When I’m Successful, I’ll Be Happy The Construction of the Mirage...

## When I am Successful, I'll be Happy

The Construction of the Mirage: How We Make Ourselves Unhappy by Chasing an Uncertain Future

Event Description

We live in a world where success has become the currency of worth. Behind achievement, image and freedom lies an ancient need that the modern mind has forgotten, the need to be loved. Many people do not realise that their pursuit of success is an attempt to silence a deeper wound that whispers “I am not enough.”
In this webinar we explore the psychological, emotional and spiritual roots of this illusion. Through Schema Therapy, neuroscience and human experience, we uncover why success feels essential for survival, why failure feels like annihilation and how modern culture has turned achievement into a new form of idolatry.
This session offers a path back to presence, connection and inner truth. Healing begins not when we become more successful, but when we remember that love cannot be earned.

***

# Programme

### 1. The Mirage of Success: What We Really Chase

• Why modern life equates success with worth
• The emotional need behind achievement
• The quiet wound that says we must earn love
• How identity becomes tied to performance

### 2. The Early Roots: When Love Becomes Conditional

• Childhood messages that shape adult striving
• Praise, withdrawal and the invisible rules of belonging
• The inner script “I exist only when I win”
• How schemas begin before we have language

### 3. Schema Therapy and the Wound of Success

• Defectiveness and Shame, the belief “I’m not enough”
• Emotional Deprivation and the hunger to be seen
• Failure schema and the fear of being ordinary
• Approval Seeking and the addiction to validation
• Unrelenting Standards and the endless race to prove oneself

### 4. When Success Replaces Love

• Why we chase goals to feel alive
• How relationships become performance arenas
• The collapse that follows every failure
• The all or nothing mind and the birth of depression

### 5. The Spiritual Illusion: When Self Help Becomes Idolatry

• The culture of “manifesting,” “vibrating higher” and “endless positivity”
• How modern spirituality reinforces shame
• The rise of spiritual guilt: “If I fail, it’s my fault for not believing enough”
• Recovering a spirituality that embraces humanity, not perfection

### 6. The Neuroscience of Worth and Presence

• How the brain changes when we stop striving
• Rebalancing the nervous system through emotional honesty
• Prefrontal calm, amygdala regulation and parasympathetic grounding
• Why safety, not success, restores inner peace

### 7. The Modern Idols We Build

• Visibility, metrics, beauty, money and autonomy as new objects of worship
• How we sacrifice relationships and wellbeing to maintain image
• The danger of living for mirrors rather than for meaning
• Losing yourself while trying to become someone impressive

### 8. Returning to the Self: The Way Back

• How to meet the vulnerable part that strives to survive
• Speaking to the inner child: “You don’t need to earn love anymore.”
• From performance to presence, from image to connection
• The role of compassion in transforming the inner narrative

### 9. Healing Practices and Mirror Based Work

• Grounding the emotional system through awareness
• Seeing yourself beyond achievement
• Mirror practices to reconnect with inner truth
• Integrating Schema Therapy, neuroscience and self compassion

### 10. Final Experiential Practice and Q and A

• A guided presence based exercise
• Space for questions in an unrecorded closing session