Feeling bad about myself
Posted on June 21st, 2017
I have not been focusing on my emotions recently. I thought about it a few days ago, and then asked myself: okay, so after that few days break from being with myself.. hi myself, how are you?
Uh. Bad, ugly, disgusting, repulsive, weird, wicked.. well just a bad person, bad human being. I realized that my normal state is feeling bad in my body, bad with my soul, just feeling bad about being myself, feeling dirty and almost as if I have been literally covered in mud, or worse, shit. I imagined I must be smelling bad, that I am sticky, and people around me have the reflex to vomit when they see, hear or smell me. I feel like an old homeless person where it is not even clear if they are a man or a woman anymore.
Plus a strong feeling that "I should not be here".
I also felt strongly that I was a morally bad person, someone who does not deserve to go to heaven, someone who must be punished, someone who is selfish, who is guilty as they have any negative emotions at all. Any negative thought about any other person that was running in my mind was causing me to label myself as: ungrateful, egoistic, self centered, selfish, primitive, superficial, vain, empty. Some thoughts about religion, God and confession started to kick in, and then I thought to myself:
What the fuck?
Why don't I ever question this state of mine? Why do I feel in this way when other people don't? Do I have any more reasons than them to feel like that? The sun is shining, and I am just going on with my day like anyone else would. I am a young attractive and sensitive woman. I have the right to dislike actions of other people, and I have the right to dislike particular people too, and I have the right to be annoyed or in a bad mood. What if that permanent negative self-judgmental background state of mine is just a leftover of how my parents saw me when I was little? In the end at some point of my life I was indeed this little weird disgusting thing that was only able to constantly shit itself. Just like any newborn is. And yes a newborn has to be in the centre of attention, and yes a child does not have a deep personality yet, and yes, it is selfish, and yes it is annoying. But that is the point of being a newborn. Why do I feel like I am covered in shit standing on an underground platform having just left the office? And that goes for that particular shitty feeling, but how many other feelings pop up on my normal day that come from how I interpreted various situations when I was a child.
My parents were simply unable to handle having a child when I arrived. That is all. I am not a bad person, I am not disgusting and smelly, all those feelings about myself were most likely their feelings, not mine. They belong to them and to the past. It is reliving to imagine that my current negative feelings about myself are mostly nothing else than their past thoughts about me. I'm an adult now and I don't depend on them, so what they think about me does not define me.
After those realisations I did one schema therapy session about this, and some new memories came up. I start understanding when and how such ideas have been planted in my head. I think this re-assigning of the ownership is the crucial part of not letting those feelings rule and ruin my life now.