Why Am I Not Good Enough?

Over 2,000 people google Why Am I Not Good Enough on a monthly basis in the United States alone. You might be one of them.  Or maybe this question hasn’t explicitly come up, but instead you’ve asked yourself, your friends, or google:

Am I ugly?

How do I make someone fall in love with me?

How do I get someone to stay with me?

Am I lazy?

Did I do enough at work today?

Is my friend mad at me?

Will anyone ever love me?

The problem is that the answers to these tough questions aren’t really on the internet.

 I can tell you very clearly that you are enough. 

You are enough. 

But I can’t tell you through the screen why these fears are coming up for you specifically. 

I can help you get started with some solid reflections. I can help you figure out where to start.

Connecting to Childhood



Before we start to care about feedback from peers (classmates, coworkers, friends, dates, partners), we care deeply about feedback from our first caregivers. It’s hard to imagine as an adult exactly how much power our caregivers had in both concrete and symbolic ways. Children rely on their parents or caregivers for food, shelter, and protection. 

But that’s not it. 

Children rely on their parents or caregivers for feedback that they are correctly perceiving realty. Children look to adults to show them how to navigate big feelings. Children need adults to reflect back to them that their world is okay and that they’re okay in it — that they belong, their big feelings are accepted, and that there are ways of getting through challenging moments. 

Typically, adults can only do this for children as much as they can do it for themselves. Ideally, they would have received this kind of care in their childhoods. However, for many parents, they have to look to other adults in adulthood to learn how to take in this kind of care. People who didn’t have the greatest childhoods can make amazing parents. But adults who didn’t have their emotional needs in childhood and never did their own healing work as adults may have a hard time understanding and supporting their children’s emotional worlds.

Parenting isn’t simple, and there’s no such thing as a perfect parent. But what happens when a parent doesn’t just make mistakes, but is unable to help a child feel like they belong in the world — even with their big feelings? 

For some of you, it might mean googling Why Am I Not Good Enough? At 2 AM when you can’t sleep. Or at 3 PM when another work day has passed and it seems like you didn’t accomplish a thing. Or the day after another disappointing date. 

When children are left alone with big feelings, are told their reality is wrong, or are made to feel like they’re just “too sensitive,” they’re left to feel like there is just something fundamentally wrong with them. We have to remember that this isn’t the same thing as an adult disagreeing with another adult. 

You can think of it as if children see themselves as extensions of the adults around them, so when an adult ridicules or minimizes a child’s realty, it can show up in adulthood as a rejection of self.

Why Am I Never Good Enough

…In Dating

Maybe you’ve tried to follow the advice of all the online dating coaches. You’re sure not to appear too available, too cold, or too desperate. You’re positive that you ask great questions and have so much to give, but there’s still a nagging anxiety that it’s not enough. Some days you feel like the right outfit will boost your confidence just enough. But some days it feels like there is something fundamentally wrong with you. 

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire — and the general feeling of not being good enough typically doesn’t start with dating in adulthood. In other words, dating activates the question, “Why Am I Not Good Enough?”, but the seeds may have been planted long ago.

I invite you think back to some of your earliest memories of first experiencing attraction, crushes, or feedback on your desirability. I frequently hear from clients that it feels silly to consider our middle school or high school selves. It can feel like who we were at age 12, 15, or 18 doesn’t impact who we are as adults. Therapists know that this isn’t true — especially if you never got the support you needed to process these painful experiences.

If you’re not feeling like there’s much to remember from this time in your life, scroll back up to read more about connecting to childhood.

Dating is an act of courage and dating requires vulnerability. It’s no wonder that dating brings up insecurities. This is especially true when we are realistic about how powerful discrimination against larger bodies, racism, sexism, and colorism are in the U.S. All of these layers matter, regardless of how someone experienced childhood. We can’t make these cultural problems into strictly individualized emotional issues. Often times negative views of self come to be as a combination of family and childhood pain and cultural pain. 

How to Increase Self-Worth

Here are three steps to increasing self-worth. Each step is full of richness, nuance, and layers. The context around each step belongs to you and is unique to your life. You may have a different way of working with self-compassion and self-worth, and that’s okay. This is one general framework. You can always consult with a licensed mental health professional for support on your own process. In fact, I highly recommend getting professional support during each one of these steps.

1.) Explore root causes

Yes, this means digging into your personal history. Yes, this includes childhood. No, it doesn’t mean you had to have had the worst parents ever or suffered a great trauma. We’re not here to rob you of your joyful memories or to convince you that you felt pain you didn’t feel. 

This step is about reconnecting to the feelings that weren’t safe to previously feel. It’s about putting words to thoughts that haven’t been fully formulated yet. It’s truly an exploration because it isn’t about jumping to conclusions, but rather following your mind where it needs to go. 

2.) Increase compassion for the version of you that experienced those wounds. 

We develop pretty sophisticated defenses, or ways of avoiding pain, that protect us from feeling the impacts of the ways that our needs weren’t met early in life. For many people, this means that it’s pretty difficult to feel a full range of human emotion. It’s difficult to break the cycles of turning our disappointment inwards on ourselves. 

Compassion isn’t a thought, it’s an experience. Thinking you have empathy or compassion for yourself is different from feeling it. It’s so important not to rush through exploring root causes because the more you can understand about past pain, the more opportunities there are to express what you felt and consider how a more compassionate view can provide much needed soothing. Many times, this kinder view comes from a therapist or trusted safe person long before you’re ready to integrate it into your own view. There is no rush. 

3.) Integrate new perceptions of yourself. 

This is where most self-help starts. Affirmation, journaling, and positive thinking are wonderful tools, but aren’t comprehensive treatments. If you’ve tried reading self-help books or following coaching Instagram accounts and haven’t connected with the material, it might be because these tools are most helpful after making it through steps one and two.

For many people, it does take months or years of a good therapeutic relationship to be ready to engage with behaviors like affirmations. Unfortunately, the deeper work is harder to capture in scalable formats like books or courses and that can leave many people feeling frustrated. 

You Are Enough.

You might feel pressure to figure this all out on your own and to just “love yourself” into feeling better. However, it’s often times a fantasy that this is the kind of work we can do alone. It isn’t that therapists have magical answers, but more that we can be with you in the process and figure out the answers together.

The answer to the question Why Am I Not Good Enough truly is, “It Depends.” 

I’m here to help you add compassion, context, and layers to finding the answers that are uniquely yours. If you’re in Michigan or Pennsylvania, you can schedule a free initial consultation here. 

If you’re not in Michigan or Pennsylvania, check out Inclusive Therapists for a licensed mental health professional near you.