Dear Ben,

It seems that even minor stress can invade every corner of my mind and reduce me to a cowering, trembling lump. I received a couple of voicemails about financial matters that I’m worried about, and not only could I not listen to them, I couldn’t even look at my phone or have it near me. I do the same thing with paper mail- I’ll often throw it away, unopened. I can’t bring myself to look at it, and then I can’t look at myself. I’m so ashamed of my cowardice.

It’s because you feel helpless – you don’t know how to handle life’s challenges, or this particular (financial) challenge, and you feel overwhelmed. You feel you don’t have the resources or the capacity to solve problems. That’s why you’re afraid to face those problems – because you’re at a loss of what to do.

I feel like a scared kid, not a grown man, and I hate it.

Yes, and it’s because the scared kid is still living inside of you – that’s your wounded inner child. All children start out feeling helpless and scared, but with proper support, guidance and encouragement, they develop self-confidence and courage, they learn to trust themselves and their abilities. If you’ve never received that kind of encouragement, if your parents hardly ever played with you, or helped you learn new skills, no wonder you’d be missing those skills. A child cannot develop self-esteem and self-confidence in a vacuum – it needs constant parental engagement. If the engagement wasn’t there, the self-esteem is also missing.

I’m supposed to be able to solve problems with grace

You can only solve problems with grace if you have enough self-esteem and self-confidence – if you don’t feel helpless in face of problems. If you lacked parental engagement and support, which is necessary for many of our skills to develop, including our problem solving skills, you would be at a loss. Another reason could be that your parents didn’t have good problem solving skills either – they didn’t speak about their problems for many years, and then they suddenly divorced, after just one argument. That’s a bad role model for problem solving skills…

I can’t even say No

A part of the problem could be your fear of confrontation, which is related to your parents’ sudden divorce after just one confrontation. As I said earlier, it could be that in your mind, you see confrontation as dangerous and something that causes irreparable damage.

All these present-day problems and limitations are caused by the emotional neglect that seems to have happened in your childhood. Try to understand that there is a child, a little boy inside of you, who didn’t get his emotional and developmental needs met properly. As a result, you’re lacking some skills now.

Like anita said, the first thing would be to stop blaming yourself because it’s like blaming a child for being inadequate. The child within you needs compassion and understanding before all.

He can get that from your adult part, who can serve as a positive, loving parent to your inner child. The task would be to develop this positive, parental inner voice, as the antidote to the harsh inner critic who’s shaming and condemning the boy all the time.

Do you think you can do that? To have that positive, compassionate voice as the counterbalance to the inner critic?