With exam season around the corner, the weather changing, and everything becoming more chaotic by the day, I find that my insecurity just gets worse and worse. In moments of high stress, I always fall back on beginning to feel insecure about everything: my place in life, my status at school, the way I look, you name it. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to escape the feeling that I am just not good enough.
For many of us, insecurity has different roots. For me, it’s needing external validation. I can never trust my own evaluation of things and find that the more insecure I get, the more I need other people to tell me that I’m doing okay, that I look nice, or that everything will turn out fine. I move further away from myself in relying on the assurance of others and worsen my insecurity by breaking the most important trust bond in my life: the one with myself.
The sneaky thing about the relationship between need for external validation and insecurity is that the worse it gets, the more it moves outside of you and starts to damage the world around you. It might be easy to say that my insecurities about my body only affect me, but when I start to project on other people, I might be damaging relationships for no good reason. If I’m not feeling okay about a certain class I’m taking, I might assume that my classmates or professor perceive me as lesser, and therefore isolate myself from those social relationships. This, in turn, might cause me to actually get those lower grades because I’m not relying on my academic support system to help me achieve my best potential. At worst, I might end up really hurting someone’s feelings because I’m just projecting my insecurities onto them and functioning based on my own distorted perceptions of the love around me.
In all of my years of struggling with this, the best solution I’ve found is to create or strengthen the inner witness. If we imagine beings as multifaceted, with different entities in charge of different tasks—for example, a version of me handling emotions, a version of me handling logical scheduling tasks, a version of me controlling desire and success—we might find ourselves missing a key figure: the inner witness. This figure is in charge of validating your own successes and failures.
It’s a part of your personality that isn’t responsible for dictating what’s right and wrong or good or bad, just for being there and watching you live your life. It’s part of you that simply sees you, and because it’s inside of you, it’s something that knows your deepest rumination, wishes and desires.
Having a part of yourself that simply acknowledges you as you are, prevents you from having to go outside of yourself to ask people to affirm the things about you that you already know you have. If your inner witness is capable of assuring you that you are, in fact, doing a good job, you rely less on seeking that confirmation from others.
The inner witness is something that’s absent for a lot of people who grow up not having the validation they need. This can range depending on your life situation. For example, a harsh, critical parent may have you developing the habit of people-pleasing and always seeking to hear words of affirmation. A toxic relationship may have you develop habits of constantly needing to hear validation that you’re needed or wanted. The absence of the inner witness is often a trauma response, but a weak inner witness is sometimes something that happens just because you might be a sensitive person predisposed to insecurity.
Developing the inner witness appears as confirming and acting upon a series of inner affirmations. It comes with practice and time because it relies upon the key issue of trusting yourself. Because trust is so deep and so multifaceted, developing the inner witness can look very different across a variety of different people. You may be able to start by simply writing down things that you know: “I am a good friend because I offer to drive people home if they don’t have a car.” “I am a good girlfriend because I give my partner the time they need to reflect without encroaching on their space.” “I am a good student because I consistently do my schoolwork.” It sounds simple, but engaging in a process of physically affirming yourself develops your capability to witness yourself. Development may also look like having faith in yourself to try something new or scary, like an exercise class, a new genre of books, a new kind of food, or taking a trip somewhere you’ve never been before.
The key thing to understand is that developing the inner witness builds confidence, in turn reducing your level of insecurity and rebuilding a trust bond with yourself. If the overwhelming nature of school and life and the world on the verge of springtime is too much to handle, it may be time to look inside of yourself and see if you have the capabilities necessary to not only survive the season but thrive in it. There is never a time when self-reflection isn’t helpful, and oftentimes trusting ourselves takes a little work. As little as focusing on the presence of the inner witness and relying on yourself to validate your own actions can mean the difference between health and stress!