Dear humour,

I am sorry you feel bad about yourself and that your self-confidence is quite low. I’ve taken a look at some of your earlier threads, and what you wrote about your family and growing up (in the thread “Require advice on how to gracefully accept changes without getting overwhelmed”) could actually explain why you feel so low now.

Anita already noticed back then one important thing that you’ve said:

I have been extremely attached to my family always trying to make ours ‘a happy family. It never happened though. No matter how much I tried, nothing got better.

Also, you haven’t really spent fun time together as a family, making nice memories, or simply bonding with each other:

We have not spent time together, not had a meal together, never went on a vacation together. Basically we never made any memories

You also said that both you, your sister and your mother felt depressed on and off.

It seems to me that your depression could be the result of you trying so hard to make your parents happy, but never succeeding. This causes the child (and later adult) to have low self-esteem, because if nothing they’ve tried made their parents happy, the child concludes that it must be their fault. So you end up believing you’re not good enough, that you are somehow defective.

And you carry this false belief into your adulthood…. As an adult, you have been putting yourself down a lot, right? For example now, you’ve been telling yourself that you are mediocre, that you are falling behind in life, that you should have done a lot better.

It seems you have a strong inner critic, who is telling you that you’re not good enough, maybe even that you’re a failure.

Do you resonate with any of this?

(If you do, the antidote is self-love and self-compassion. It’s possible to feel better!)