You don’t mind making enemies
When your opinion differs from another person’s, you need to put them down by shaming, teasing, showing hatred towards, or forcefully persuading them to think and do like you. It’s your way or the highway. Furthermore, when conflicts arise, you think that the other person should be the one to say sorry first.
You need to see yourself as “above others” to feel okay about yourself
As you are, you’re nothing much. So one of your subconscious strategies to feel alive is grandiosity. You’re special. For example, you don’t see the need to apologize for any role you’ve played in a misunderstanding or to listen to what others have to say. And yes, avoiding conflicts also counts as you not wanting to hear what others have to say.
You believe you don’t need therapy
You believe this because you also believe that you’re not allowed to break down, feel helpless…and you might even believe you’re not capable of affecting others negatively, which brings me to my next little sign of poor mental health…
You won’t let yourself feel
We all experience things; things happen to us and we always have a response to it but you stifle it because you’ve learned that feelings make us weak, are dangerous, and unbearable. Not true, not true, and not true. Feelings come and go and are kind of like data that hint at what we need to do differently to do better in life.
You are mostly angry and worried instead of sad
Perhaps due to a mix of developmental trauma and modeling of your early caregivers, you may hold on to anger, fear, and shame whenever something does not go your way. Sadness and hurt are buried deep inside and unacknowledged because it would hurt to feel hurt. [But feeling hurt is okay, just remember that whatever happened was out of your control and does not define you.]
You explain things away
By things I mean feelings and any situation that’s confusing and ambivalent. You rationalize, analyze, use “logic and common sense” and stay in your head as if it has the ultimate answers. Sure it makes sense to find out why you’re sad, but sometimes there’s no perfect, accurate explanation as to why you’re feeling frozen, disgusted, and ashamed. That’s why there’s this thing called “staying with the feeling” in Gestalt therapy.
You see other people as people but not you
At the end of the day, when making decisions, your opinions don’t count as much as your parents’ and your friends’. They know what you need, you don’t. You feel scared and that something terrible would happen if you were to trust your perspective of what you need.
You do things out of fear, guilt or wanting to prove to others
Instead of doing something out of love, compassion, or genuine interest, you do something mainly to feel relieved of fear or guilt or shame or specifically the fear of being seen as nothing/weak by others. For instance, do you strive towards something at your job as a way to prove to certain people that you’re worth something?
