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Recently, a New York Times article—“America’s Hidden Racial Divide: A Mysterious Gap in Psychosis Rates”—reported on the work of Deidre Anglin, who had “spearheaded much of the past decade’s research on racial disparities and psychosis….Anglin, who is 48 and a professor of clinical psychology at the City University of New York, has published a flurry of papers with titles like ‘Racial Discrimination Is Associated With Distressing Subthreshold Positive Psychotic Symptoms Among U.S. Urban Ethnic Minority Young Adults.’”
Whenever I read or hear about someone in my field who is significantly younger than me—or even around my age—and has accomplished so much more, I feel incredibly inadequate. I can’t help but think, What did I do wrong?
And then I remember. Duh! Three decades of your life were spent consumed by severe mental illness. But then I tell myself that I should have accomplished more in the last nine years since I terminated therapy with my psychiatrist. I haven’t been hospitalized in over 10 years. What have I done since then that is significant? That is comparable to Anglin? I recently went to a literary reading with a friend. A young woman with an impressive biography read an excerpt from her memoir. I thought, I will never write like she can, so why am I trying? Why am I continuing in this pursuit of fooling myself?
I have difficulty accepting that my accomplishments are good enough, given the challenges I’ve endured. But other people don’t know the challenges you’ve encountered, and they think you’re a failure, I tell myself.
For instance, maybe I should be a supervisor now with a substantial amount of experience in that role, but I’m still a staff psychotherapist. I often think that my new colleagues must wonder why. Or maybe I’m overestimating the amount of time they spend thinking, Why isn’t Andrea a supervisor?
A post by Leon Seltzer on unconditional self-acceptance nails this. He writes: “Unless, again, you’re employing standards external to yourself to determine whether you ‘make the grade’—an intrinsically comparative concept that can easily entrap you and stifle your native creativity. If you want to virtually guarantee yourself a life of frustration, of endless seeking and striving, you’ll keep setting the bar higher for yourself.”
The question remains: Why can’t I accept myself where I am regardless of where other people are and what they have achieved? I tell my clients all the time that it’s not helpful to compare. I would do well to heed my own advice.
In another post, Julia DiGangi writes, “Unconditional worthiness has become so popularized it’s easy to forget what it means. It means that the Self determines … worth regardless of the condition.”
I don’t know how to do this. I believe I learned to negate my achievements from my mother. When she got her first programming job after updating her coding skills following her divorce from my father, she worked at a firm that facilitated focus groups. After six months, she received her first performance review. After not getting all “excellents,” she quit and started her custom software development firm. This all took place when I was still in college. She was such a powerful role model for me, in the absence of an alcoholic father, that I tucked this scenario handily away in my unconscious as a bar to measure up to for a lifetime.
Fast forward to my first review period at my new job and I’m panicking. First, management is asking us to complete a self-assessment. I hate those. “What are your strengths? What areas do you need improvement in?
At the same time, the powers-that-be are rolling out what they call a “dashboard” for each clinician. This will enable us to view a myriad of data that will show us at-a-glance such statistics as our productivity, our retention, our clients’ cancellations, and more.
I haven’t had my introduction-to-the-dashboard meeting yet. I’m going into this review with only my weekly productivity numbers which are accessible from another spreadsheet. Those numbers are on the borderline of acceptable. For the first four weeks of November, for example (not counting Thanksgiving week), my productivity is 89 percent. I believe management’s gold standard is ninety percent.
I know that I’ve discharged many clients for various reasons. Some have decided they’d rather see an in-person therapist, some have changed insurance, some decided I was not a good fit, some didn’t want to continue therapy any longer and some just stopped coming without communicating why. Regardless of the reason, too many terminations are not considered an indication of effective therapy.
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All this says to me I am not good enough, and that my review will be in the toilet. But as DiGangi writes, “Remember: Your brain is brilliant, and the overwhelming majority of its spectacular work is done outside of your conscious awareness. This is protective because the awareness that ‘I am only conditionally worthy’ can be so painful [that] frightening your brain often tucks it away into its unconscious recesses.”
I’ll try to keep this in mind.
