My family has a home video of me at nine years of age taken on Christmas Eve in which I tell one of my sisters they are going to be in big trouble if they don’t behave. I had a heavy lisp as a kid, and the clip is a serious source of laughter and has become somewhat of a catchphrase whenever memories of our childhoods are revisited.

Something happens between childhood and adulthood where our naive and eager desire to be unconditionally connected to our family and to spontaneously make friends becomes heavily censored. After enough disappointment, heartache, and pain we begin to feel like there are more reasons not to share ourselves with others than there are reasons we are worth loving, even though our need to be loved is not equally diminished, and we often find ourselves at crossroads struggling to make those connections we desire while also censoring ourselves sufficiently to avoid betraying our darker natures.

Many of us experience feelings of shame which are distinctly connected to our relationships with other people. Mistakes, even when they are accidental, often drive us into deep self-loathing or embarrassment, and we can find ourselves disconnecting even from people we don’t want to abandon, feeling like we have imperiled our relationship or their opinion of us, even if unspoken, this assumption that the world is very near to perceiving us the failure that we perceive ourselves. Most of my adult life I was ravaged by shame and self-hatred, even though I strove to do my best in everything I undertook. My brain was certain that I was a horrible, talentless, tactless imbecile who could not do anything right, and my failures and mistakes only ever reinforced this insecurity. When I would not get hired after job interviews, or get rejected by a romantic interest, or say something dumb at a party or in conversation with a potential new friend and betray myself to be the boring, insecure person I was I would feel like hiding away from everything and everyone, only to yearn for those connections I seemed to keep messing up through my own inept behavior.

Once when I was in my late twenties and deep in my alcoholism I went to a work party with a beautiful, talented coworker whom I really wanted to be friends. Overcome with nervous anxiety I drank even more than I usually did, and on the drive home it was apparent how absolutely inebriated I actually was. After we left the party and got back to her house she insisted I not drive home, but I only lived a few blocks away and was so embarrassed at being drunk that I wrongly insisted I should, and unfortunately did. After sobering up I was even more embarrassed that I had driven drunk, and feeling insecure then unintentionally shut down all further attempts to befriend her, my deep shame at who I was and what I had done overcoming my need to make real friendships and connections.

But not all my indiscretions were so conspicuous. A potential friend once saw the wallpaper of my work computer which featured Galactus, the World Eater, from Marvel comics. He mentioned it and instead of seeing this person as someone who was trying to be friends with me, I insisted the character was called something slightly different, which I had heard from another person also saying it wrong. He kindly didn’t acknowledge my error, and later when I realized I was wrong was so embarrassed about being a dick and pedantic that I also avoided other interactions with him.

When these kinds of interpersonal conflicts occur within already established relationships such as those which are romantic in nature or with siblings or even parents they begin to accumulate and can become a wedge which drives apart once hopeful and intimate bonds. In a past significant relationship my ex repeatedly cheated on me, but it wasn’t actually his indiscretions which ended up driving us apart, but his shame at his own behavior which he was constantly afraid of being discovered, so he would similarly withhold himself from connecting to me during our courtship, which eventually became a sterile and gross mischaracterization of who we were to each other. But I would do this same thing to other partners who maybe didn’t call for a few days or who weren’t emotionally available on a date, thinking for sure it was a sign they had soured on me for one of the many reasons I felt myself unlovable and instead of having empathy for their own stress became paranoid about my own.

We often preemptively withdraw from relationships, consciously or otherwise, when the stress of our insecurities become too great to bear, and which can be further amplified when we do make real mistakes. Two family members at various times stole from me, and though I tried to maintain those relationships in spite of their offense, because they were important to me, both withdrew because my presence constantly reminded them of what they had done, hurting me not once but twice, and more profoundly by their withdrawal than the actual theft, which I honestly didn’t care about. Often we actively hurt people as a defensive mechanism, such as another relative who felt insecure about refusing to read my books from a misplaced sense of religious devotion would descend into unprompted, aggressive hysterics each time we got together to the point I had to end our relationship. I have also quite often been treated with enmity by people who wanted to date me but I was not interested turned around and said horrible things about me and disparaged my character (and still do) though there is nothing wrong at all with being uninterested in someone, themselves in turn hurting someone they supposedly wanted to care for and missing out on a good friendship which might have also led to other tangential romantic encounters and opportunities. Very often our professional success can also be impaired by such self-defeating insecurities, for instance a young man with whom I worked on a video game project who was so imperiled by his inability to meet his own expectations he stressed himself out to the point of abandoning our project (and no amount of praise or encouragement on my part helped). This can be even more difficult when bosses or jobs are actually stressful, their behavior compounding our own lack of confidence to the point of being unable to handle it, and I moved on even from good jobs in the past because I also could not handle both my insecurity and the triggers of it in my environment (some jobs really are abusive, though, and should be handily abandoned).

Why do we sabotage ourselves when what we need most is to have close relationships and people who love us in spite of our mistakes, or job opportunities or other materially or emotionally beneficial relationships?

The short answer is our mothers. When we are children we are especially vulnerable to emotional manipulation, and having no ability to erect healthy interpersonal boundaries are distinctly affected by the parenting strategies that our moms or dads use to navigate the challenges of parenthood. Most parents have never gotten good training in the job, and were in fact abused in the very same way by their own parents that they in turn use on us, because these are actually adaptive human survival instincts which drive human nature and the result of millions of years of evolution. When children are neglected or abused this triggers coping mechanisms which are meant to help a child survive in the harsh world of adulthood, if it is harsh, and since other human beings are often the very barriers to getting what we need for survival these coping mechanisms are above all designed to help us survive each other. These instincts can often be apparently self-defeating too, especially those to withdraw and isolate, as they are characteristics of human nature which are meant to promote survival of the human species as a whole at our individual expense, to motivate self-removal from others in order to either protect ourselves or to protect the group from us. Often, obesity and other health problems also result from such self-defeating behavior and emotional isolation because the disconnect from other humans raises stress hormones which in turn promote retention of nutrients because the body perceives us to be isolated and without the support of the group thus at greater risk of resource deficiency (this is one of the reasons why one or both partners in a dysfunctional romantic relationship will also gain weight, as a survival mechanism against emotional isolation).

Specifically, the self-debasement and shame that we feel during insecurity is a direct result of parents who were exploitively and opportunistically disciplinary. Having been reared by emotionally unstable adults themselves, parents who cannot care for their own needs nor emotionally handle the unpredictability and otherness of parenting a child (let alone several of them) become hypervigilant for any and all potential conflict, disobedience, or inconvenience. This takes the form of anticipating tantrums, anger, yelling, screaming, throwing, biting to the point that parents actually anticipate and see these behaviors even when they don’t occur, never mind that it’s fine when they do and children are not bad for being angry, but parents who were taught that being angry is wrong in turn see their angry children as wrong, and even our very emotions got punished as children if they were not in compliance with what our emotionally damaged parents expected. Parents who were themselves severely abused as children will also use their role as parents to indulge their emotional volatility and exploit even innocent and altruistic characteristics of children in order to subjugate and control their environment, for instance harassing and threatening children about sexuality, bodies, singing, sharing, eating, hunger, or any other human trait which can be exploited. Because we have no life experience nor skills to protect ourselves against exploitative human adults, we as children are then convinced that our abuse is our own fault, parents often even explicitly or implicitly telling us as much, that it was our fault we got hit, or thrown out of the house, or had horrible things yelled and screamed at us. Then when we become adults who are savaged by the intense personal insecurities and ineptitude caused by such extreme abuse continue believing it is our fault that bad things happen to us, and mistakes and other wrongs are simply damning evidence of our worthlessness. We then consciously or unconsciously distance ourselves from those relationships which would be damaged anyway by our perceived shortcomings, further harming our own needs and driving away the very people we need and want.

The real problem with such self-defeating conceptions of ourselves, our individual worth, and our relationships with other humans is that we are also taught by these same people and communities who harmed us that the way to improve upon this situation is to change your mindset and try not to fail. This absolutely does not work because it is not our mindset which is wrong, and none of us can avoid making mistakes or failing in life. What is wrong is that we are still traumatized by our experiences, and trauma cannot be resolved by willfully changing your opinion of the trauma. Self-will and asserting our will on the environment is the very thing which caused our abuse in the first place. It is the antithesis of self-care and healing. In order to heal the self-defeating attitudes caused by abuse, neglect, and disappointment of our pasts we must turn inward and explore exactly how the abused caused us to adopt these defensive and coping mechanisms in the first place. Without understanding who we really are and how we were shaped by our experiences we cannot then have compassion for ourselves and our experiences, which is ultimately what we lack—self compassion. Self-pity is not the same as self-compassion, however, and because you probably were not shown any compassion as a child you do not actually know what it is, and mistake the abundance of self-pity you feel as compassion, but it is not the same. But neither is self-pity detestable—that too is a conception wrought by narcissistic abusers who despise weakness in others because they despise it in themselves. Self-pity is in reality the coping mechanism we adopt when compassion is not forthcoming from our environment. Children who are lucky to grow up in healthy homes and are not burdened with abuse have an abundance of compassion shown to them as children, so they know it for themselves. Self-pity is a way to find worth for ourselves when no one else does. But self-pity is derived from what happens to us, and is not about who were are intrinsically as a human individual, and as such it can never replace compassion because compassion is centered on our innate value as a person, without regard to what happens to us. Because self-pity is also a defensive survival mechanism it also ignores our own culpability in our behavior, because we perceive our mistakes as justification for our own abuse or suffering, directly contradicting compassion, where compassion knows we have intrinsic value in spite of our mistakes and thus facilitates self-empowerment.

It is not possible to resolve the unconscious effects of trauma and abuse by changing your attitude. Such ideas are the product of manipulative and exploitive abusers who wish you to stay vulnerable and exploitable. Instead, the resolution of self-defeating behaviors and adopting real confidence comes from measured practice and self-inquiry as instructed by my new book, The Perfect Child, which teaches the reader specific skills to explore trauma and our past and resolve its effects on our lives. As a guide for overcoming trauma it teaches empowerment and short-circuits the tragic cycle of intergenerational trauma, but best of all it can help you learn who you really are as a person, which is not a product of your mistakes and shortcomings but the intrinsically wonderful and beautiful person you started out as, when you were a child. You might also, like myself, come to discover that the things you’ve done weren’t actually all that bad, and many times actually kind of funny (I mean, really, why was I such a dick?), and that you actually have far more positive attributes than you were ever aware.

If you can’t afford a copy of The Perfect Child, you might like to read my articles on How To Cure Depression, It’s Okay To Be Half a Person, or Salvaging Personal Relationships.