The Voice That Says You're Not Enough

There's a voice a lot of parents carry that says some version of: you don't know enough, you're not doing enough, if you were really good at this it wouldn't be this hard.

I hear it almost every week, in different words. A parent will tell me about a hard morning, a meltdown, a missed moment, a short temper, and somewhere in the retelling, the voice slips in. Not loud. Usually just a quiet aside, almost apologetic: I should know how to handle this by now.

Here's what I don't do when I hear it: I don't try to argue with it.

I used to. Early on, my instinct was to reassure, "you're doing great," "that's totally normal," "don't be so hard on yourself." All true, probably. All mostly useless. That voice doesn't respond to reassurance. It's not actually interested in evidence. You can hand it a list of everything you did right today and it will find the one thing you didn't, and make that the headline.

So instead of arguing with it, I've started getting curious about it instead. Not "is this true," but something more like: whose voice is this, really?

Because it's rarely actually yours. It's usually older than the moment it's showing up in, a message absorbed a long time ago, from somewhere, about what it costs to not have it together. And once you start listening for where it came from instead of whether it's right, something shifts. The voice loses some of its authority. It's not gone. But it's no longer the only voice in the room.

I have a specific way I invite clients to sit with this, a short practice for the moments right after that voice shows up, before you've decided whether to believe it. It's not complicated, but it does something most people don't expect the first time they try it.

I'm not going to walk through it here. Some things land differently when you're actually doing them with someone in the room, rather than reading about them alone on your phone.

What I will say is this: if you've got a voice like that running in the background, the one that shows up after the hard mornings and tells you it's evidence of something, you're not alone in that, and it's not actually telling you the truth about who you are as a parent.

If you're curious what it might feel like to finally turn around and look at that voice instead of just enduring it, that's exactly the kind of thing we'd start with in a first session.

Curious? [Book a free intro call →]