The Hell Of Endless Aspiration: When Motivation Backfires

Let’s face it: there is no cure for psychological trauma. All the humiliation, indignity, abuse, shame, fear and guilt that deeply scarred your past cannot be fixed, no matter how many appointments you book with your therapist.

The only way to address trauma is to make your life experience so grand that your trauma becomes small by comparison.

You don’t fix your trauma; you outgrow it by growing yourself.

This is why the more traumatized you are, the more you strive towards achievement as you seek to give meaning to the pain and suffering; something to make it all worth it.

But here’s the thing;

The more traumatized you are, the least likely you are to be charismatic, pleasant, skilful, sociable, likeable.

The more you need achievement, the less likely you are to reach it.

You’ll find traumatized people running behind fake success gurus and motivational speakers who sell nothing other than momentary hope and cope…

The motivation industry is traumatizing and abusive at its core. Self-appointed “inspirational gurus” insist that you have no excuses for your failures, just like they don’t show any gratitude for their blessings. They want you to deny the external factors that contributed to your failure because they deny the external factors that contributed to their (supposed) success. They dishonestly claim full ownership of their fortune, but take no responsibility for your failures, even though they promised to help you.

So, the traumatized soul, desperate to achieve, blames himself for his misfortune on top of suffering his misfortune. He gets more and more proof of his inadequacy as he is being compared to “successful people” who made it all by themselves with no excuses and no advantages (supposedly).

The more he tries to mitigate his trauma, the more exposed to trauma he becomes, and the more conditioned he becomes to hating himself. The more he needs to achieve, the more proof of his inadequacy he gets.

The more he tries to escape failure, the more failure he piles up. The more he tries to outgrow his trauma, the more he grows his trauma. The more the trauma, the more he tries to succeed to give meaning to his pain.

Like a modern-day Sisyphus, his torment never ends…

Perhaps the greatest achievement is genuinely not needing achievement.

Perhaps it is a noble thing to achieve a state of least reliance on an unfair world, to have no desperate need to be recognised, validated, admired.

Perhaps glory lies in not needing it.

Perhaps humility is the way to beat humiliation. Dignity is having no need to glorify yourself to counterbalance past indignities.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

- Seneca