Dear Lily:

“I don’t like myself much and put myself down, so others also don’t respect me”- it will take a long time for you to like yourself, but it takes no time, if you pay attention, to not tell other people that you don’t like yourself. “Just need to work on my discipline!”, you wrote regarding the graphic novel project. Not putting yourself down verbally also takes discipline, and you can do it!

“I am grown up now and people usually don’t dare to make such comments to adults (how sad that some would then think it is okay to treat kids in this way? Or to hit them? When they would never do this to an adult)!”-

Problem is when parents say mean comments to their children, the brain remembers those comments, and those comments are glued to the brain with the feeling of shame and guilt, and then, as adults, the brain replays those comments, just as is happening to you. And so, when a person doesn’t say hi to you in the hallway, or tells passive aggressive jokes at work, you get very distressed.

Without those “mean comments” you heard as a child, a person not saying hi in the hallway would not be this distressing, not even close, and you’d forget about it quickly. And the passive aggressive jokes at work would be distressing but not so distressing that you “almost started to cry at work and had suicidal thoughts on Friday and Saturday”.

If you had the opportunity to examine those early life comments and your feelings that are attached to those comments, in the context of quality psychotherapy, that will be the beginning of decreasing the frequency and extent of your distress in social situations and otherwise.

anita