Sept. 18, 2012

We were talking about defense mechanisms in class today and I suddenly realized something:  I’ve internalized my parents’ sense of my inferiority. For a significant amount of my life, I had to put up with my parents calling me “stupid as a cow”. I’ve had to put up with my mother telling me that I wasn’t "girly" enough. I had to put up with my mother and my brother’s jabs about my chubby stomach. I had to put up with my parents’ disappointment that I did not “make something of myself” after college. I realized that all those years of feeding myself negativity and of swallowing my family’s acid, I’ve internalized their view that I am inferior. 

This has powerful implications for who I am now. As a self-aware adult, I am better able to think about others' opinions of me and whether or not I incorporate that into my own self-image. However, when I was a child and an adolescent, I was much more sensitive to the opinions of those I deemed important and hence, my identity is more subject to being molded by their views. This may explain some of my low self-esteem and neuroses. I am also not a particularly resilient person and I’m very easily discouraged. This translates into being someone who takes criticism too personally and too much to heart. I generalize my flaws to all aspects of my life and all aspects of myself, thus influencing my mood, self-perception, and how I attribute my successes and failures. As my own worst critic, I tend to attribute my successes to being a fluke. Conversely, I attribute failures to some inherent, deficient part of my personality and I tend to see these defective parts of myself as enduring, global, and unchanging. Lastly, I tend to minimize my successes while magnifying my faults. Now, I know that all this does not just come from living with negative parents and, but I suspect that some part of it may be attributed to them, possibly even a significant part. As Judi Hollis wrote once: “Fat is a Family Affair.”

I know that these thinking patterns are not very adaptive and that’s why I want to correct them. Now that I'm away from my fault-finding family, maybe I can rebuild my self-esteem and become someone new. Reinvent myself, in other words. Maybe I can learn to stop feeding myself negativity as well. It’s like my teacher said, “If you don’t want to be friends with someone who says nasty things to you, then why do it to yourself?”