Why Can't I Ever be Good Enough?: Escaping the Limits of Your Childhood Roles by Joan Rubin-Deutsch
We learned how to relate to others in childhood, by gauging the responses our behavior elicited in our parents and creating early agreements with ourselves about how best to act and feel. We believed this was a mutual agreement, or contract that we were making with our parents. Unfortunately, these contracts don't stand up outside our families of origin and were often not formed our best interests in mind. Breaking these old contracts and establishing new ones with the important people in our lives is essential to both growing out of unhealthy childhood roles and getting what we truly need. In Why Can't I Ever Be Good Enough? we learn which contracts still define us, what it takes to break these, and how to create brand new contracts with ourselves that will lead to healthier relationships and lives. Through a series of exercises that include sample contract worksheets, we learn: How to develop a conscious awareness that will make old contracts visible How to distinguish your own voice from the critical, internalized voices from childhood How your contracts influence the way you connect and disconnect in relationships How to envision and create the life you want to be living