I was wondering why does it make us feel unworthy when we try to connect with someone we like, even if that person seems to have quite an opposite impression of us? It seems to be a fairly common phenomenon. Sometimes can even happen in both directions. Why is that? And I thought, what if the answer to this question lies in relativism?
Meaning.. what if I have been looking for the answer from the wrong perspective? What if only the perception of the DISTANCE between how good I think I should be and how good I am is accurate? What if upper end of being good actually EQUALS how good I actually am, and the perception of how good I am is the one that is wrong? In other words, maybe feeling unworthy is not because it makes us understand how much worse we are than what we think we should be (the popular belief), but maybe it makes us see how much better we are than we think we are (my theory here). And, as known in psychology, being better than one thinks they are is equally distressing as being worse than one thinks. And since being worse is THE socially acceptable direction, our brains tend to perceive a kind of "inverted image" of the reality.
Because that feeling came up to me exactly after the moment of connection, not before, it must be connected with the perception of the other person of me. And this really would be a proof for my theory: that that unworthiness feeling is proportionate to how much I underestimate myself.
I have been trying to imagine that for a few minutes. It is like looking at those visual illusion images trying to imagine the stairs walking up instead of down, and back. I was trying to get to a point where my brain would treat both possibilities as equally possible. And how it felt when I would get there, for a short moment, it felt: sobering. And memories of people telling me compliments would spontaneously appear, with the added angry words "but this is what I have been telling you!". So seems right.
Another proof to my theory is that it can actually very likely happen that both people would feel the same unworthiness feeling in relation to each other. If the popular belief was true, this would make no sense, unless those people were both paranoid and out of touch with reality.
Another proof actually: if you have this feeling towards two people, does it not feel like just exactly the same amount of unworthiness? If it was depending on that person those values would obviously differ. But they don't.