example: exercise). I have a lot of respect for drugs because I have worked with many of them both in research and in clinical trials during the course of my health care career. I’ve always emphasized (here and on my other sites) that drugs are powerful agents with risks and benefits, and should always be administered judiciously, based on a partnership between doctors and patients.
During my relapse, I immediately went for both routes - the chemical route (antidepressants) and the psychotherapy route - as I had done when I was first seeking help for depression. Unfortunately for me, I tried 3 or 4 antidepressants and the side effects were intolerable. I remember taking two antidepressants made by a drug company that I used to work for; one made me extremely drowsy, the other made me so dizzy and nauseous that I was unable to stand up and walk a straight line.
I was forced to resort to psychotherapy as my main line of treatment, and just to be on the safe side, actually enlisted both a psychologist and a psychiatrist for double dose of psychotherapy weekly. The psychiatrist and I tried to find a drug that would work, but after almost 3 months, ultimately decided that given the suboptimal dose of a SSRI that I could tolerate, I wasn’t getting the therapeutic effects anyway, and we would stop trying to find the med that would work given that I was doing well on psychotherapy. If I wasn’t improving on psychotherapy alone, would I continue trying different medication therapies? You bet. My goal was to get better.
My approach to health - including mental health - is quite simple: I have personal responsibility for my own wellness.
This means I am accountable as a partner with my doctor(s) for my health, and given that I know I have risk factors (depression is one), I have a responsibility to monitor my own mental health so that I can recognize early warning signs before something more serious emerges.
This means I need to educate others around me, especially people close to me, so that they can help me detect abnormalities if I miss the signals.
My goal is to be well and stay well. When warranted, I make sure that the treatment decisions I make with my doctor is based on sound scientific evidence, and I make sure that I do my part in whatever non-medical (i.e. lifestyle) changes I need to make to get better.