Not such a great day.

I'm doing okay, I know that. The people that I encounter to work with all benefit. Given time constraints, family, my own limited energy resources and the room for improvement in my financial resources, I'm blessed, I know.

So why does it hurt to notice that close friends I trained alongside, are achieving so much more? I love that they are happy and purposeful, I love that they are so blessed, I accept that we are all different, that I have other gifts, that their drive and focus and energy and resources are different than mine, and yet after I've thought good things for them, I look at my own development and feel stagnant, stunted, lazy in comparison. It just makes me feel like such a failure. I want to jump for joy on their behalf, hug them and tell them they are so, so lucky; and then I remember it has nothing to do with luck, at all. They did it. I didn't. That's all there is to it. Pointing to luck is just a way to try and absolve myself of responsibility. "Lucky" is what people with a victim-mindset say about those who have worked their nuts off.

This is bringing up so very many names I was called as a child. "You let yourself down, you do, and you let me down. You're such a disappointment, you never finish anything. You could have been X, you could have done Y. You cut your nose off to spite your face you do. You just couldn't listen, could you. You just couldn't buckle down and do what you were told. Never mind, we can't all be high achievers, we can't all have the discipline or the self control; you certainly don't."

Even the kind stuff was conciliatory. I don't think there was ever straightforward praise for an effort or achievement. Even when I got it right, there was always the debriefing attitude - the 'well, next time you could try xyz and then it could be even better'. By memory that idea was supposed to make me happy and fired up to go again.

At least, that's how I remember it. I was being trained to pull myself up by my bootstraps, by a loving mother who had absolute conviction that she was teaching me to shine, but one who had no idea how far off the mark she was in her estimation of my resilience.  I was sensitive. She didn't 'do' sensitive. Sensitivity was an affectation to be stoically ignored until it gave up and went home.

In my childhood I was the moon the stars and everything, allegedly, or at least I was supposed to have been. I just didn't match up. At some point I decided to live down to my reputation, I just forgot to tell myself, and so the angst continued.

My initial training in EFT was the first I'd undertaken in a decade and the first course I'd ever gone on, ever, that inspired me and that I'd planned for and looked forward to. I don't think I'd entered a classroom with such expectation since my first day at infants school.

The training was utterly transformative, it opened a window on another life and was almost a religious experience. Five days of constant energy work and by the end of it I was gobsmacked at my own potential - I'd forgotten I had any.  I even spent a couple of weeks seriously worried that I might have a crush on the trainer. I didn't. I had an overwhelming gratitude and understanding of a level of kindness and acceptance that hadn't touched my radar for years. It somehow felt as if it ought to be immoral to be that happy because of encountering a man with a powerpoint presentation.

That's the thing about really good EFT practitioners. They can't see the mess and limitations that you see from a downtrodden perspective. They see a perfectly good, capable, caring person temporarily side-swiped by a series of heartaches. Recognising that somebody saw that in me was briefly an emotionally confusing experience.

In that nearly-week, as we all went through our own revelations and changes, the women I connected with became my sisters. They will forever hold a place in my heart that is exclusive to them. We each left our own limitations behind and set out in glorious technicolor on the yellow brick road to happy-ever-after, together, side by side.

I guess that somewhere in my mixed up subconscious I correlated that with setting off, arms linked, matching our strides. I guess its to my credit, then, that seeing how they all have skipped so far ahead, I'm not angry or jealous, I don't feel that they left me, instead I feel that I let myself down, dropped the ball, that I could have been still side by side with my heart sisters, but I'm back here at the starting blocks because I'm...... useless.

Yup, some tiny part of me sees every tiny achievement those girls have made, as proof that I am, by comparison, useless.  There is one of our crowd who has positively flown ahead; her rise has been stratospheric and my little node of fear and insecurity weeps in torment at being even-more-completely-and-utterly-useless by comparison. Its all about how I could have, would have, should have; very unhealthy. And then another ECHO/memory throws a hissy fit that 'No I'm not useless, and its all not fair anyway'.  I really am beating myself up.  I know its all irrational and my conscious brain wouldn't choose to endorse either outlook, let alone experience them, but that's the joy of pre-programmed subconscious subroutines. Something small will hit the play button and then they just run, on repeat, and there's not a dang thing you can do about it without some energy healing or energy psychology, such as EFT.

This is in print because I tried working it out verbally by dumping it on a very dear friend, and yet even though she habitually thinks the very best of everybody, I somehow managed to convince her this was jealousy and resentment targeted at another individual. It's not it's not it's not!  Its just the pain of failure, or more specifically the regurgitated re-run pain of never being quite good enough, a long time ago.

I do hope I'm coming down with something, or heading for a menopausal meltdown. It would be so lovely to have something to blame for this coming to a head so forcefully, but maybe its just decided that at my age, its about time I got rid of this misrepresentation.

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