The Fear of Admitting One’s Mistakes
A while back a Facebook friend asked a really interesting question on her wall (I am paraphrasing here):
"Why are some people unable to admit a mistake or to own when they are wrong? In fact they blame their mistakes on others but they take all the victories and claim those as their own?"
I think this is such a great question.
Here's my take on this:
This is often a trauma response. It's a not-good-enough-wound.
If someone grew up in a household where they were constantly criticized, verbally or emotionally attacked or beaten for being wrong or making mistakes, they will learn to defend themselves by never claiming responsibility for mistakes they made because they are scared of the punishment associated with making mistakes.
In fact their nervous system is always hypervigilant against mistakes.
They will up play their victories because that’s what feels safe and that was probably met with praise.
There is a lot of wounding here and if you try to push this person to see their mistakes they will retaliate and can even get nasty because for them admitting a mistake is punishment, which our nervous systems view as pain and a threat to our survival so they will fight you to stay alive.
In this case the work that needs to be done with this person is a lot of safety work, calming the nervous system and helping them integrate the fearful parts of themselves.
The struggle with the need to be perfect
I want to say most people struggle with being seen as doing things wrong or imperfectly to a certain extent, and whilst they can admit it in private, they are terrified of being seen as doing anything wrong in public.
It shows up as a fear of being publicly seen as failing and so they never get started with anything.
So the trauma response in this case is a vow of perfection or vow of invisibility. Where they wait until things are perfect before they get anything done.
I also suspect that the current school system contributes to this a lot - most of us spent our childhood being praised for being smart and getting things right and then that praise was withdrawn when we didn't do as well at things.
Most kids associate this withdrawal of praise with withdrawal of love.
This is even worse if we grew up in a household where perfection was demanded of us at all times. Where every single fault was highlighted.
This reward and withdrawal extreme is playing out in our adult lives and it affects our finances because to expand we’re required to experiment and innovate, which requires us to make mistakes and "fail".
It's part of the process. In fact making mistakes and "failing" is how we build our resilience muscle.
This fear of failing and being seen as imperfect will make it hard for us to start businesses (entrepreneurship teaches you to get used to failing, trust me), invest in new things (not all investments work out and we learn a lot from those that don't), collaborate with others, show up on various media platforms etc.
Part of these vows are ancestral and it really doesn't feel safe (on a nervous system level) to be seen or to make mistakes and it feels like death.
So on the surface this seems to have nothing to do with money, but it has a lot to do with money.
Money trauma is never about the money.
This is why we do the healing work on the nervous system and ancestrally.
PS: I hope this encourages people to stop abusing their kids (hurtful words mess kids up) and start healing so they love their kids even when they mess up cos that is a huge part of generational wealth. Mental and emotional health impact our finances in adulthood, most of us are struggling with expansion because nothing feels safe and expansion literally shuts down our nervous systems and feels like danger. Trust me. I know. I have spent my adult life working on this and now help people heal from this.
