Dear Flavia:

You are welcome. Your ex husband’s father mistreated  him and he  proceeded to mistreat you, a very common and unfortunate pattern, abuse begets  abuse. It is a person’s responsibility to not pass on abuse but he was not responsible in this most fundamental way.

I wish he  did seek professional help early on and changed his ways. But he didn’t.

You wrote: “I thought that I was like a defective product… sometimes  I still act like everything I do will never  be good enough”. As you can see, and I do see, having a doctorate degree, working as a professor in a university, being a.. good Christian wife.. none  of these change that core belief of not  being  good enough. I see  people achieve great things but the not-good-enough feeling remains. And they keep aiming at proving they are good enough by achieving more, but the feeling remains. The way to change this core belief, this feeling  of being  defective, less than is to notice the thoughts and feelings of that inner critic within and inserting  rational thoughts into the  mix.

The inner critic, that is a mental representative  of a parent that was critical of the child. I suppose your ex  husband has a hold on that inner critic,  adding a lot to what it has to say to you. The voice of the inner critic is not  only thoughts,  dry thoughts but there is emotion to the thought, that feeling of shame, of distress. The thoughts are convincing because of the  emotion involved.

When you hear such thought+ emotion, notice- what was the thought, what  was  the emotion, then relax best you can and substitute true thought for the distorted thought. For example, let’s say you wash dishes and notice you left dirt on a dish, a thought occurs to you: you can’t even do this one  thing right? What is wrong with you? And you feel shame and distress, hot in the face maybe, heart  racing a bit. Pause for a moment, breathe slowly, say to yourself: it is okay, I was distracted, no one washes dishes perfectly every time, everyone leaves dirt sometimes. The thing  to do is to  rewash the dish, so you do just that, slowly, put it away.

Guided meditations, theme mindfulness is an excellent practice because  it slows you down, helps build the practice of pausing, noticing and correcting thoughts. When you correct a distorted/ abusive thought, a good feeling follows the correct/ true thought.

I hope you post again. I would like to  communicate with you further.

anita