Dear cass:

I appreciate you sharing a bit about your childhood. There is a bit of trust (in me, in this case) that a person has when sharing personal items, and I treasure such trust,  it  is  very valuable to  me.

My first point is regarding what you wrote here: “I feel like  if I fail, everything they have done for me  will be for nothing”- that is, if you fail to “be able to support them (your parents) financially in their old  age”, that would mean that the food, clothes, school supplies and so forth that they  paid for you to have  would  have  been for nothing.

In a  society where older people do not have a way to  survive except by being taken care  of  financially by their adult children, and that is the  societal expectation (is this true  in your case?), I can understand this way of thinking. But even then, I hope that their motivation was to fulfil their own responsibility to take  care of whom they brought into their world and that they were  interested in your well-being for its own sake.

My second point is  regarding your childhood experience with your friend and her  cousin, that tells me that the core belief that you were inadequate/ less than was  already  formed by that  point,  before this experience.

You wrote  regarding  age 6 or 7, “around the age that I began to  stop being as close  to my dad.  He  kind of took  a backseat in raising me”- meaning he was  close and he withdrew, moving  farther away from you; you reached out to him and he rejected you, correct?

If you would  like, will you share  more about this last  item? My purpose is to look into the origin of this false  core belief that you are  inadequate and less than. It is the beginning of the process  of challenging  such a  core  belief, evaluating it and  hopefully changing it  to a true core belief.

Can you imagine  believing  you are adequate and equal to others, that  no one  is  more than you.

anita