Feelings Of Inadequacy During Childhood Development

• The mind is very impressionable during childhood development.
• Negative experiences during childhood development can create feelings of inadequacy.
• Negative beliefs can be hard to change because they are self reinforcing.

As a child you probably experienced a time in your life when you were told that you weren’t good enough, or didn’t do something well enough.

Sometimes you would hear this from your parents, who out of anger or disappointment would say something hurtful to you.

Other times it would come from your classmates, who would say things like “you’re not cool enough to hang around with us, go away nobody likes you”.

Whilst this form of rejection would be damaging to anyone’s self esteem, it is even more hurtful and harmful when it occurs during childhood development.

One of the main reasons why this is the case, is because young children are highly susceptible to suggestion.

Emotional Susceptibility During Child Development

Unlike an adult who has already lived for many years, a child has very limited life experience, and therefore their knowledge of the world is also limited.

The result of this inexperience is that children have a natural tendency to believe what other people tell them. For the simple reason that they have not acquired enough information about the world to argue against it or reject it.

This is why during child development anything is possible for a child, and also why they have such a vivid imagination.

However as the child continues to develop and society begins to impose restrictions on their beliefs (by telling them what is real/not real, right/wrong) their imagination, creativity and open mindedness gradually begins to decrease.

A good example of this can be seen with children who believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny.

Since the child has been told by their parents these things are real, they continue to believe in these magical figures until someone tells them they do not really exist.

Negative Beliefs & Child Development

Not all beliefs however are as innocent as believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, especially if those beliefs are associated with a strong negative emotion such as fear.

For example, a child who is scared of the dark because they think the “bogeyman” will get them, will eventually reject this belief when they learn the bogeyman is not real.

However despite the fact that they no longer believe in the bogeyman, in the subconscious mind of the child, darkness and fear have now been associated together.

As a result, this child may continue to fear the dark into their teens, or even as an adult.

Negative Emotions During Childhood Development

This exact same principle applies to all our childhood experiences, such as those where we were told by others that we weren’t good enough.

These negative statements which subsequently generate a negative feeling within us, become stored as emotional memories in the subconscious.

Later whenever something triggers those memories, we automatically feel the feeling associated with that emotional memory.

For example, suppose when you were a child you failed to do something. As a result of your failure, you were then made to feel inadequate by another person.

For example, they may have said “you’re hopeless”, “you’re good for nothing”, “you can’t do anything right” etc…

Since your child mind is still very impressionable, you accept that you are “good for nothing” because of what you failed to do.

This acceptance then results in the creation of a subconscious emotional memory, where failure becomes linked to feelings of inadequacy.

This memory will also become part of your belief system, which will then influence how you see yourself and the world you live in.

Once this negative childhood experience has been stored in your subconscious, it will continue to affect you for the rest of your life (unless it is resolved).

For example, since you now believe you are good for nothing you expect to fail, and so miss out on many opportunities in life because you did not go after them.

Or if you do experience some kind of failure in your life, your subconscious feelings of inadequacy are reactivated, which make you feel like you’re good for nothing.

Note : As a general rule, your negative subconsciously stored emotional memory will affect you whenever anything occurs in your present that is similar to your stored memory of the past.

The Reinforcement Of Negative Beliefs

As you can see from the above example, in both cases the negative subconscious belief which was created as a result of a negative childhood experience is self reinforcing. Which means that the negative belief grows stronger by itself.

Overcoming this belief can be difficult, because it has been stored in your subconscious since you were a child. So even though you may say to yourself “I can do this” or “I am not a failure”, your subconsciously stored emotional memory will continue to make you feel inadequate.

This is an extremely important point to recognise, because your emotions and the feelings you experience as a result of them, are a very powerful motivator of human behaviour.

So powerful that they can cause you to automatically do things you don’t really want to do. For example, if you are very angry you might hit someone, but later regret doing it.

Essentially what this means is that your subconscious emotional memories can dominate your conscious thought processes, causing you to feel a negative emotion when you are trying to feel a positive emotion.

So even though you may be trying to think and feel confident, your emotional memories continue to make you feel inadequate.

Another important point to recognise about emotions is that the subconscious tends to place greater value on two types of information:

1) Powerfully charged emotions
2) Frequently entered information

Since people tend to think about their negative beliefs a lot, and experience emotional discomfort from them, this self reinforcing nature can make it very hard to remove them.

Note : Whilst most of your subconscious emotional memories are created during early childhood development, they can also be created later in life, especially during your teens and less frequently in adulthood.