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You function mainly from your logical, rational mind. You’re accomplishment-driven, overextending and overworking yourself, ignoring your well-being in the process. You don’t sleep or rest as much as you need to and rely on things like caffeine and sugar to keep you going. You’re doing everything you can think of to stay on top of your busy life, but you feel like you’re drowning.

You overeat and have trouble maintaining a healthy weight. You’ve tried all kinds of things to change this but nothing has made much of a difference.

You lack the support to acknowledge and manage your perceived shortcomings and instead soothe yourself with food/substances or pleasure/entertainment of other sorts.

You often feel over-extended and overwhelmed by all the obligations you have to meet and don’t have time for what you enjoy. You’ve lost track of what really brings you joy, you’re too consumed by the efforts of mere survival. Life often feels like a never-ending grind and when you’re not busy meeting obligations, your time off is spent hibernating and recovering your strength to be able to keep going, you have no energy for anything else.

You wonder why life seems so much easier for other people and question what secret you might be missing out on. You feel like nothing you do, no matter how hard you try is ever enough. Everywhere you look you see how different you are from others and how you’re apparently lacking.

You’re trying to figure it out on your own and perhaps consider yourself to be a loner and/or a rebel. You have a hard time asking for help and pride yourself on your self-sufficiency and independence.

You have a hard time accepting and navigating change or feelings of uncertainty.

You often feel misunderstood, undervalued, invisible and overshadowed like you don’t have a voice or a presence that’s respected.

You feel that others don’t trust you or hold you with much regard because you’re different. No matter how hard you try to “be normal” your differences and inadequacies always seem to show through in some way.

You have a hard time trusting others, or trust too easily and get hurt.

You don’t trust yourself and have a hard time making decisions with confidence, often turning to outside sources for guidance.

When you’re being watched, timed or evaluated, you often fail to perform, speaking becomes less fluid and you draw blanks.

You avoid attention and feel anxious expressing yourself in front of more than one or two people. You blush easily and feel totally exposed when it happens, wishing you could melt into the floor and disappear. You also tend to avoid large crowds.

You feel emotions deeply, and maybe avoid them altogether because you don’t know how to handle them without being consumed by them and completely falling apart. Even if you wanted to, most of the time you don’t have the time or space to indulge like that.

You feel like you’re fundamentally flawed and limited because of who you are, and have spent much of your life hiding while you try to figure out what’s wrong with you, so you can fix it before anyone finds out. You’ve learned to be tough and strong and harden all your sensitivities to prove that you have what it takes to survive and meet everyone’s expectations of you. You’ve done this in an effort to fit in and be accepted, to feel less vulnerable and alone.

You set impossibly high standards for yourself that you can’t live up to, and have a harsh inner critic. You blame yourself for everything that goes wrong. Every mistake you make is a reminder/evidence of how inadequate you feel.

You’re plagued by feelings of guilt, shame, inadequacy, inferiority, and often feel like a failure.

You’re held back by feelings of self-doubt, fear, insecurity or a sense of powerlessness.

You’re stuck in confusion, perfectionism, indecision, worry, over-analysis or procrastination.

You suppress and avoid feelings or thoughts that are “negative” because you’ve learned that you need to be positive to be successful and happy.

You’ve set your passions aside in favor of a more practical, conservative path, but strongly feel an unmet yearning. You feel a deep calling to help others and make a difference in the world but the details of that desire are vague and you don’t know how to move forward.

You settle for relationships that really don’t support or nurture you or bring you the joy or fulfillment you long for. You might find yourself in one-sided relationships where you are the giver and they are the taker.

You’re afraid to let people see your true self for fear of judgment, criticism, creating distance or losing them altogether. You filter everything that comes out of your mouth and often choose to remain silent. You often don’t feel safe to allow your full self to be seen or heard for fear of being too much, not enough, weird, awkward, worthless, unimportant or unwanted. You often feel out of place, unwelcome and left out, like somehow you didn’t seem to land on the right planet and can’t seem to find “your people” or a place where you really belong.

You notice problematic patterns in your life that keep showing up again and again, you can’t seem to escape them.

You avoid conflict and adversity at all costs. You don’t know how to handle strong emotional reactions, your own or those of others, in a supportive and healthy way.

You’re extraordinarily kind, warm, generous and understanding towards others but don’t treat yourself the same way. You constantly compare yourself to others and often come up short.

You often feel like you need to defend yourself and can be angry and resentful towards people who don’t understand you, talk down to you, dismiss you or disrespect you. You also react very strongly to injustice, disrespect or mistreatment of others, especially those who can’t defend themselves, be it a person, animal or nature.

You keep your challenges, difficulties and emotional heaviness to yourself because you don’t want to bring other people down. When you need help the most, you isolate yourself and try to figure it out on your own, meanwhile pretending that everything is fine.

You’ve learned to keep your troubles to yourself because you think nobody will really understand or be able to help in a way that really makes a difference. Trying to reach out would be a waste of energy. Maybe you’ve tried to share your problems and the response wasn’t very helpful and only made you feel worse.

You don’t know why you feel the way you feel and don’t know how to explain it adequately to get the right kind of help. Maybe you have a hard time letting other people in because you’ve so often experienced judgment, teasing, criticism  pity, rejection, being misunderstood and shot down. Maybe you’ve shared too much with the wrong people in the past and regretted it, so you’re afraid to be vulnerable.