The root of the problem

[donnalotus]

My fear of failure and blockages to success come from a long line of family disappointments and hard, hard lessons.

This came up after a local metaphysical / new age healing store came up for sale. Kumu and I decided to investigate whether this is something that we could do, as we have seen ourselves having a store together and doing the work in this way. We didn’t see it this soon but it did raise some interesting thoughts and feelings in both of us.

I realised that I’d hit this point of self-sabotage when I was sitting in bed, bawling, talking to Michael about it, because I’d interpreted his “thinking” look as “doubt, fear, failure, hell no!”

Then I realised after talking to him that he’s fully supportive if I want to jump into buying the business and running it. So what I was seeing was all the fears that jump to the surface when I’m faced with change in this way. I automatically feel I’m not going to succeed.

 

Why is that?

I’m not 100% sure but I know it goes back to my childhood and beyond. I look at my Mum and Dad, the way I was raised, and the inbuilt feeling of never being good enough.

Somewhere, going even further back, possibly to our Irish roots is my gut feeling, is a feeling of unworthiness, of having everything taken from you and being kicked in the gut so much that you are simply broken. That is how my Dad’s side of the family came to Australia, as a broken convict, an Irish man, who had stood up to the English and failed.

I’ve always been interested in the genetic roots of people, as I believe we carry some of our core thoughts and beliefs from our genetic disposition. There are a lot of “poor” and underprivileged belief systems with Irish roots; I just haven’t really looked at it before because many of us are made to feel because our skin is white we’ve always had it easy.

I am starting to see now core beliefs in our family – poor, underprivileged, guilt (Catholic), unworthiness, never good enough and failure. There’s a lot of the typical Australian “cutting-down-the-tall-poppies” that goes on, particularly in the rural scene, where everyone is trying to be more down-trodden and “work harder” than the next person. Success isn’t really seen as success, it’s seen as indulgent (how dare you take off a day to go fishing? You have work to do!), or lazy, or “soft”.

I looked around at the house I grew up in while I was up Home, and while it’s clean, and simple, it’s a typical lower class farm... old furnishings, nothing new, and no time or money to put into fixing anything up. There’s a lot of love shown in the curtains that Mum made to brighten it up, and remnants of the renovation years ago where we knocked out a bedroom wall to make a larger livingroom, and an entry to the bedrooms and bathroom that didn’t involve having to go outside.

There’s a real poverty feel to it, and I realised I feel comfortable in my poverty-attitude. I don’t feel comfortable around wealth and upper class living. I feel like white trash most of the time, and that I don’t measure up, and that brings on the feeling that I don’t deserve anything better because how could I ever hope to intermingle with wealth and abundance?

The biggest thing I’m seeing in my belief system is the unworthiness and a lot of fear. Fear of failure, of ending up destitute and poor, even though I have never been that bad before, I’ve always been provided for, something has always come my way. Yet I still freeze when offered a wonderful opportunity to succeed and get ahead, because deep down I am just white trash with no prospects who is eventually just going to fuck it all up.

How on earth do you start to heal that?

Comments

[moonvoice]

I know this won't do crap for your fear of success, since that's likely so deep-rooted and will take a while to fight off and work with; but I honestly see you being so awesome at having a store like that, running it, finding success with it. Do you think it is something you could do?

[donnalotus]

It is something that both my friend (kumu) and I have talked about, she's run a store like that in the past and helped her teacher run her successful business, so she's familiar with it. At the moment we're both just trying to get into a point of financial security that we could invest in a store and so on - we have had a lot of visions and thoughts about one, even down to the name! So we will definitely be doing it in the future, at the moment we're feeling 2012-ish...

It was more that this particular store (where we met actually!) coming up for sale pushed forward our timeline and we were like "holy shit we're not ready!" But we're feeling that she's going to want to move on the sale faster than we could, I personally wouldn't financially be able to get involved until March at least because I have to get these other loans paid off first before I could apply for a business loan.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, it means a lot! It will definitely happen on some level, whether we are in an actual store, or working from one of our homes, or working on the land (it's part of our dream to buy some land to lay a Medicine Wheel, and take people outdoors to reconnect to Mother Earth, and do the traditional landwork, vision quests, etc.)

I actually have dreams of displaying and selling your art in the store when we get it ;) (provided you were interested of course :D) Now THAT would be awesome!