a realization

First:  I have to get this off my chest.  Everytime I think about the people who have my blog in their Google Reader I get a little gun shy.  Why/how is it always so scary to post things online?

On with the realization:

I do this thing.  I didn't realize or understand it until yesterday.  I realized that I don't celebrate my victories.  I always thought it was that I can't take compliments... when somebody says, "Good job!" I usually feel sheepish and undeserving.  I try to say thank you - but I never quite feel accomplished, per se.  Other people seem to celebrate their victories, at least I think they do.  And those same people are the ones that are good at celebrating others' victories as well.

I am not good at this.  At celebrating others victories.

It's not that I'm not proud of other people for their successes - because I am.  But I've always felt like I've needed to fake the excitement that goes along with celebration.  It's weird, hard to explain.  But it's rooted back at how I treat myself.  As a child I always had these insurmountable expectations for myself.  I was easily overwhelmed and overly stressed when something didn't come easily to me - I always expected that I'd be able to perform perfectly at anything that was asked of me.  This is/was probably an unhealthy mindset.  But I developed a sort of backwards reward system for myself.  Instead of celebrating victories, I've only ever punished myself for my failures.

I expect myself to be able to do things perfectly, and when I can't, I mentally beat myself up.  On top of that, I don't celebrate the things that I do achieve - I just chalk them up to the baseline expectation I have for myself.

So what that means is I float around my emotional baseline and the only direction I'm moving is down. Like this:

What's difficult about this is I've only just realized it - and I have no idea how to go about retraining myself to think in a way that will obviously be much better for me in the long run.  Help!