Dear anonymous03:

Welcome back! I am amazed as I continue to find out more of what we have in common, I share your quirk as you call it, at least I used to- touching wood. In my case, it was more than a quirk, it was one of my OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)  compulsions, aimed at keeping bad luck from happening to me. I did touch wood (the top of a table) the first time I read, and I will be touching the desk to my right side as I re-read the rest of your post.

I read that you have been seeing a doctor, that you’ve been chanting- all good, and that you asserted yourself with your mother with partial success: “the other day, she yelled at me.. I conveyed to her that I am not going to bear the brunt of her anxiety… I am not okay with her yelling at me… This has helped to a certain extent”.

You wrote: “my family thinks I’m too ‘modern’ and ‘liberal’. Well, I wish more people were”- it’s almost funny, isn’t it, that NOT yelling at one’s kids is considered too modern and liberal. This means that yelling at one’s kids is considered traditional and conservative.

You shared that you “have really low self-esteem”, that your “self-worth is almost negligible”, and that “there is a fair amount of self-hatred”- that was my experience too, but not anymore.

“Regarding what you said about the guilty core belief. How does that really work? I genuinely am feeling guilty majority of the times.. I’m scolding myself mentally all the time, and I can’t stop. Can we speak more about this? How do I change this core belief?… I realize the self-criticizing and scolding needs to stop… I am just trying to heal now”-

– We can definitely speak more about this:

Notice this, in what I just quoted, you wrote: “I’m scolding myself mentally all the time”. On January 21, you wrote: “Growing up, I did get scolded a lot, sometimes for doing things that weren’t even wrong”- your mother scolded you=> you scold yourself. A mother’s scolding in real-life becomes a mental scolding. In other words, a mental representative of our scolding mother keeps scolding us.

The guilty core belief is about believing that you deserved the scolding, that you were a bad girl who was scolded by a good mother. To change this core belief, consider that your mother scolding and yelling at you was not a form of parenting, but a form of abuse, and that when she scolded and yelled at the child that you were- you were a good child, and she was a bad mother.

In addition, it will be impossible for you to stop scolding yourself (that is, for the mental representative of your mother to stop scolding you) when your mother, in real-life, still scolds you once in a while.

Regarding the pandemic taking a turn to the worse- if you are living in the country I think you are living in, then the pandemic has taken a huge turn to the worse with a record high of over 332.5 thousand new cases and a record high of 2,256 new deaths yesterday, April 22, 2021 (Wikipedia, India). Where I live, the U.S., there were over 67 thousand new cases and 896 new deaths yesterday, a big improvement over the record highs of over 307.5 thousand new cases on January 8, 2021, and 4,493 new deaths on January 12 2021.

Please do your very best to be safe, and keep safe. I hope that social distancing and sanitary practices as well as vaccination brings an end to this nightmare sooner than later.

anita