Why Am I So Insecure?

Insecurity sucks. There seems to be no escaping that one area of your life where insecurity lives. Generally, there are inner parts of yourself that you feel very confident about and others where you don’t.

You might be very secure in your career, like Jennifer Aniston, but not in your appearance. Or maybe you feel insecure about your abilities to make good choices but very confident in the way you look. It can be a mixed bag when it comes to insecurities and confidence issues.

We might tend to say, “Jennifer Aniston, what does she have to be insecure about?”

The thing is, different people and situations do trigger deep insecurities for all of us, including people you think have no reason to feel that way.

Dating someone we might put on a pedestal or who gets a lot of attention can cause us to feel less than in comparison. Or, the person may not be one to offer quick compliments, which in turn, leads to us questioning our appearance.

Why am I so insecure?

Regardless as to what might trigger our current insecurity, the real question is, where is this feeling coming from to begin with?

We might tell ourselves to get over it. We might tell ourselves positive things. We might get a new hairdo or makeover in hopes of avoiding insecurity. But, at the end of the day, we are still left feeling less-than.

If you spend any time on Facebook, you will find yourself surrounded by selfies. If you don’t know what a selfie is, it is a picture you take of yourself and post online, send to your friends and so on.

On my daughter’s Facebook, every selfie is liked by her friends who tell her how beautiful she is. Then she replies, “Naw”, and tells them how much more beautiful they are. Over and over. Men and women do the same thing.

People are so insecure about the way they look that they need to take picture after picture, attempting to prove to themselves that they look good. Ultimately, they are still left feeling like they’re not good enough and start the next day with a new and improved “selfie”.

Why wouldn’t it be enough to have your friends say how beautiful you are? I assert that you don’t want to believe them. If you believed them, there would nothing to keep you from feeling wonderful and secure and no reason to keep fishing for compliments just to reject them.

What is keeping us from wanting to let go of our insecurities?

As much as we say we hate feeling insecure, there is something in us that feeds on it. If there weren’t, we would choose to internalize the compliments, reject our negative beliefs and not compare ourselves to others.

This feeling of insecurity is really a rejection of yourself. Someone can give you a compliment and you immediately reject it with an excuse, instead of just saying thank you. You have just rejected yourself.

So where does this need of rejection come from?

In most cases it comes from feeling rejected as a child. It could be that someone in your family, usually a parent, didn’t meet your needs, or that another sibling got all the attention. This would leave a child to feel unimportant and rejected. How a child interprets this rejection determines how the insecurity gets labeled.

Maybe you felt that if you were better at sports like your brother, your parents would have paid more attention to you. This might cause a lack of confidence in your abilities.

Perhaps you felt that if you were prettier like your sister, you would have gotten the attention she did. This might cause a lack of confidence in your appearance.

If your parents always corrected you, you probably grew up feeling like you couldn’t do anything right. As an adult this could cause you to have a lack of confidence in your decisions and possibly yourself as a whole.

And it can go the other way to. If you got attention from your parents as long as you got straight A’s, you might become a perfectionist, which is a form of rejection as well.

You can see how easily these thoughts get carried into adulthood. That is obvious. The not so obvious part is how to stop rejecting ourselves.

We call this chronic rejection in our lives a “rejection attachment.”

We become so attached to feeling rejected that we are unable to stop doing it. It’s like an addiction. There is something in us that enjoys this feeling, Otherwise we would stop the behavior. It’s like a bruise that we push on even though we know it will hurt.

We unwittingly do things all day long that result in us getting exactly what we don’t want…rejection.

Here is a good test to see if you have a rejection attachment.

Each day, keep a little journal of everything you feel rejected by.

Write down what preceded the rejection feeling. Was it something you thought? Was it something you said? What it is a situation you put yourself in?

Then at the end of the day, think what would have happened had you not done those things. What would your day have been like?

After that, ask yourself if you really want to be done rejecting yourself and have the day you could have had.

The iNLP Center is proud to offer our new book, Your Achilles Eel!

Or, read more about Your Achilles Eel.