Hi Anita,

Did you have counselling or therapy to reach this stage? Or is it a case of having to constantly remind yourself of the fact that you are not the person your mother said you were? I think it is so difficult to let go of the beliefs our parents instill in us because they taught us when we were growing and you look to them to learn how to live and what to believe.

Thank-you for remembering my post from earlier on in the year, I have re-read it and I feel like these feelings keep cycling through my life. The people and circumstances may change but these feelings manifest again and again.

I do feel ashamed all the time when I really think about it. Whenever I speak to anyone I assume they are thinking negative things about me because I feel like a failure or worthless. Sometimes I even feel embarrassed to eat at work and I’ll let people push in front of me in queues and things like that because I don’t feel like I deserve to go first.

I think the problems with my family will always be a struggle because if they knew some of the things I did they would probably shun me completely and never speak to me again. I now have a nephew and another one on the way and it would hurt me very deeply to not be able to see them. I don’t introduce my boyfriend to them and I can’t talk too much about my life as I don’t want them to leave me, so I think there will always be an element of shame as I can’t be open with them. It’s hard to process this and ‘categorise’ these thoughts in a way that I can accept without feeling guilt.

I allow myself to cry in private when I need to, but I do very much struggle to cry in front of other people.

I feel like these problems are preventing me from having a healthy romantic relationship. I start off ok when I can distant myself, but once things get more intense and feelings and attachment are involved, I straight away start to feel insecure and inadequate. I feel like they are losing interest or that they do not love me enough (although I don’t know what ‘enough’ would even really look like). We spoke before on my post about feeling insecure because my partner is attractive and he had been using dating sites whilst with me. I can understand that this is not an acceptable behaviour so it’s normal to feel insecure after this has happened, but with the existing issues I feel like I would have ended up feeling insecure anyway. I did not feel this way at the beginning. It is as soon as I start to care about someone that I am suddenly terrified of losing them and then I become certain that I will lose them because I feel like I am not enough.

I stopped my counselling because my counsellor was focusing very much on my mother’s death. She asked a lot of difficult questions and I would go away feeling very upset. I feel like maybe this is part of the process but I didn’t want to feel so weak and down that I couldn’t face getting out of bed and going to work.