How My Parents Caused Me to Lose Confidence
For most of my lifetime, I was a people pleaser. I had trouble saying no. Other people would take advantage of me. I had low self-esteem and had trouble socializing. It took me over 30 years to realize the main cause of all these problems — my parents. If you can relate to my situation, read along…
Telling Me I’m Ungrateful and Lazy
Let’s look at a model situation from the life of my 10 year old self. One day, my parents called me from work and asked me to do the dishes. I agreed. But for some reason, I didn’t do it right away. I don’t remember why exactly. Maybe I already had plans to hang out with my friends. Or I was just playing games on the computer. Maybe I was even working on your homework. I told myself that I had plenty of time. But then, I got distracted. I’ve spent too much time on the other activity, or I simply forgot about the dishes.
When my parents came home and walked into the kitchen, they saw a sink full of nasty dirty dishes. Perhaps understandingly, they got upset. They told me: “Why didn’t you do the dishes? We put a roof over your head, we feed you, we take care of you. All we ask for is that you help a little around the house. But no, you didn’t even take 10 minutes to do the dishes. Is that really too much to ask for? You know what you are? You are ungrateful. You are lazy. And you are selfish!“
They may have not said the last things so bluntly, but it was certainly how I felt when my parents disapproved of me this way.
Learning From Our Environment
As children, we are trying to learn as much as we can about the world around us and how it works. We are learning from your parents, close family members, our teachers, our friends. We view our parents as an authority. After all, they are adults. They have jobs and they provide for us. And we are just kids. We don’t know how the world works and we are unable to take care of yourselves…
If our parents get upset about the dishes, we are thinking: “They are right. They do take care of me. And they just wanted me to do 1 small thing. Instead of doing it, I just found excuses. I guess I am lazy and ungrateful. I don’t deserve them. I’m just a terrible selfish human being. I don’t deserve to be loved.“
I realize this may look crazy from an outsider perspective. You may have never had these thoughts. At least not consciously. But if these kinds of situations keep repeating throughout our childhood, and our parents keep telling us what a bad person we are, we will believe them. Over the years, these thoughts get programmed into our subconscious mind. We will actually view ourselves as terrible people.
Compensating by People Pleasing
OK so you believed I was a bad person. But I still had to interact with the world. I needed my parents to love me and to take care of me in order to survive. I wanted to have friends and a girlfriend. Later on, I wanted to have good relationships at my workplace, etc. But how could people like me if I’m such a bad person?
Simple, I just had to find some way to compensate for it. Some of the things I did to compensate for being a bad human being were:
- Always putting others before myself
- Seeking approval of others
- Always agreeing with people (being afraid of disagreeing)
- Never saying “no”
- Always offering to help (even if it wasn’t convenient for me)
- Needing to always make jokes and/or entertain (being a class clown)
- Trying to impress others with my skills
- Tolerating inappropriate behavior towards me (inability to set boundaries)
The Toll This Took on My Life
When I was exhibiting these behaviors, people would be taking advantage of me. I’d go above and beyond to make everyone around me happy. And I thought that they would feel the same way and I expected them to do the same for me. But when the time came for them to return the favor, they declined. Consequently I was feeling disappointed, hurt, and resentful.
The worst part was, that people appreciate appreciate nor respect me. They could sense my low self-esteem and the fact that I was compensating. If I didn’t respect myself, why should they respect me?
Even when I managed to build some relationships, I could never be sure they are legit. Most of my “friends” were just hanging out with me because of the benefits they were getting out of it. They didn’t really “like me for me”. They were using me as a doormat. This off course doesn’t mean that everyone was just using me (there were exceptions), but it’s an interesting thing to think about. Which of your friends are actually your “real” friends?
Forgiving My Parents
When I realized this, the first thing I felt was resentment towards my parents. After all, how could they ruin my life like this? But then I realized they didn’t do it on purpose. They were just subconsciously doing what they learned from their parents, without realizing the consequences. They didn’t have access to so many amazing resources as I had — books, websites, videos, courses, etc. Trauma is passed from generation to generation. If I didn’t realize this and proactively change it, you would’ve most likely pass the same trauma onto my own children.
How Can We Fix This?
If you’ve read all the way here, there is a high chance that you’ve recognized some of the described patterns in your own life. The good news is that you’re already on the right path. Just by becoming aware of these behaviors enables you to make a conscious decision to eliminate them from your life.
However, it can often be really hard to change our behavior, especially if we’re used to acting like this our whole life. Fixing the damage is a long-term process. But it definitely can be done. I’m a living example. What really helped me through this process is an online video course called Transformation Mastery by Julien Blanc. You can read my review of Transformation Mastery here.
