TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to explore the concept of fear of success. When I was a child, into my teen years, certainly into my 20s, I really got the concept of fear of failure. That made perfect sense to me. I knew how horrible it felt when I didn’t do well enough at certain things. And my parents, well, they pulled away from me. They rejected me in different ways. Or in school, when I gave the wrong answer or screwed up at sports in different ways, kids, teachers, coaches, well, they could laugh at me. I could be humiliated. I could be socially ostracized. Failing was something I really did not want to do in this world. My family system, my school system, even friendship circles, where so much of the love was conditional, and the condition was unsucceeding.
So when I first, in my early twenties, heard about this concept of fear of success, it seemed so counter-intuitive. All I wanted to do was succeed. So why in the world would I be afraid of the thing that I wanted most? Well, the irony has been in my life that, by and large, in a lot of different areas, I have succeeded. In some areas, I haven’t succeeded so well. In some areas, I’ve failed a lot, but in some areas, I’ve really succeeded. And I’ve gotten to see why I had some very good reasons to be afraid of succeeding.
The biggest one for me has been that the thing that became most important to me in my life, the thing that became most important for me to succeed at, was to know myself. To really be connected with the truth of me was to develop the truth of my full, real, honest, authentic self. And the more I developed that, the more I felt connected to me as a successful human being. And the consequences of that, in many ways, in many parts of my life, were devastating. For starters, my parents didn’t like it that I became more of a full true self. And the more I did it, the more I had conflict with them. The more they actually rejected me.
At first, it really was very confusing because my parents always told me, “Daniel, we want you to succeed. We want you to be happy. We want you to be whoever you really are and manifest whoever you really are and how you feel in the world.” And so, at some level, I believed them until I started actually doing it and realized that they didn’t really like a lot of what I was becoming, but more so who I was becoming.
What I learned was they actually wanted me to succeed in a very conventional way. They wanted me to have a successful, conventional, emotionally disconnected career. They wanted me to have a successful, conventionally shut down romantic relationship with a woman. They wanted me to be a conventional, shutdown, not very healthy parent of the variety that both of them were. That was their idea of success. And had I done that, I would have really met with their approval. Had I traumatized my own children in the same way that they traumatized me and had I denied it and let them off the hook, my parents off the hook for the traumas that they did to me, that would have been success.
The more that I got to know myself on the inside and look at my history and really feel like I’m becoming a successfully internally connected human being who loves myself, I realized that that really threatened them. And they took it out on me in all sorts of different ways. They didn’t like it, and it was incredibly painful for me. And that is when I really started to realize I really had some very legitimate reasons to be afraid of succeeding at this most important thing in my life.
Also, I started realizing it wasn’t just my parents who rejected me. My teachers in college, my professors, they didn’t like the way I was thinking. The more I became connected with me, the more I had real perspective on myself and on life. I was studying biology. I had a different perspective on science. I sometimes found myself much more connected to the wildness of nature. The more I connected with the wildness of myself, I became more connected with nature and less with all these silly little distracting intellectual scientific algorithms that they were coming up with. They liked statistics more than they liked the truth of nature. And the more I succeeded at connecting with me and connecting with the world and really having perspective, really feeling like this is what I came here to do, the less they liked me.
They certainly didn’t give me good grades for it. I knew how to fake it to get by and give them the answers they wanted, but they didn’t want me to really ask open-ended questions. They didn’t want me to be artistically creative within this supposedly scientific framework that they had defined.
I also found the same thing when I became a therapist. In many ways, by becoming actually what I considered to be a really good therapist who really cared about people, who really respected them, who didn’t force them to do anything, who didn’t play around with these dumb psychological theories, simplistic incorrect theories that we were taught, I noticed that, well, a lot of my colleagues didn’t like this. I threatened them. Many of my clients loved it. They wanted to come more. They wanted to refer their friends and their family members to me as a therapist. But a lot of my colleagues in the mental health system at large were uncomfortable with me. And I realized, ooh, this level of success, private success, emotional success, a quiet independent success was very threatening to the norm. And it scared me.
And you know why it scared me? Because some part of me was still looking for love from these so-called authority figures. My parents never liked it, but I became a successful psychotherapist. They became more and more threatened by it. And when I started to have a website that became more successful, where I told, to the best of my ability, the truth, this YouTube channel also, the more successful and popular it’s become, the more honest I have become, the more real and authentic and connected, and what I feel is brave that I’ve become. Courageous to be able to get over my fears or work through them and say it anyways, to press start even though it’s terrifying and speak my mind and talk about the things that I’ve learned that have been the most valuable to me.
The more I realized I got rejected for it by my family system, by my historical friends. It’s been very unpleasant. And the reason it’s been unpleasant, like I said a minute ago, is I still, some part of me wanted to be loved by them. Who doesn’t want to be loved and respected and honored by their parents, by their grandparents, by their family system? I think it’s a normal, natural thing for a child, even a grown-up child, to want to be loved, be honored, be respected by one’s parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, extended family system. And I got less and less of that, and that still carries on in me.
There’s still a part of me that is a wounded little child, the part of me that I think I haven’t fully healed. And it’s so hard to heal that, to go back to being one years old or being a baby where I was being abandoned and rejected and betrayed over and over again by my parents. It’s like some deep template in me still wants them, some parental figure to love me, wants the world to love me in that way. I’ve done a massive job, a massive internal job at healing that. I think if I could put a number on it, 95 percent of it I’ve healed. I really feel like I’ve healed about 95 percent of my traumas. But there’s still that five percent of me that is scared, that’s terrified of doing too well in an honest way because I will outshine my parents, that or I will shine a light on their deficiencies, on how they barely engaged in the healing process, how they turned against healing, or our world at large, how much of our world at large doesn’t want to know about healing.
Our world at large, like my parents, like my family system at large, it’s just a big drug addict, just taking more from the world, taking, taking, taking, living in an unsustainable way, living externally, living for external success.
I had once upon a time just lived entirely for external success and given up on looking within. I think I would have much less reason to fear success. It was that kind of success that I had nothing to be afraid of.
And I think when I was a really good student in high school, faking it in school, faking it with my teachers, faking it with my classes, and giving the right answers, regurgitating the right answers all the time, I had every reason in the world to have no fear of success.
But when I started looking within, I think I had a lot more reason to fear success. And I think it comes down to this power struggle. As long as I, at some level, was the less powerful one in the system, as long as I, at some psychological level, was looking for love from my parents, my teachers, my world, even expecting or feeling it was a right of mine to get the justice of the love that I hadn’t fully gotten once upon a time, I was always susceptible, well, to being afraid of their rejection and really suffering for their rejection.
And so the only answer I have to the fear of success that some small part of me still feels is to go within more, to become the parent for my still wounded sides, to have that conscious relationship with me, to love myself more and to love myself in the way that I should have been loved long ago, to hold myself and nurture myself, to not expect it from anyone else or anything else.
And to say, Daniel, this is my internal dialogue with myself that I have so often now: It’s okay to be afraid, but you can love yourself. You can be there for yourself. You can fight for yourself. You can act in spite of your fear. Have courage, have strength, don’t give up, and remember what is most important. Let that be your guiding light in life.
And what is most important is that connection with the core of truth within you, which is there.