Dear noname:

You are welcome.

My input on first topic: “I find myself judging her for her mistakes.. women I want to be intimate with I find myself judging them for their past even if they are more self-aware and a completely different person now. It makes me feel hypocritical”-

– in the core of this judgment is your judgment of.. you: “My inner child is so noisy and still requires very much attention”, you wrote today. You judged what your inner child has to say as noise, and you judged your inner child as requiring attention that he does not deserve. Your judgment of your inner child is wrong: what he has to say is not noise, not if you listen to him. And he doesn’t require any more attention than what he deserves. The reason that the attention you paid him is not enough is because it was never an empathetic, gentle attention!

You still don’t know your inner child, the person that you were (and are) well enough. Aim at getting to know yourself in a different way, in a way that places this child that you were/ are as the most important person in your life, a person born good but not treated good. Fast forward, he needs you to treat him differently from how he was treated.

He was noise to your mother growing up (when he made a noise), he was noise to your father… he needs to not be noise to you!

Now back to women you were intimately involved with, this woman particularly- the reason you judge them but not your clients is the intimacy issue, the women activate your judgment because they feel too close to you. The judgment of a parent activates self judgment-> self judgment activates woman judgment.

Prepare counter thoughts to focus on when you feel that judgment for the woman in your life, relax into those thoughts, and place empathetic, gentle attention on your inner child, listen to him, listen to the simple sentences he has to say to you.

My input on the second topic (I read the part of your post on the second topic after typing the above): in the first paragraph of your post, you wrote: “I find it difficult to see myself sometimes, had someone come to me with this same issue it would have been easy for me to identify”- it is easy for me to identify that your decision to have no contact with your mother is the right choice for you, and long, long overdue. For now, you can see it yourself and you felt relief having made this decision. But too soon (has it already happened?), you will feel guilty about it, and you are likely to find reasons to contact her again. When that happens, it will be easy for me to identify that you shouldn’t reconnect, but you will have a difficulty seeing that yourself.

In that same first paragraph, you wrote: “I am an adult yet my inner child is so noisy”- your inner child wants you to see him as he is, a good child. But you can’t see him this way for as long as you don’t see your mother as she is. She is selfish and unloving, dishonest and not a good person.

Your inner child is mixed with your misunderstanding of your mother. There is a mix between the two, and her part of the mix is what gets projected into the women in your life. You have to separate you (your inner child, you in the beginning) from her. A no contact is only the beginning, but a necessary beginning.

You have to go back in time and give her the Bad that belongs to her, so to see your inner child as the Good that he is.

Don’t let the (unjustified) guilt draw you into the swamp of depression where you spent so much of your life in. If you make this separation happen, you will not have to aim at “being better at accepting depression” (the title of your thread), you will be able to not be depressed.

anita