When we looked into the root of this behavior, everything began to make sense. He had grown up under intense pressure from his father, a highly accomplished man, both a professional soccer player and a university professor. His father had clear expectations for success, and there was little room for failure or mediocrity. As a child, my client wasn’t able to meet these expectations in the way his father demanded. Over time, this led to the formation of a painful core belief: “I’m not good enough. I’m a failure.”

But he couldn’t live with this belief, so his system developed a strategy to escape it: extreme overcompensation. Every time those old feelings of inadequacy surfaced, he would unconsciously push himself into extreme action, to prove that he wasn’t a failure, to avoid ever touching the shame of not being good enough.

But of course, this strategy was unsustainable. It led to exhaustion, burnout, and a complete emotional imbalance. The constant running from one extreme to the other was his system's way of avoiding pain, but in the process, it created a life that was unmanageable.