“Why Do I Feel Bad if My Life is Good?” 5 Major Reasons

Hi Tracy, if you had operations as a child that were traumatic for you, even if just because you felt lonely and scared at the hospital, yes, it’s very possible that an operation as an adult could trigger old feelings and memories and leave you anxious and upset. Definitely worth talking to someone about like a counsellor. Congrats by the way on the 10 year recovery journey! Best, HT

Hi there AM. We are truly sorry to hear you weren’t taken seriously. It does indeed take a lot of courage to get out there and keep finding the right therapist. It can be like dating, to be honest. Lots of courage and energy. But when you do find the right therapist, it’s generally more than worth it. But if it’s anxiety you are experiencing, or anxiety/mild depression, you do have options. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is very useful for anxiety and does not involve going much into your past, so there is very little talking about your life barring your first session where a general history is taken. From there you just deal with what is going on in your life each week, now. Or you could try clinical hypnotherapy which involves far less speaking as well. Best, HT.

Hi there, we don’t know how long this has gone on for and if that was the worst of what she said, but we’d imagine it was a far more complicated situation. While it’s easy to find one person and then blame all our problems on them, usually self-esteem this low is complex and would come from a variety of experiences. For example, do you have loving, supportive parents who are there for you even if you are in a bad mood or make mistakes? Or did you not get the support you need growing up? Did you have a stable, safe home? Or was there trauma, upset? If you had a loving supportive home how would your sister end up this mean in the first place? She’s learned it from the adults around you, we’d imagine. We are only guessing. All we are saying is we simply can’t tell you as we don’t know you, but siblings criticising each other is common and would usually only decimate someone entirely if they were already in an unstable frame of mind for a variety of other factors. The question we’d ask is, what are you hoping for here? What gain are you hoping for? What will it give you if you can say ‘yes it’s all her fault!’? Is it a way to avoid looking at other things? And then we’d say, why not put the focus not on trying to figure how much it is or isn’t her fault, but what you can do now to learn to like yourself more? Is there someone you trust you can talk to? Or a counsellor at school you could speak with, for example? How could you learn positive, powerful communication skills to let your sister know you don’t want to be put down anymore? Best, HT.

Hi Reem, it’s hardly surprising you’d feel negative and worried and doubt yourself if your parents, the very people we all deep down are wired to want the support of, aren’t giving it to you. This is not to say they don’t love you or want the best for you, just that maybe they are blinded by their own assumptions, worries, and under societal pressure, and are unable to see that you want to follow your dreams. So we’d say, don’t judge yourself for worrying and doubting. Just accept that you are doing your best in the face of unhelpful disapproval from family, take things one day at a time, and keep following your dreams. Part of growing up is realising that sometimes we can’t please our family and also be ourselves, and that to grow up we have to become independent and make choices for ourselves and hope that our family understands in the long term. Of course this is assuming that you attending school isn’t putting your family into financial distress. If so, then sometimes we need to grow up even further and work to be financially independent, finding a part time job or a scholarship. Best, HT.

When you were growing up, were you loved and accepted even if you were miserable, sad, or angry? Or only if you seemed perfect, happy, fit some idea of a good child, to fit into a family where everyone acted perfect and sadness and anger were perhaps always hidden? Do you now accept yourself if you are angry, sad, or miserable? Or only if you match some standard of perfect person you have decided on? You see you say you feel you are not ‘being your true self’. What we sense is someone who is very lonely, very anxious, very scared, even, feeling lost. Yes, we agree you have identity issues, and are far from understanding who you are, as you are caught up in pleasing others and some strange idea of what a perfect person is. First of all, nobody has an exact, perfect self. We are all many things, we all have many sides, including messy ones, but at heart we have a set of values that inform who we are and that offers us a sense of self. But when we grow up having to seem a good child to please the parents we might idolise we learn to please so much that the real us gets lost along the way, we become too fluid. We become a responder, always scanning others to see what we think they want then responding instead of being. Our whole existence is rotated around pleasing, around living up to some false idea of what we should be. The main symptom is always a massive intimacy issue. When we are actually our true selves we like ourselves no matter how we are behaving as we have compassion for ourselves. We know how to be ourselves around others as we don’t judge ourselves, so we don’t feel bad if we say silly things or are less than perfect. And others like us as they trust our authenticity, not as we are being perfect. Nobody wants a perfect friend, they want a friend who is comfortable in their own skin, all of their skin, not just parts of it. It’s not perfection that attracts others, that mostly turns others off. It’s authenticity. In summary, we feel this is a deep rooted issue, not a small one. As you are 20, a large part of moving through this will be becoming more and more independent from your family, finding out who you are outside of their influence, making mistakes and finding your own solutions, becoming entirely financially independent. From there we would highly suggest you seek support over all this. As we sense a very deep rooted issue that is complicated, not something that will be fixed with a gratitude journal. Therapy can help you develop self compassion, self awareness, and self acceptance. You won’t feel you have to ‘raise your vibration’ as in fact this is a falsehood of the new age movement to sell courses. You will accept your vibration as it is in any given moment and paradoxically this acceptance will stop your moods slipping all over the place and your anxiety running on high all the time as you just never feel perfect enough. Also note that meditation is not at all about detaching from your thinking. It is about accepting your thinking so much that it no longer has power over you. Recognising, accepting, not attaching meaning or value. But we think it’s interesting that even with meditation you are trying to seek some perfect nirvana and also avoiding facing the shadow side, the difficulties, meditation, when done right, means we have to sit with a LOT of discomfort. That can be the process. For years. Burning through our discomfort, learning not to judge all our emotions that come up like fear, sadness, physical pain. And this process would be a powerful one for you. All of this might feel overwhelming. So note that we think you are probably already a perfectly lovely person, it’s just that you have to be the one to first see it, to accept yourself just as you are, including the less than perfect sides, and that this will mean you can finally breathe and finally connect and finally find some real meaning in your life beyond the superficial. Finally, consider volunteering. Volunteering with those less fortunate than ourselves can see us in a world very different than our own, which can give us new perspective on ourselves, and also help us feel a sense of meaning. Plus research shows it can help with depression and a lack of connection. Best, HT.