Everyone indulges in self-diminishment from time to time. Sometimes these thoughts can be overwhelming. An elaborate maze is constructed to keep the thoughts from dissolving. Around and around you go, looking for the way out of the thoughts and finding all doors closed to you.

In general, self-diminishing thoughts are rooted in beliefs that you are not enough or not lovable. A very early experience, sometimes initiated at birth, triggers a contraction, a fear we sometimes call original fear, in which suffering, small or large, takes place and the story of a diminished self is written. This can become a lifelong story, a lens through which you create your personality and your strategy for survival.

Life can become a series of events that you judge according to this story. Did the event prove you were lovable or enough, or did it reinforce the fear that perhaps you are neither? Some common strategies are to try to be indispensable, impeccable, or the best at everything. You start to believe that your performance in the relative world is constantly taking you either closer or further from happiness or suffering.