Shame
I had felt ashamed of myself since a young age. My parents certainly did the best they could, but you can’t heal what you don’t name- they felt ashamed of themselves, and just passed those feelings onto their children. Shame is a negative emotion, for the most part. There are times when we should feel ashamed (such as when you call others names, deliberately hurt someone, etc), but most of us feel ashamed way to often, and it becomes a way of being, versus a passing feeling. If the shame starts to cause us to feel inherently bad about ourselves, it has taken over. It is no longer just a feeling, but has us in its grip. When we internalize the feeling that there is something wrong with us, we have problems. We all do things wrong make poor choices, say things we don’t mean, etc, but at our CORE, we are OK-worthwhile beings in our own right, who occasionally make mistakes. But when life or other people tell us otherwise, we tend to believe them, at least as children. We don’t have the fi...