Dear ajack379:

I have and am improving my relationship with myself- am engaged in the process presently. Only ten minutes, while having a late breakfast, I have made some progress.

My first experience with a competent, empathetic, trustworthy, hard working therapist started March 2011 and lasted two years and a few months. I continued my therapy without my therapist when I relocated to a different state. What made the therapy effective for me in regard to my self-rejection/ heavy duty, abusive self criticism is the number one skill introduced to me by my then therapist and that is Mindfulness: the ability to pay attention to what is going on in my brain (and rest of body). And I don’t mean paying attention to my thoughts alone, that wondering- mind as it is called, being caught in thoughts.

What I mean by mindfulness is the ability to pay attention to thoughts and emotions and how the two affect each other in the moment-to-moment experience of living.

Without this ability I wouldn’t have been able to make the progress I am still making. It is a skill that takes a long time to build, for someone like me, anyway who has been as dissociated and .. strictly-cerebral as I used to be.

I had such great difficulty being around people because I was afraid of them attacking me, like my mother used to. I observed myself through their eyes (projected myself or better say, I projected my harshly critical mother into those people) and everything I did or didn’t do, an expression on my face, anything was an alert for me: am I going to be attacked for this or that. And I got angry at the person or people, as if he or she was already attacking me.

When alone, I got away from all my imagined wrong doings. Ah… the freedom (from attack), the security- precious.

These very days, I notice my distress (fear and anger) the moment it happens – this is Mindfulness. Then I correct my thinking from the automatic (no words really, anymore): he is looking at me doing X wrong and will be attacking me momentarily, to: he is not even looking at me. He is a safe person for me. He will not attack me because I know him well and he is invested in my well being.

Let me know if you want me to write any more; will be glad to share if it can be of any help to you.

anita