Why do you feel so crappy? You're not as alone as you think

If there's one thing we all share, it's feeling like crap, and thinking we're the only one.

We don't like to think of ourselves as mentally ill, and many of us aren't, at least not all the time. Sometimes it comes and goes, like depression or anxiety, and sometimes it hangs around like that stuffy smell in your house during the winter when you can't open your doors and let some fresh air in.

I'll bet like everyone else, you think it's just you.

Everyone else looks better than you on Instagram, is more successful than you on LinkedIn, is having a more fab-o life than you on Facebook. It's because you're an Imposter and everyone else is Genuine! They'll figure out you're just a poser! A pretender! That you don't deserve your accolades! If you asked Tom Hanks, Sheryl Sandberg, Natalie Portman, David Bowie or Lady Gaga, they'd tell you they have moments when they worry about getting busted too.

The good news is you don't have to go through life feeling like crap, and you're not alone. The bad news is there are no quick and easy answers. No listicle is coming to save you.

Whose fault is it? Someone needs to take responsibility!

Modern psychiatry would have you believe: It’s all your parents’ fault.

Are you the God of Bad Judgment? The Goddess of Clumsy Boardroom Remarks? The Non-Binary Non-Manager of Missed Opportunities?

It’s all your parents’ fault!

Wondering how to change, make your life more meaningful, stop binge-eating Elvis’s PB-banana-and-bacon sandwiches, or get that damn voice in your head to shut up about how you’ll never achieve your lifelong dream of becoming a world-class guinea pig proctologist?

The first thing to do, the only thing to do, is point your finger at someone else. It’s all your parents’ fault!

Hey! The index finger, not that one. No need to be rude.

Why, Mom and Dad?

Modern psychology holds that since our parents raised us, they’re our most important influence. That's true, up to a point. How much is up for debate.

People have blamed their parents for their messed-up lives since, well, forever. To be fair, plenty of alleged grownups have committed some pretty grievous parenting errors leaving the poor kids to deal with the consequences.

American psychologist Steven Pinker says in earlier times, children were suckled by their mother for two to four years until the next bambino came along, then were dumped in a group of kids and left to fend for him or herself until adulthood.

When parents can't be around much to mess up their kids, they leave the job to others. And that's just the beginning. Let's move on to others in our circle of screw-up.

Peers

American psychologist Judith Rich Harris challenged the idea in her 1998 book The Nurture Assumption whether parents were truly the most important influence in forming a child’s personality. She criticized research that failed to account for genetic influences, and highlighted the importance of the peer group, with whom children identify and alter their behavior to fit in.

Did you grow up thinking you were stupid and ugly and useless because your parents told you so? Or was it because your bullies reminded you every single day? (Maybe it was both.)

Kids have been driven to suicide by toxic peers' ‘slut-shaming’, ‘gay-shaming’, or other shaming. The biggest shame of all in one’s teen years is the crime of being even a tiny bit different. If your peers have decided you’re to be their whipping boy/girl, they’ll find some difference, however minor, and beat that dead horse into a road pizza.

What do we do as children to avoid this? We alter our behavior to fit in as best we can. Especially girls, who are wired for relationships and for whom it’s critically important to be liked.

Blame your brain, too

Then there’s the matter of how we're wired. We often think our problems and disturbances are unique. They are, to some degree, but we have much more in common with humanity than we know. We’re anxious and we think it’s us; it’s some specific influence, some personal problem, it’s Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Yet anxiety is hard-wired into us. It’s an effective tool for keeping us safe in the days when danger lurked around every corner. You couldn’t take for granted you’d live to see the sun set. You also couldn’t count on seeing it rise again, either.

It's not just parental mistakes making you as anxious as you think; it’s the residual cavecritter effect of having to worry about impending injury or death every single moment. Except now you worry about your partner leaving you, losing your job or your house, or worst of all, something happening to the kids.

(Like your lousy parenting, as told to their therapist in 2037. Kidding! But who do you think their therapist will blame?)

When it comes to confronting the root of feeling crappy, that’s when things begin to get…difficult.

The typical prescribed medications only treat symptoms, not root causes. It's like aspirin. You feel better for a short time, then the suffering comes back. Professionals agree the best way to deal with depression, for example, is a combination of drugs and therapy. Medication can calm your brain enough so you can process and articulate your thoughts better. But drugs by themselves are often ineffective. They can take months to take effect and sometimes they stop working.

Not everyone can afford them, either.

You still need to do the work. To dig down, where you’ve never gone before, although you’ve perhaps caught glimpses of it in your dreams. Buddhists do it through meditation and reflection, which is slow and incremental. Evidence-based Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), is quite similar. You learn to identify your thought patterns, challenge your perceptions and interpretations of yourself, of other people and events, and finding different and more realistic ways of viewing all these things. It can be self-directed, through self-help and YouTube videos. No therapist required.

If there's trauma in your past, it's a job best not undertaken alone. You'll need some help. A trained professional if you can afford it, and a trusted friend or family member if you can't.

You'll find your parents in your unconscious, but it's as crowded as a sports bar on Superbowl Sunday. You’ll find your peer groups, your old jobs, past partners or spouses, maybe even random strangers with whom you probably had unpleasant encounters (forgetting all the great strangers who passed through).

We're not done taking inventory.

Genes

Okay, your genes are your parents' fault!

Genetics play an important, if traditionally underrated role in determining a child’s personality. It's nature and nurture, not versus, with 'nurture' receiving the lion's share of attention for decades.

American psychologist and geneticist Robert Plomin writes in Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, (2018) “Environmental differences are important — they account for the other half of the differences unexplained by genetic differences — but these environmental differences are totally different from the way environmentalists thought they worked. From Freud onward, environmentalists assumed the environment was doled out by families, as implied by the word ‘nurture’. Genetic research has shown that environmental influences are idiosyncratic, stochastic, and unsystematic — in a word, random.”

Plomin emphasizes genetic differences are on the individual, not group level. Genetic science has, after all, been used to justify a truckload of oppressive abuses against others by those in power.

Steven Pinker takes note of the heritable traits we customarily assign to environment: “How proficient with language you are, how religious, how liberal or conservative. General intelligence is heritable, and so are the five major ways in which personality can vary (summarized by the acronym OCEAN): openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, antagonism-agreeableness, and neuroticism. And traits that are surprisingly specific turn out to be heritable too, such as dependence on nicotine or alcohol, number of hours of television watched, and likelihood of divorcing.”

You’re not a slave to your biology, but you may have to consciously fight your Netflix addiction.

The forgotten element: Ourselves

Lost in the current culture of parent-blaming with roots in Sigmund Freud’s now-discredited ideas about Oedipus & Electra complexes, penis envy and mother-blaming is the idea that at least some of our psychological distress comes from ourselves via bad choices and decisions.

The younger and ergo less experienced at life you are, the more of these you’re going to make. It’s all part of figuring out life. It helps if you learn from your mistakes, which not everyone does.

Consider this: If you're being honest with yourself, how far back can you remember being a kid and find an inner sense that you just weren't good enough? Even before school, if you can remember back that far.

We're back to Imposter Syndrome, and we know most people have it. (And those who say they don’t--are they lying?)

Your negativity bias works in conjunction with it, making you feel fearful, like something bad is about to happen, and remembering your unpleasant experiences with greater clarity and rumination than your pleasant ones.

Negativity bias is another psychological tendency built into all of us, it's not necessarily something your old man did when you were three. Feeling unworthy deep down? Join the human club. Depressed? Most people are, at least sometimes, and don’t know why, or what to do. People way prettier, way more successful, way richer, and way more accomplished than you feel just like you. Like, exactly. 

And they didn’t even know your parents.

Our brains have evolved over millions of years and we’ve come a long way since the days we oozed around with nothing more to mating than dividing ourselves or knocking up a fellow trilobite. (I have no idea how trilobites reproduced but I’ll bet it didn’t involve swiping right.)

The more complex a system, the more ways it can malfunction. According to physicist and science writer Dr. Michio Kaku, the human brain is literally the most complex object in the universe. This gooshy lump of fat and water sloshing between your ears, he says, is more impressive than the most sophisticated neural network programming and which STILL can perform tasks in a millisecond the most sophisticated computer on earth can’t (yeah, even the one that won a poker game).

The influences driving you are the results of million of years of people, experiences, and neuro-programming trying to keep you safe from large Neolithic animals and hostile bands of roving humans.

Yeah yeah yeah, and your parents too.

It helps to know you're in the same oversized ocean liner as everyone else. That they're pretending they feel okay when they don't, either. You don't need to meekly accept what your genes, your brain wiring, your parents, your peers, or any other influences have wrought. Your brain is neuroplastic, and with regular, steady, conscious effort you can change the way you think and feel. It will never be perfect. But it will be better.

You still have to look within. And challenge yourself. Face the very worst about you, and find out it's not as bad as you think. And it doesn't even have to cost any money.

Tunnel Photo by Darkday on Flickr

Parent & Child silhouette by Mohamed Hassan on Needpix

Couch potatoes photo: Public domain by LAIntern on Wikimedia Commons

Trilobite photo by Incidencematrix on Flickr

I’m a freelance writer, sales/business developer and human brain victim descended from a long line of real headcases, just like you. When I’m not probing my own brain (ewwww) I blog with attitude on Medium and look for ways to spend the rest of my life making a difference and helping others understand they're not nearly as weird as they think.