Dear Lily:

The fact that “The things that happened back then, don’t really hurt any more” does not mean that you are “more or less okay with (your) past”- I think it means you are numb to your past, to your past experience with your parents. I believe so for two reasons:

1. On the first page of your thread you wrote about the past: “I felt like they (your parents) only saw the bad in me, like I was the evil child”, and about the present you wrote: “I want to hurt myself, destroy myself”. This means that because of the input by your parents in the past, a core belief was formed in you, when you were a child, that you are a bad person. This core belief exists now, in the present, and is motivating to destroy that perceived bad person.

2.Your therapist did not help you, she wasn’t good at what she did. When she shrugged her shoulders following you asking her if the therapy should continue- well, the shrugging of the shoulders means I don’t care. Not caring, the therapy was not … therapeutic at all, damaging, not healing.

I don’t think the problem is that you are lazy or not ambitious. I think you are hard working and ambitious. The problem is, how do you stop beating yourself when you believe that you are a bad person, how do you forgive yourself for making mistakes when every mistake means to you, that indeed you are a bad person…

It is that core belief that makes life so very difficult. It has made my life very difficult. It is like carrying a ton of unnecessary, figurative weight. Everything is more difficult, every step is difficult. Having accomplished what you have accomplished so far, carrying this figurative weight, is evidence to how hard working and ambitious you really are.

To make your life better, it is not that you need to correct lazy ways and become ambitious, it is that you need to challenge that core belief and if you determine that it is untrue, change it. It takes a lot of time and work to do this. But over time, that figurative weight will lessen and lessen and moving farther will be possible.

anita