Dear Elizabeth:

You are welcome. I accept your apology in your post of a few days ago. I appreciate it as I got so few of those in my lifetime, it is a nice, refreshing experience for me!

“I still have it in my head that I don’t deserve to be happy, that I’ve done this to myself and this is what I get“- this means that you are angry with yourself, angrily saying to yourself: your fault! You messed up! You deserve to be feel this pain, to be punished!

No wonder you “don’t have the motivation” to stop suffering when you believe that you deserve to suffer, that you should suffer.

This belief that I italicized, was that a message you heard from a parent when you were a child, or otherwise, how did it come  about, when did it first appear in your earlier life?

anita