Dear Lucas:

You wrote yesterday: “I only feel really good about myself when I know I have an impact on others around me. If I am by myself, I often feel like I am worthless… I guess it’s part of the reason I don’t like to be alone… Most of the time, I live with feelings of intense hatred and disgust… It seems that no matter what I do, I will not be enough”-

To understand more the situation now, we have to look at how it started: a baby, a young child, is not born with a sense of his own worth, neither is he born with a sense of lack of individual worth. It is born open, wide open to input. If a parent smiles at the child, expressing pleasure for having the child in the parent’s life, that becomes the child’s sense of self worth.

Without that smile, without the message from a parent that he or she is pleased to have you in her life,  later in life, true: “no mater what I do, I will never be enough”-

You can make the whole world smile (Robin Williams did, an international comedian and movie star), but if you didn’t make that one person in your beginning life smile, there is indeed nothing you can do to make up for that early lack.

Nothing you can do unless you heal, that is. Heal from the lack of that smile, and often, from the frown of the parent looking at you in those early days.

If what I wrote here means something to you, let me know.

anita