How do I move forward when everything around isn’t changing?

Hello,

When we are feeling stuck, change feels impossible because we don't know what to change to make it better. Therapy can help with this. I can hear that you feel there are difficulties relating to your ability to feel confident in your relationships, leading to self doubt about your ability to relate to other people and to feel confident that you are able to maintain important beliefs about yourself and your abilities in life.  When put down as a child, the messages received at the time stay with us, and impact our adult lives in negative ways. This can manifest itself, for example, as anxiety, which might appear as expressing or withholding emotions in a way that is unhealthy, destructive and negative in the thoughts and feelings we have toward ourselves and other people. They respond in ways that may make us feel uncomfortable, which can feel threatening to us and so we retreat to the safety of what we know ~ those unhealthy beliefs that we hold onto. 

In order to change things causing distress and pain, it is necessary to identify and talk through those things that have caused such feelings so that we can challenge and question the messages that were instilled in us as children. In therapy, we will try to understand and re-frame them as beliefs that come from important people in our lives, such as our parents or other important people that we have looked up to and respected. From there we can gain an understanding of why we react in certain ways to difficult situations and learn how to understand the reactions we have from a different perspective so that they are not harmful and self-critical. 

When we are in a mindset of always pleasing others, we are looking for approval of ourselves, for being a 'good' person, and for being seen as a 'good' person. Although it is nice to be thought of as helpful, and good, when we do things for others in this way, it is often so that we are approved of, so that someone reinforces the messages we were given as children, that we should always be nice, and that it isn't right to think about yourself, before others. In essence, we are telling others that we are not as important as they are so we will do whatever they would like us to do if we gain their approval. Therapy can help change this perception of ourselves, and enable us to think about how important we are, break the cycle of being stuck, and enable us to move forward.