Good Enough for God?

I’m working on these old beliefs and these “voices” that try to convince me that I am not good enough and that I will be abandoned. Using the tools of Cognitive Therapy helps a lot. And the Tapping (see the January 7 2009 entry) helps too. I know that this new work could only have come after some sobriety because I get to see what’s really behind the “ism”.

I have been working Step Two—asking God to restore me to sanity. These old persistent beliefs –schema in cognitive therapy talk--certainly are a kind of insanity. Today I realized that one of the problems is that my fear that I am not good enough applies not just to how I am in relationships but also with God. I think that I even fear that I am not good enough for God. Other people will be restored to sanity but not me? Other people will be healed but not me? Here is the real pain of these old beliefs. They interfere not only with friends, lovers and family but they attempt to cut me off from God as well.

My solution then has to come from God. To take this fear and this old belief and say—as I would in any important relationship---“my head is trying to convince me that I’m not good enough for you, and these old deep beliefs want me to believe I can't have your care for my life, so we gotta talk about this.”

This is certainly one of the things I cannot fix myself. This is where I turn to the 7th step prayer: “…remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows.”

I assure you, all of the fellows in my life have been affected by my schema/old beliefs/defects of character.