Feeling stupid and incompetent

We've knocked out the a big one on last therapy session: me feeling incompetent and stupid. Why do I do easily feel so, even faced with obvious counterexamples? Well I get it now, and I've even made a link to being chronically late and having extreme reactions to it.

We've started from that picture of myself sitting next to my dad at the computer when he ambiguously wants me to help him and wants to teach me at the same time. He's criticizing me and comparing to his friend's son, also saying other things that I won't quote here. I'm sitting there, hungry and thirsty, like a hostage. In the session I wasn't able to describe at all how I feel in that scene. I was describing the thoughts but I could not put my finger on any emotion. The therapist was repetitively asking "but how do you feel?", and finally I resorted to try to describe that background dwelling hopeless sensation and threw in some metaphores, to which she shot: "it's humiliation". At this moment my body relaxed. I wasn't even aware I was tense. So yes, that meant it was the right word, but I couldn't make any sense of it, since humiliation would require someone having done something bad: either me or my dad (me if it was justified and dad if it wasn't), but there was nothing that I saw that was not right. To me I was rightfully feeling so, as I was a worthless weirdo upsetting my dad.

Next, she asked what I needed in that scene. Again I could not answer as my attention in that scene was on my dad. I was extremely focused on him so that I could predict or prevent his next inevitable explosion. I didn't think of what I needed. The only sensations about myself was intense hunger and thirst that I would notice from time to time. Then the therapist asked "are you maybe anxious?". Oh yes anxious, definitely. Then she asked to imagine her entering the room and started telling how the scene looked to her. She said a lot of disapproving things to my father. She asked how that makes me feel. My only reaction as the little girl was: shock. I could not integrate what she was telling because I could not comprehend that my father could not be telling me the truth about me. It didn't work.

Again she asked what I need. And at that point I said I'm hugging my father and I tell him I love him. Then he starts crying and tells me that everything he was saying is just his stupid bullshit and he loves me a lot and that he's just telling me those things to make sure I succeed in life. He's criticizing me so that I can be even better than I am now, but whether I will be or not doesn't matter to him at all, because he loves me already a lot.

Wow. What a surprising turn of events. My father actually once did that scene, but that was when I was 20 and he was drunk, so to me it was not really meaningful. But now I'm thankful he did it, as I had something to work with in my imagination.

Later we talked about what worked in that exercise and what I could reuse when I feel incompetent and stupid. She threw few logical conclusions:

Those points sound obvious but it's so much easier to believe in them when one understands the reasons behind them.

And me myself made another important point to myself:

When I feel that dwelling feeling that I'm an idiot: it's not because I don't know anything, it's the feeling of recognising that there's still something to learn. I've prepared an awesome four floor layered cake and I'm freaking out that the cherry on the top is not straight. I'm giving money to a homeless and apologizing that I don't have a bigger banknote but just a few small ones of the same value. I focus and freak out on the irrelevant details, because I never look back at what I've achieved, I only look at what there's left to be done. So when I'm feeling that dwelling feeling I should imagine that what I see as my lack is indeed my potential. What I see as missing is what there could be added on top of what I already have, but what I have is enough. Draw the |x| out of x.

And here the analogy popped up: it's like being constantly late. This feeling of trying and trying and not making it no matter how hard I try. This someone anyways moving away the finish line once I approach it. I've used to have this repetitive dream where I am late and my father is in the car and keeps on honking and all the time I need to fetch that one last item. And each time I look at the clock it's 5 minutes past the time when I was supposed to leave. And at one point in that dream I just start wishing that it was over, that I could just sit down and accept I'm late, but instead I'm like that hamster running in the wheel. I think that dream is an expression of that "it's never enough" problem.

This issue was also touched in Vipassana. The "I'm never enough no matter how hard I try" and my father. It was just not deep enough to understand the whole picture. Well I'm not even sure if it's the full picture now, but for sure it's more than up to now.