" Are we good enough and smart enough?"

Are we good enough and smart enough?

Brian Lynch

A colleague of mine who worked with the same ideas I do for many years developed a scale for self-evaluation made up of a list of 32 questions.

I would like to present several and explore a few of them. For example:

1) I feel like I am never quite good enough.

2) I feel somehow left out.

3) I think that people look down on me.

The idea is to rate yourself on a scale of 0-4 with “4” being that you feel this way “almost always”, “3” “often”, “2” “ sometimes” and “1” “seldom”.

In the end, you get a score that is then compared to a scale that is based on an average score of a group who took the questionnaire. It is not a “test” but an evaluation.

My purpose is to suggest that the evaluation and each item is a window into the way we imagine ourselves. Each statement is an “Image.” An image can be thought of as a “scene.”

I read the first statement and what immediately happens is that a flood of subconscious thoughts happens, a flood of “scenes” well up in me, situations wherein I have felt exactly that way, at work, in school, taking a test for anything. I am riding the bus or train and looking at everyone and imaging their lives and comparing myself to them.

If I were having such a thought as the statement in #1 suggests it might immediately lead to the thought in number #2 as we will obsess and “magnify” about our difficult situation and start to convince ourselves that our problems have to be worse than everyone else’s.

Now in terms of the questionnaire, the idea is that the 1-4 response is immediate and therefore more a reflection of how your life has gone up until now. Of course, some of us have been lucky and this is the point of the questionnaire to evaluate the overall history of the individual. Maybe I do feel like I am as good as anyone else and put a “0.” This is fine and so we go on to the next. But we still might feel left out some of the time. Now when did we feel left out? Under what circumstances did we feel left out?

Finally, I think the more severe of the three, the last one, is probably an indication of how much we have been put down and humiliated in our lives and the opposite of how little we have been encouraged and rewarded for our efforts, albeit in the end, all three are an indication of these actions.

So by now, I am sure you have rated yourself on just these items. The score means “nothing” in itself. It is a sample. The whole scale, again, is a self-evaluation. But just based on these three items what do you think the difference in feeling and how a person approaches a day is between one who has a score of “0” (that is never feels any of these feelings) compared to someone with a score of “12” (that is almost always has these feelings”). I think their quality of life is quite different.

Can we change our feelings about our “image” and indeed change our self-image? Indeed, I think we can. We can get interested in both our image and how we feel about it.

Copyright 2010

SEE: Internalized Shame Scale