To have an insecurity is to pretend not to have it

The self-perpetuating loop of insecurities

It is hard to say you really know someone until you know how they wince around their wounds. Our lives are shaped by our insecurities like plaster in a mold. To know what hurts you is to know what controls you, what organizes your attention, what distorts your behavior, what you move towards, and what you avoid.

Insecurities can be surprisingly persistent. A kid in second grade can make a comment about your weight and you could spend decades thinking about it. You could be a world-class figure skater and still feel like you’re so-so despite the accolades. Insecurities seem immune to the passage of time, and can even be delusionally detached from reality.

To understand why this happens, we have to understand what an insecurity is and how it forms.

An insecurity is a comparative judgement that you believe reflects on your worth. It is believing that you are “too much” or “not enough” in some regard, compared to other people or an external standard that you have internalized. But this alone is not enough to make an insecurity. You have to also believe that this somehow makes you less deserving of love.

These two parts, the evaluative component and worth component, are both required. Taken alone they are innocuous: you can be bad at cooking but feel no shame over it, because you don’t hold the expectation that you should be good at it, or that being bad at cooking says anything about you. On the other hand, simply being told you are “undeserving of love” doesn’t really mean anything without some rationale: it is always that you are undeserving of love because of your being “dumb,” or “short,” or “too sensitive”—which sticks to your mind and stings.

Insecurities can form from conditional approval or shameful experiences. Conditional approval teaches you to jump through certain hoops for validation, and feel ashamed when you fall short. But being explicitly shamed can be even worse because there may be nothing you can “do” about it. You don’t even know how it feels to experience the win condition. You only know that how you are is wrong.

This is usually instilled by someone you trust to have knowledge or authority you lack. For most kids that means their parents, but it can also be someone you respect in a particular domain, or even the broader culture.

Insecurities form by installing external judges/evaluators because you think they’re better judges than you and you want to maximize your chances of getting love and acceptance from your tribe. They may not even be right, but you believed them. Somewhere along the way, you trusted someone’s judgement over your own and inferred it said something about your worth as a human being.

Insecurities have a way of sharpening and organizing your attention. You can become vigilant, scanning the room to compare yourself against other people or against a harsh internal standard. Or, you can go out of your way to avoid comparison entirely—getting lost in perfectionism and never sharing your work because you may be exposed as not talented or skilled, or avoiding parties because you can’t stand the possibility of rejection.

This avoidance can create a self-perpetuating loop: by avoiding situations where the insecurity may be exposed, you close yourself off from ever receiving contradictory information and updating your understanding. In some cases the shame is so overwhelming that you can’t internally reflect on or investigate it. Your belief in your own unworthiness becomes hermetically sealed.

Another way insecurities can self-perpetuate is by compelling you to seek out and re-enact scenarios where you can prove you don’t have that insecurity. For example, a girl who is insecure about her appearance may repeatedly enter beauty pageants in an attempt to prove that she is beautiful. She may win them, but the more she participates the more she entrenches the belief that her beauty is something that needs proving.

I lost years to this compulsion by choosing the wrong school. I went to Wharton, but I didn’t care about business. I just wanted my credentials to provide me with the sense of worth I felt I lacked. I felt that if I chose the most arbitrarily prestigious environment and excelled in it, my competence would then be undeniable. But no matter how hard I worked, there was no winning.

The main thing I learned going to Wharton was how disappointing a life optimized around prestige was. The people I envied the most weren’t the ones with the most impressive grades or job offers, but the ones who genuinely enjoyed what they were doing for the sake of it. I didn’t know how to live like that. I was raised to believe that achievement would be the vehicle for my happiness and freedom, and spent the first half of college chasing clubs and communities and competitions. They kept me so busy I forgot I was operating within the frame of needing to prove I deserved to be there.

From the inside, it did not look like insecurity. It looked like ambition, or conscientiousness. It looked admirable. I eventually exited the rat race and spent years untangling my identity from achievement, but what scares me is that I could have kept playing that game.

You’re stuck in the self-perpetuating loop as long as you believe you have something to prove. You can get so busy trying to win at this game that you forget the frame you are operating within—the frame that you are not enough as you are. But you can challenge this.

Ask: Where did I get the idea that I’m not good enough because of XYZ? Who is speaking when I feel that way? Is it my coach, my mom, my ex? Are they right? Which part? The evaluative part, or the worth part? Do I actually want to be doing this, or am I just doing this because succeeding will say something about me?

Both strategies of avoidance and re-enactment are ways of refusing to look at an insecurity. We’d rather tuck it away or chase temporary proof in an attempt to convince ourselves it doesn’t exist. If these worked, the insecurity would have disappeared long ago. But you cannot change something you never touch.