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Altering my core belief of being totally bad & unworthy no matter; corrosive self doubt

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ms spock

MyPTSD Pro
How have you cracked this one?

I have an issue with corrosive self doubt. I have an issue with deep, intense and passionate self hatred. What my parents instilled within me are total lies. I am simply not as bad as a person that I feel/think that I am. I can write that but I cannot experience within myself as being true. I deeply believe at a total core level that I am totally bad, awful, revolting, too much, too needy, too desperate, too horrible, too destructive, too aggressive, too reactive, too dangerous and too disgusting to have anything in my life. I sabotage myself and f*ck up things for myself and then go through the recriminations and self hatred. I only just noticed the self sabotage thing. So I have awareness of that at least. I walk around all day saying to myself "You have to improve. What you do is not good enough". This is different from the passionate for healing/recovery/management. I am being totally brutal to myself. I just pound myself no matter how little or big a thing that happens is, and I pound myself whether I can or could not change the thing or not. So I am not doing a lot of reality based thinking. I am doing a lot of distorted cognitive thinking. I am living and reinforcing my own inherent negativity bias thing, which all humans to do some extent.

I am terrified to be in this now, though I am no longer in danger or threatened. I tried for many years to get better in a place that was dangerous and it didn't work. I understand why that is now.

I don't have to continually attack myself after each encounter with other people. I don't need to walk around all day saying to myself "You have to improve. What you do is not good enough". I do that all the time and it is sabotaging my recovery/maintenance. It's not unreasonable to not be able to give up comfort eating or binge watching TV if being present in my body is to be aggressively, dissected and self attacked by my self. I am constantly aggressively putting myself down or attacking myself.

1. is to be really aware of it. The first thing is to note each time I do it.

2. is to be able to sit with it and see what I am doing. I need to notice the patterns.

3. is to gently, gently, gently pry myself away from obsessive thought patterns I have used to save myself from my parents and then the emotionally and financially abusive psychologist and the sexually exploitative psychologist.

So ways I disconnect from myself include:

dissociation,
depersonalisation
derealisation
maladaptive daydreaming
food addiction, binging and comfort eating
depriving myself
punishing myself
sabotaging myself
aggressive and abuse self talk - which I am often not aware of but it's related to those horrible feelings.

The last three I have been aware on and off and people often tell me that I am so hard on myself and that I am giving myself a hard time. I didn't really get it though. Well I get it a lot more now as I have just had a major depressive episode. These thought patternes

I will rarely let myself be nurturing to myself or helping myself. It all has to be me fixing my badness, so I am reinforcing myself own negative patterns, corrosive self doubt and self hatred.

I have been here just one month off a decade, and I had worked so hard for many years before I got here. I have worked really hard since I have been hard. This is an adjusting an attitude and life practices. I think once I have gotten this one down I will be at a maintenance place. It feels impossible to do this but I have felt many things have been impossible and done them with lots of persistence and perseverance.

I realise now too that when I am deeply in self hatred and punitive mode that if anyone agrees with my self hatred I spiral down in to confirmation of my parents ways of treating, seeing and hurting me and I get so much worse.
 
Heartfelt suggestion: instead of practicing criticizing yourself, debrief. Whenever you engage with the world, spend five seconds looking at the positives of that engagement.

- I successfully walked into the store
- I successfully chose three things from the shelf
- I successfully interacted with the teller
- I successfully left the store.

Those things are true. They are concrete and absolute and verifiable. Perhaps those things would be very easy for you; for me, its worthy of a pat on the back. You can use more complicated things :)

Be your own student. Congratulate yourself. Offer help. Give yourself gold stars.

In fact, I recommend putting an actual gold star in your bedroom, as a memory aid. I've got one. Whenever I see it, I remind myself to have compassion for myself. Some days I can't feel it, so I remind myself I've felt it before, and i can feel it again.
 
@ms spock, thanks for your post, for expressing that painful experience of hating yourself so much. Religions assume that everyone will love themselves as a matter of fact - it's an abomination that our starting points are to hate ourselves. My history is that I reserved all of my most deeply felt hatred and hostility for myself. It was unconscious; there was nothing I could do to change that. I would frequently curse myself out, call myself stupid, and when no one was looking, I would hit and slap my own face and head. And it didn't feel weird to do that. But as I read your post, I suddenly realized that it's been at least half a year or more since I've done that. I'm like wow right now. I think for me, it has been crucial to embrace my ugly, awkward, bad, stupid, yucky self to the fullest, to integrate that side of me into the realm of light. From reading your post, I sense that you're distancing yourself from that side of yourself because you say:
I spiral down in to confirmation of my parents ways of treating, seeing and hurting me and I get so much worse.

The "I" takes on your parents' perspective. For me the hardest part was to really identify the "bad" side as myself, which I envisioned to look like a character out of Les Miserables. To identify with her was like death in the past, so my mind went bezerk at the thought of becoming one with her. I hope this is not a dumb analogy, but it was like a racist having to embrace a person who was a race he was biased against. At times, I felt revulsion. But I soon learned that my badness was a lie, an illusion created by my parents to buck up their own sense of selves. It's hard to expose the lie when it's covered up.
 
I don't have a perfect answer for this.

You have some people in your life now who love and value you, if I remember correctly. Are they such poor judges of character that they would feel that bond with a person as awful as you imagine yourself to be? I doubt it!

Someone I respect actually asked me once, if I really believed I was uniquely the worst person God had ever created. He said (kindly) that if I thought that, I was giving myself too much credit. That I was not actually that "special" I was only as bad and worthless as the average person. Interesting perspective.

This stuff takes practice, I think. You didn't get these inaccurate ideas over night. You won't learn a more accurate way of thinking over night either. Because I value fairness, I find it helps to remind myself that it's only fair to treat myself like I would someone else. (But I do tend to argue this point with myself a lot.)

This is about growing, and learning, and making progress because it's fun and interesting and adds positive value to the universe. It's not about getting "better" because you're defective now. It's not punishment and it's not atonement. It's a journey, not a destination.
 
Someone I respect actually asked me once, if I really believed I was uniquely the worst person God had ever created. He said (kindly) that if I thought that, I was giving myself too much credit. That I was not actually that "special" I was only as bad and worthless as the average person. Interesting perspective.
That is most amusing. Thank you for that. It is so true.

I had forgotten that I had created this thread. I am really challenging this one at the moment. It's really slippery and comes at me through multiple perspectives. But I am getting smarter at noticing it and knocking it down. Until very recently I would become paralysed by this. Now I am keeping going a more.

Heartfelt suggestion: instead of practicing criticizing yourself, debrief. Whenever you engage with the world, spend five seconds looking at the positives of that engagement.

- I successfully walked into the store
- I successfully chose three things from the shelf
- I successfully interacted with the teller
- I successfully left the store.

Those things are true. They are concrete and absolute and verifiable. Perhaps those things would be very easy for you; for me, its worthy of a pat on the back. You can use more complicated things :)
That's a great strategy. I could do that and really focus on the good/positive/proactive things that I do, and I do do a lot of them. Like you, some of the simplest things can be like Mount Everest for me some days. So each small thing is worth cherishing - it really is - when I have a major depressive episode I might barely be able to get out of bed and might only be able to binge watch TV.

Be your own student. Congratulate yourself. Offer help. Give yourself gold stars.
That's a good idea. I am really nice, caring, loving and encouraging towards my students.

In fact, I recommend putting an actual gold star in your bedroom, as a memory aid. I've got one. Whenever I see it, I remind myself to have compassion for myself. Some days I can't feel it, so I remind myself I've felt it before, and i can feel it again.
That's a great suggestion. I can do something similar.
 
This has been useful for me to listen to in order to gently break down the self hatred, ruminations and corrosive self doubt.


and this...

Self-Compassion there's free audio and exercises to do.

and this could have been written for me
seriously could have been written for me. She goes through the evolutionary perspective of the reptilian brain. The gold fish story is amusing.

and


I want to go to back to The Mindful Way Through Depression and The Mindful Way Through Anxiety.

I need to revisit David Burns' "Feeling Good" and another book.
 
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Big successes for me today. I got up and walked for an hour and a half with the dog. Then we went to see PB, she sat on his lap and licked his face, he laughed a lot. Then I went and bought some good food for B to eat for breakfast. Now I am preparing to teach all today 1) Teaching IT to kids, which is a lot of fun, then teaching about Australian wildlife this afternoon at a big festival so that will be fun as well.

I am reaching out to make connections with people. I have found another group to be part of - the two crazy ladies I should have left that show months ago, but at least when I get there now I am ending it on a much more positive light.
 
I taught really well first at the IT place and there weren't as many kids as expected. After that I went out to the big festival. I was diligent, attentive and they couldn't believe I learnt all the kids names and I acquitted myself well. I stayed back to help with the pack up, and then helped a women next to us who looked at all her stuff to pack up and looked like she would cry. I started packing up all her stuff as well and she was barely holding with me helping her, and the two sweet gay boys helped us take down the tent.

My sleep is still shit I woke up again at 2.30am again last night I went and took a sleeping tablet. I lose it much more when I am not sleeping until I ride through these changes I have to take sleeping tablets or mix it up with Valium one night and then sleeping tablets the next. I can't afford to crack any more teeth open. That's been 3/4 nights of waking up at 2.30am. I am not going to stress about it but I am going to manage it carefully so I don't end up losing it emotionally.

I am doing really well. It's amazing. Things are coming together.

I am not useless, hopeless, or an abomination.

I am going really well.
 
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