A blog by Alison Gee, psychodynamic psychotherapist
You’ve worked hard, achieved something important and finally reached the goal you’ve been pursuing. Perhaps you’ve been promoted, bought a house, earned a qualification or reached a level of financial security that once seemed unimaginable.
You should feel pleased with yourself. And perhaps, for a little while, you do. But the satisfaction doesn’t last. Almost immediately, your attention turns to what comes next, what you haven’t achieved, or what someone else appears to be doing better.
For some people, this is a familiar pattern. No matter how much they accomplish, there is a persistent feeling that they haven’t quite done enough, or aren’t quite good enough.
It’s easy to explain this as ambition. And ambition isn’t necessarily a problem. Wanting to improve ourselves, develop our abilities and achieve things that matter to us can be enormously rewarding.
But there’s a difference between wanting to succeed and needing to succeed in order to feel worthwhile.
In my work as a psychotherapist, I often meet people who appear confident and accomplished but privately experience considerable self-doubt. They may feel like imposters, convinced that their success is somehow undeserved or that sooner or later they’ll be exposed as less capable than everyone believes.
Others are relentlessly self-critical. They notice their mistakes far more readily than their achievements, dismiss compliments and compare themselves unfavourably with people around them. Even when they succeed, the internal pressure rarely lets up.
Why might this happen?
One possibility lies in the relationship between achievement and approval during childhood.
Some children grow up feeling valued and accepted for who they are, regardless of how well they perform. Others may experience love, attention or recognition as being closely connected to their achievements, behaviour or ability to meet the expectations of important adults.
Sometimes these expectations are explicit. A parent may place enormous emphasis on academic success, sporting achievement or getting into the right school. In other families, the pressure is less obvious. A child may sense that being successful, responsible or undemanding makes their parents happy, while struggling or expressing difficult feelings creates disappointment.
Over time, a child can come to believe that being good enough depends on doing well enough.
These beliefs don’t necessarily disappear when we become adults. They can become part of how we judge ourselves, often without our being aware of it.
We may no longer have a demanding parent standing over us, but we carry an equally demanding voice inside our own heads. We set increasingly high standards, punish ourselves for falling short and struggle to enjoy what we’ve achieved.
Success can become an attempt to secure something that never felt entirely certain in childhood: the feeling that we are valued, accepted and enough as we are.
The problem is that external achievements are rarely able to satisfy an internal need of this kind. Each new accomplishment may provide temporary reassurance, but the underlying doubt remains. Before long, another goal takes its place.
There can also be a more uncomfortable aspect to success. For some people, doing well brings feelings of guilt or anxiety. They may worry about surpassing their parents, becoming different from their family or attracting resentment from others. Success itself can feel threatening, even when it’s something they’ve worked hard to achieve.
None of this means that ambition is unhealthy or that successful people are necessarily driven by childhood difficulties. The question is whether achievement feels like something we freely pursue or something we must continually deliver to feel acceptable.
Psychotherapy can help us explore that distinction.
By understanding where our expectations of ourselves come from, whose approval we may still be seeking and why our achievements never seem sufficient, we can begin to loosen the hold of those old beliefs.
That doesn’t mean abandoning ambition or settling for less. It means becoming more able to choose what matters to us, rather than feeling compelled to prove our worth through what we accomplish.
Perhaps the most meaningful change is discovering that we can enjoy success without depending on it to tell us who we are.
The author, Alison Gee, is a psychotherapist.
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