The useless or no good saga

by Elizabeth Keats
(New Zealand)

Today I was thinking about the put downs that people did to someone they did not think measured up.

How many children or adults have been made to feel they will never come up to the standards people in authority expect of them? How did it make you feel when someone said to you that you did not come up to the criteria that they expected of you and that you would never come to anything?

It made you feel useless and defensive. You lost confidence in your ability to cope with life and with the responsibilities that you had to face. It might have left you with post traumatic syndrome, which further incapacitated you. You became afraid to apply for work feeling that the person who put you down would not give you a reference and would tell the person you had gone to not to employ you.

A child hearing that from an adult in their family or a teacher might stop trying to do better if they were programmed to be a failure.
Take heart there are many people out there who have heard such comments and made up their mind that they were worth something more than someone's else's spite and selfishness.

There is good in everyone and no one is incapable of achievement, it is just that we all have different strengths and weaknesses and talents and where we find that we might be a square peg in a round hole, somewhere in a different situation we might excel.