I Am Not Good Enough - The Lost Boys Painting Series

In my previous post, I talked about my inspiration for my new painting series, the Lost Boys, and also I shared the first painting which is a stencil portrait of my four years old son.

In this post, I will share my second painting and also some of the things I learned in Good Enough Parenting workshop I attended several years ago. I talked about this workshop in my previous post so I think I don't have to repeat myself. As I mentioned previously, Lost Boys painting series is inspired by Ruth B's beautiful song called Lost Boy and also the lessons I learned from that workshop. This post will be a bit longer than any of my previous posts but I think it is necessary for me to share a bit about some facts I learned during the workshop and how these facts relate to the theme of my paintings. I will share some personal experiences as well and to be honest this is not easy for me but as an artist, I am incorporating a part of me into my work that makes them uniquely mine. And my hope that whatever I share here will be beneficial to someone out there.

If you read my first post, I mentioned about the need to meet children's core emotional needs in order for them to be mentally and emotionally healthy. There are four core emotional needs but I am not going to talk about all of them. Let's look at the first one - connection and acceptance.

Benefits of meeting the need for connection and acceptance in children

Whether we realize it or not, ALL of us want to build connection and receive acceptance from our parents/guardian. Children who have this need met adequately will develop some positive traits like:

Healthy sense of self-acceptance and open to new experiences
The child who has a healthy sense of self-acceptance is able to accept himself fully, even his flaws. He is open to trying new experiences and is not afraid of meeting new people. He is confident in his own skin but not cocky.
Feel belong
The child who feels belong do not think of herself being weird or a misfit. She feels she is on a par with her peers and doesn't feel insecure.
Mastery and success
The child who has the sense of mastery and success feels competent and know that he can achieve anything if he puts enough effort to achieve them. He knows his potential and he is not afraid to hone his strengths.

Disadvantages of not meeting the need for connection and acceptance in children

"There was a time when I was alone
Nowhere to go and no place to call home
My only friend was the man in the moon
And even sometimes he would go away, too..." ~ Lost Boy, Ruth B

We have seen some of the advantages of meeting the need for connection and acceptance in children. Now, what about the disadvantages?

If this need is not met in children they will develop "schemas" or "lifetraps" that is defined as cognitions and emotions stored deep within our minds that are triggered when we encountered similar situations later in life. These schemas include emotional deprivation, social isolation, failure, emotional inhibition, mistrust, and defectiveness. I am not going to talk about all of them but I will share about defectiveness because this is one of the most dominant schemas that I had developed in my life.

What is defectiveness schema?

Someone who has a defective schema believes that she is never good enough for anything in her life. She believes that she is full of weaknesses and because of this, she believes that she is not lovable.

A child who grew up constantly being critised by his caregivers that he is stupid, fat, ugly, and so on would start to believe it. He probably always being compared to his siblings and felt that he couldn't measure up to his parents standard.

As someone who has the defectiveness schema, I find it is very difficult to accept compliments. Whenever someone compliments me for some achievement, the first thing that would come to my mind would be "are you for real? I don't believe you. You are just flattering me. I am not that good. If you know who I really am, you would be disappointed". This internal monologue is my automatic response to compliments. In my head I knew what the other person said is true but somehow in my heart, I just don't believe him or her.

Before I learned that I have this damaging lifetrap, I always felt like a misfit, a good-for-nothing who doesn't deserve to be happy and successful. So no matter how good I am at a certain thing or how talented I am, or how successful I am, deep in my heart I always felt that I am not good enough.

Since attending the Good Enough Parenting workshop, I finally learned to accept myself better and see myself as someone who is lovable and worthy of happiness and success. I am not totally 'cured' so to speak but now I know how to respond positively when I am being complimented. I learned to accept that I am talented in certain areas and enjoy the successes they bring.

Inspiration for the painting

My experience in dealing with defectiveness inspired my second stencil painting in the Lost Boys painting series. In this painting, you can see a crestfallen boy squatting on the ground. He feels lonely has nowhere to go. He is discouraged because he feels like he couldn't measure up to his parents' expectations and as a result, he rebels against their authority and gets involves in all kinds of juvenile delinquency. He figures if his best efforts couldn't satisfy them, so why bother trying?

He is a lost boy feeling frustrated and exasperated.

The colorful background represents his life in general. He is young and yet to experience a lot of things so the colors are still vibrant and not muddied. You can see the words "not good enough" repeated over and over again on the painting. I intentionally painted them in white to represent his sense of shame and failure. He never speaks of his feelings but he is constantly haunted by his sense of inadequacy. The words are the demons that refused to go away.

Medium: watercolors and markers on watercolor paper

Here are the process photos: