Dear Alia:

You shared very little about yourself. All I know is that you are in your early forties, have a family to support (married with children perhaps, I don’t know), live in a small town with little work opportunities, moving is not an option, commuting is cost ineffective.

You believe that you are “worthless and useless”, at least in the area of work, and you suffer from “work anxiety and fear” as a result. I am not clear about the ego thing, if what you meant is that you behaved at work as too confident, sort of went to an extreme from the worthless belief to display the opposite?

What I do know is that I shared your belief myself, that I was worthless and useless most of my life. It is only recently, while still in what I refer to as my process of healing, that this core belief has been changing. Before I was much more anxious than I am now because I felt that I didn’t know what to do in this or that situation, that I didn’t know the right thing to do, how to respond to people, how to protect myself or even know when I was supposed to protect myself. I didn’t have me to count on, to trust. So I was anxious. Can you relate?

anita