Well, first off, in all likelihood, they are, or at least some of them are. And even if I or some other therapist or your friend or your parents or your partner don’t believe them to be real, it’s of little consequence because you still experience them as real and that’s all that matters in your world in any given moment.
Let’s say that you are not advancing in your career at a satisfactory clip. You’ve been plugging away for years and you’re not where you were led to believe you’d be at this stage in the game. Perhaps you’ve picked an arbitrary timeframe for success, but so what? You want what you worked hard to achieve. I’m not here to tell you not to be disappointed.
But let’s look at the future you were promised - are you, alone, being deprived of it? As I said in a previous post, knowing that one is not suffering alone is often enough to make a situation more tolerable. Maybe your chosen career is not a meritocracy. Maybe, more often than not, incompetent people are kicked upstairs and talented people toil in obscurity. But is that always the case? Is there another way of approaching the work to make it work for you, where you are rewarded for your dedication and talent? And if not, what are your other options?
Your problems are real to you so they are real to me. Let’s try to solve them together.