Does Everyone Else Seem to Know How to Do Life Better Than You?

That nagging feeling that other people are somehow more capable, confident, or clued-up than you may have roots much further back than you realise, says psychotherapist and BWRT® founder Terence Watts.

Have you ever had the strange feeling that everybody else was given a rulebook for life – and somehow yours never arrived?

Other people appear to know what to say, what to do and how to cope. They seem more confident making decisions, more comfortable speaking up, and more certain of themselves. Meanwhile, you may find yourself quietly wondering how they know all this stuff that you don’t.

Perhaps you’re successful at work but still assume other people are more capable than you. Someone pays you a compliment, and you instinctively brush it aside. You apologise when you don’t need to. You hesitate before offering an opinion because somebody else probably knows better.

Or perhaps there is simply an underlying feeling that, however well things are going, you are somehow not quite as good at being a person as everybody else seems to be.

There are reams of articles and books explaining that this isn’t really the case – that it’s all down to poor self-worth or a lack of confidence.

But supposing you’re right?

Supposing you really did miss out on something?

Well, you didn’t. But here’s the interesting part: it isn’t true that everybody else received some piece of vital information that you somehow missed. Many of the people who feel exactly as you do simply become very good at keeping it hidden.

Just like you.

That’s just one of the signs that you might be suffering from Foundational Devaluation Syndrome (FDS), which can cause you to secretly feel as if you are somehow lacking something that everybody else knows.

It can make you feel that everybody else is more ‘savvy’ than you, more capable than you, cleverer (or not so stupid), more ‘in the know ’, and generally more aware of how to cope with all manner of difficult life issues. It can cause problems with concentration, memory, relationships and careers and prevent you from getting the best out of life.

Well, it’s not your fault! The chances are you did not get the best deal when you were growing up, as far as parenting was concerned. You start discovering who you are from the moment you are born, and if parents yell at you a lot, you learn you’re bad. If they ignore you frequently, you understand that you are of no importance. If they often taunt you, you learn you are stupid.

You won’t remember any of it, but everything you learn about yourself until you are old enough to wonder if it’s true becomes part of who you secretly believe is the real you, the ‘you’ you want to keep secret a lot of the time.

Foundational Devaluation Syndrome is exactly what it sounds like – at a foundational level, the real you was devalued often and deeply enough that it became a fixed belief.

Where does that feeling come from?

Our understanding of ourselves begins developing long before we have the ability to examine it rationally.

A young child doesn’t think: “My parent is stressed today and their reaction probably has very little to do with me.”

They experience what happens and learn from it.

Repeated criticism, ridicule, emotional distance, or being made to feel that your needs do not matter can influence the conclusions a child begins to form about themselves.

A child who is frequently shouted at may begin to feel that they are bad. One who is repeatedly ignored may learn that what they think or feel isn’t particularly important. A child who is constantly mocked or belittled may begin to assume that they are stupid or incapable.

Nobody necessarily sits them down and tells them any of this. The learning can happen quietly.

And because these beliefs are formed so early, they can feel less like something we believe and more like something we simply know.

That distinction matters.

You might consciously know that you are intelligent, loved, and competent while another part of you continues to operate according to a much older rule: other people are better at this than me.

The invisible rulebook

That can create some curious contradictions in adulthood. You might earn a promotion yet privately wonder whether you’ve fooled everybody.

You might be surrounded by people who genuinely value you but still feel surprised that they want you there.

You may automatically defer to somebody else’s opinion even when you know just as much about the subject.

And sometimes it appears in the smallest of moments: rehearsing what you’re going to say before making a phone call, worrying that you’ve said something silly after a perfectly ordinary conversation, or watching somebody confidently deal with a situation and thinking, How do they know how to do that?

From the outside, these things can look like a lack of confidence.

But confidence isn’t necessarily the whole story.

Someone can be extremely confident in certain situations and still carry a much deeper assumption that other people are somehow more legitimate, capable, or deserving than they are.

That’s what is meant by foundational devaluation. At a very deep level, the person has learned to devalue themselves – often so early that they may have no conscious memory of how that belief began.

A belief is not the same as a fact.

The encouraging part is that the things we learned about ourselves early in life are not necessarily accurate.

Children are wonderful learners but not always accurate interpreters.

If you were made to feel insignificant, it doesn’t mean you were insignificant.

If somebody repeatedly made you feel stupid, that doesn’t mean you were stupid.

If your feelings weren’t listened to, that doesn’t mean they didn’t matter.

Yet when an idea has been carried around for decades, questioning it can feel surprisingly difficult. The belief has been there for so long that we stop noticing it is a belief at all.

One useful starting point is to become curious about the moments when that old assumption appears.

When you find yourself thinking, ” Everyone else knows what they’re doing except me, ask yourself: What evidence do I actually have for that?

When you automatically dismiss praise, notice the impulse before you reject it.

When you assume someone else’s opinion must carry more weight than yours, ask yourself why.

And perhaps most importantly, notice the difference between feeling less capable and actually being less capable.

They are not the same thing.

You didn’t miss the lesson.

One of the great misconceptions behind this feeling is the belief that everybody else possesses some knowledge that we don’t.

There was never a secret lesson everybody else attended.

There wasn’t a handbook you failed to receive.

And the version of you that learned long ago to feel smaller, quieter, or less important than other people does not have to dictate how you see yourself today.

Sometimes the most powerful realisation is also the simplest: perhaps there was never anything missing from you in the first place.

About the author

Terence Watts is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, author and founder of BrainWorking Recursive Therapy (BWRT®), an approach now practised by trained therapists in more than 20 countries. Drawing on decades of experience as a psychotherapist, Terence has written extensively about anxiety, emotional wellbeing and the way our earliest experiences can shape our responses in later life. His recent books include Anxiety Gone!: with BrainWorking Recursive Therapy® and Ageing Well, Living Longer: The BWRT Route to Vitality. Find out more at www.bwrt-professionals.com