Home→Forums→Emotional Mastery→Being better at accepting depression→Reply To: Being better at accepting depression
Dear noname:
The word depression is in the title of your thread. Living in this way, being “overly cautious of every move I make out of fear I might somehow offend someone”, being therefore “quite and reserved to avoid mistakes”, this is a depressing way to live. Just like you wrote, living this way does “make it near impossible to have fun”.
I lived a lifetime having this very core belief, that I am guilty and that I have to be overly cautious of every move I make, fearing that I just said the wrong thing, didn’t say it just the right way, wasn’t complete, must clarify, must add that I didn’t mean it that way, that I meant this and not that, cover all possibilities of interpretation of what I just said. That has been torture and no wonder my relief times was being alone, not interacting with others, daydreaming.
You wrote, “I don’t feel its realistic for anyone to fully accept my flaws”. By flaws you mean being guilty, in other words, being a bad person who is inclined to offend others with every move he makes. I don’t think it is possible for a person who cares about being good, to accept being a bad person.
I think this is exactly the core of the problem: you, noname, are a good person. I have no doubt about it. But you believe that you are a bad person. There is no way for you to accept that you are a bad person, this is why you struggle so much. If you were a bad person being bad, you wouldn’t be struggling. But being the good person that you are, you are tortured by this false core belief that you are a bad person.
Having had this false core belief myself, only recently changed and still changing, I had to go back to my past relationship with my mother (no longer in contact with her). I believe you need to go back there too. I know you don’t like it and of course, I will not push this idea on you, not at all. I will explain here why it is necessary and for what purpose, and I will explain it in a very simple, a very simplified way:
In the beginning you were not mentally separated from your mother. The two of you, in your experience, were one unit. In the reality of your childhood, in the context of the relationship between you and our mother, you were the good person and she was the bad person.
When a separation of sorts happened within that mental unit, as you grew up, a big flaw in the separation process has occurred: you took to yourself the badness that was hers and gave her the goodness that is yours.
Now you must go back for just one purpose: give her back the badness that is hers and take from her the goodness that doesn’t belong with her.
(Again, I use good and bad here in the context of the relationship between you and your mother).
There is no other way to change this core belief that you are bad and guilty, a belief which is not true to reality. No other way to resolve your lifetime distress, depression and loneliness, all based on this powerful and false (not true to reality) core belief.
anita