Dear Worldofthewaterwheels,

You are welcome!

There was no violence, no shouting even but my mom was always at the top and my dad often seems incredibly weak

Indeed, there are similarities with our families, although there was yelling in my family – my mother couldn’t control her emotions and she would have angry outbursts at my father and me. When I became a teenager, I started yelling back, so there was conflict.

But my father never wanted conflict and he tried to appease my mother and calm her down. He allowed to be yelled at and insulted. I think he suppressed his own anger and numbed himself emotionally. I guess that’s how he could stay mostly unaffected by her insults and accusations (I mean, he could go about his life, he had professional successes and was respected at work. Just not at home).

But for me as a child, my mother’s constant complaints, bitterness and misery were devastating. I grew up in it, and it formed me. I never felt good enough and no matter what I did, it couldn’t make my mother happy. She too blamed everybody else (specially me and my father) for her unhappiness. She fits your description very well: “My mom could victimize herself easily with him being very apologetic.”

The result of it all is that I grew up believing I was bad and that there is something terribly wrong with me. Similarly like you believe about yourself: Its like there is something wrong with me and i cant put a finger on exactly what.

A bit more specifically, this is what you said about yourself:

i do loathe myself in the sense that, i cant seem to put a foot right..just nothing works out for me. Like i seemed to discover, oh! im a dork…not a creative nerd. A real loser who can only fuck up.

The false core belief would be: I am a dork. I am a loser.

I am guessing it has been formed based on many instances of being put down and ridiculed by your mother. Or compared to others. It has been formed based on your mother’s general attitude to you: that there is something wrong with you.

First your mother believed you were not good enough, and was sending you this message, and then you started believing it too. It became your “truth”. Because as children, we believe our parents, they are our mirrors. Their behavior towards us tells who we are and if we are lovable and worthy or not. And if they say bad things about us, if they mistreat us, we believe them. We always blame ourselves, not our parents.

When we grow up, we still have that same false core belief working in us. And we sort of attract more of the similar experiences of failure and embarrassment. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Basically, if deep down you believe that you are a failure, you will indeed fail. And I think that’s been happening to you all these years.

***

You have another set of core beliefs, which is about other people. You believe that everybody is jealous of you and nobody wants you to succeed. I think that too is the result of your mother being jealous and competitive with you, even to this day when she isn’t happy when you achieve success but goes silent.

These are your experiences (in your adulthood) of people being jealous of you and trying to undermine you:

When i really did well, there was always someone in the crowd visibly unhappy and it would bother me.

There has always been someone more accomplished vying for my job, or next to me or coming up behind me. Always a boss who wanted more and made me feel like i wasnt enough. A boyfriend who needed more of something i didnt have. I never mastered a corner of the room for myself that somebody else couldnt do. So therefore i feel fairly worthless.

You get crushed by the people who are out there looking to win against other people. I feel like there is always a lot of jealousy around me and i cant control it, how others react to me, but it ruins everything.

I often feel angry that other people are rude, mean or wonder what their problem is. I know what it is though…they want attention.

When you read the above examples, does it apply to your childhood as well? Because my guess is that you’ve experienced something similar in the relationship with your mother, even as a child and young adult, and that’s where the main wound stems from.

The main false belief in this area of your life (area of relationships) would be: People want you to fail. People want to hurt you. People are not to be trusted.

This unconscious belief is what directs your relationships and how you see people. And that too becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As Anita said, there were for sure instances where people wanted to harm you and take advantage of you. But there were probably also instances where you misinterpreted their intentions, or where you approached them with mistrust, ready to defend yourself (i have to defend myself against what i perceive as possible danger right?), and they didn’t like it.

My take is that a part of your experiences (not all) is based on these false beliefs that run in the back of your mind, and attract such events. I am writing this not to dispute your reality, but to tell you that there is more to experience, that there is a broader reality, in which not everybody is out to get you, and in which you are not a dork but a wonderful and creative person.

These false beliefs were created due to repeated negative experiences with our parents, but they can be reversed, with healing.

What do you think of all this?