Hi Anita, thank you very much for both of your responses and for taking the time to re-post following that odd spam post!

As an adult, you rightfully, I am sure, labeled your father a misogynist, which suggests that you know that many of his opinions about girls and women were wrong. But as a child, your father was a superior being, a god (to the child that you were),  and what he said about you was the word of god. He told you in so many ways that there is something terribly wrong with you,  you naturally believed him, and shame (the belief that there is something terribly wrong with you) took hold, a core belief was formed.

The hallmark of shame is a constant, vigilant, painful awareness of  mistakes made/ wrongdoings committed: often imagined mistakes and wrongdoings, and in regard to real mistakes and wrongdoings: they always appear, to the shame based individual, much bigger than they are.

Yes, I agree with this. I’m full of shame as a result of my dad’s treatment of me. I sometimes even hear my mind telling myself “I’m bad” or “I’m disgusting” and it’s sad and scary how ingrained these beliefs are. I’m trying to grieve for my childhood when emotion comes up and attempting to talk to myself kindly. In the present day I genuinely don’t feel like I have any reason to feel that way towards myself and I know that it’s not true, yet my nervous system is wired around these messages.

“For me, it’s probably enough now to acknowledge that when something like this happens it isn’t automatically my fault“- it will take this kind of acknowledging, over and over again, over many months, to uproot the core belief that when something bad (or something that you perceive to be bad) happens, it is automatically your fault.

Thank you, I’m guessing persistence and repetition is key, plus identifying when a thought isn’t helpful in the first place. I think I’ve over-identified with them a lot in the past because when coupled with feeling anxious and upset they’ve seemed logical. I didn’t understand the importance of emotional regulation and how much being out of your nervous system’s window of tolerance can skew your perception of things.

A CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) practice will help in this regard. I got my introduction to CBT 12 years ago by reading the book  Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Dummies and doing the exercises in the workbook, same title.  One key exercise is filling in a form when you notice that you feel distressed: (1) you label the feeling best you can, (2) you write down the thought or thoughts behind your distress, (3) you evaluate each thought as to its truth or lack of. Ex.,  you submit a post on tiny buddha and it comes out with lots of excess print, you feel distressed, you fill in the form: I feel anxious (feeling), I made a terrible mistake (thought), then you evaluate the thought: did I make a mistake.. what was my mistake?

Aha, I have this book! I bought it about 7 years ago and read it all the way through but didn’t commit to doing the exercises. It’s a great book but I got stuck in the act of constant researching and reading about mental health in other areas, which I think was a form of self-soothing and running away from doing the actual work.

Flicking through it again now, yes, I think re-visiting this book and working through it properly would be so helpful for me. It’s really encouraging to know that it helped you and I feel so ready to commit to it now. Would you mind sharing how you incorporated CBT into your day to day life? For instance, would you sit down for an allotted time each day to work through the exercises?

The reason I made the comment above (the italicized) is that as a shame-based person that I was, I  know how quick I’ve been to seewrongdoing and wrong being on my part anywhere and everywhere possible. Sometimes, when I felt criticized and judged, I really was, but at other times, I assumed that I was… when I wasn’t.

I know that as I respond to members, particularly to shame-based members, I need to be reasonably careful to not word things in ways that can easily be perceived as criticism. More so, I need to be careful to not really criticize and judge members- something I did when I wrongly projected my mother into original posters’ stories, wrongly assuming that what is true about my mother is also true about the OP or the OP’s mother!

That makes a lot of sense and I thank you for being so considerate because it’s not always easy to get these things across online. In person we have tone of voice and body language to help us! Projection when you’ve experienced a difficult/abusive parent is so easily done and human, I’ve experienced this tendency myself in the past when it comes to my father.