Better? It did help the trigger to do this. I like doing this!
Yay!
"won't and don't need to have everyone like me" - always watch out for the word "need" - it's actually part of black and white thinking.
I would also add that even the words good/bad are fairly black and white as well. A common phrase from DBT is to change I am bad or any other negative self talk into something like "I have been doing the best I can, and things need to change." It is neither all one or the other. It's less about good and bad, and more about accepting what is with a non-judgemental stance.
All the ways you ask about being bad reflect that you are very judgmental about yourself. Making judgements rarely helps fuel change. Acceptance can really help fuel change. And I know that you do want some things to change.
Everytime you get stuck on various ways you say or show to yourself or other people that "I am bad" or ask people "Am I bad?" to try to pause and take out the word "bad" and try to tell yourself: "I have been doing the best I can, and some things need to change."
That thinking fuels to then looks at ways ti change. "I am bad" - doesn't. It's not a useful thought if the goal is change.
It reminds me of how I used to ask my therapist all the time, "Am I crazy?" I would then list for her 100 reasons I thought I was crazy. I thought the problem behind much of my depair was that I either wrongly thought I was crazy or I was actually crazy. My therapist could have sat there all day and told me I was not crazy, and I would have thought of something else. We did initially did go through my thoughts as to why I thought I was crazy, and she did initially refute them.... but it wasn't helpful. For the same reasons others here have pointed out, there were deeper reasons why I was so bent on I am crazy.
My therapist told me that I was trauma bonded to the thought itself.
So she approached it differently. She told me that if I was crazy, then well, I need therapy all the more! We both laughed.
Then she asked me, "what does this automatic thought do for you?" "What do you gain by thinking "I am crazy" or being worried about being crazy?"
At first, I looked at her like she asked me the worst thing. I told her, I don't gain anything by thinking this.
I was incorrect.
What I gain is that I escape the true work of dealing with the trauma, I have a way to blame myself and not face what has been lost. I maintain some kind of bond or connection with the abusers by believing what they told me. I also buy into the belief that crazy people do crazy things, and then I'm more likely to keep doing crazy things. Thinking "I am crazy" is also a way to set a boundary between me and everyone else. I am separate. I am not them. I am other. In the end, thinking and believing I am crazy didn't really help me do anything I actually wanted, it didn't help me change, and "helped" me escape the grief and pain of the trauma I went through.
I wonder if the same might be happening for you, only change out "crazy" for the word "bad." It does not surprise me that as you begin to get unstuck, or less bonded to these thoughts, and begin to change them with other more useful thoughts, some of the grief of what you lost as a child, what your inner child did not get, is coming more to the surface.
For me, part of changing the automatic thoughts was recognizing that my abusers were abusers and I did not want to agree with them.
Sometimes, when I got caught up in thinking negatively about myself, my therapist would ask me, "Do you want to agree with your abusers? They thought you were terrible. Do you want to agree with child abusers?" My answer was no. It was a confrontationally kind thing that helped snapped me out of the automatic thoughts. It helped me slowly break that bond.
You are doing that in a different way by going back to identify them as pedophiles. Good. Now keep choosing to reject what pedophiles believe, including what they believed about you.
My therapist would also ask me "what benefit negative self talk doing for you?" "Is another way to get what the negative self talk gets you?" Like escape from the grief that it wasn't my fault. Once we identified that, my therapist and I would work on ways to handle the grief and take breaks from the grief. Same for anxiety and etc.
This is another way of looking at it all, and doing basically the same work you are doing.
For more info on DBT, try googling "DBT self help" - there are tons of good sites out there. There are also some really good workbooks that help people with or without BPD.
