the rotten core

Doing this work is an emotional rollercoaster.  For almost a week I've felt good but the downswing prior was excruciating.  One evening after going out to drinks with work colleagues I bottomed out.  In the midst of it tried to find words to describe my feelings.  The only one I could muster was disgusted. 

Disgusted with myself. 

Now, feeling fine, I am quite shocked by this.  Language gives the experience form.  And it seems the form of my feelings was revulsion at myself.  How awful that I have been living with well of self-loathing inside.  How sad that a long time ago, before I had words, I came to perceive myself this way. 

And ever since then I have struggled with this self-designated rotten core. 

Now I am finding the words for it.  It was a relief to pick up Reinventing Your Life and find someone else's words describing how I felt.  Those words have helped me understand... and accept. 

Now my experience has a name - defectiveness - and someone is helping me find ways to let it go. 

activated

It’s fair to say I’m feeling shite. Last night I was even having those (hypothetical) thoughts about cutting myself. I can’t remember having these thoughts since I was a teenager maybe twenties. That was back in the days when self harm wasn’t even fashionable, I’d never even heard of anyone else doing it. I think I only ever acted on them once, scratching with a safety pin. Nonetheless they’re indicative that my emotional state is reasonably fragile.
I’m feeling let down by my friends. I want support, holding, but noone seems to get that. Maybe it’s because I don’t let them know what I need. Although on Thursday I said to a friend “I’m having a life crisis” but she didn’t follow it up with a query as to whether I was okay. I hear the sound of emotional deprivation! Although now I think about it, a dear friend of 30 years duration said to me only a week ago that she’d like to be able to give me more support and that I should ask her when I need it. I could be partly perpetuating the feeling of deprivation by discounting the support on offer and by expecting people to read my mind about what I need from them.
I’m also very conscious that I’ve had falling outs with a couple of long term friends and am pretty down on myself about those aka I’m a bad person aka Defectiveness.
So my core schemas are pretty well activated at the moment. The trick is to manage myself while I’m feeling this way. Keep mindful that in this state I’m at risk of acting out some of my classic schema driven behaviours. I also need to be kind to myself, use the schema modes model and get my Healthy Adult supporting my vulnerable child (who can flip into Angry Child all too easily).

assessment

Usually when you start psychotherapy with a professional, they take your history and in doing so sometimes use an assessment tool (usually a questionnaire which is scored) to measure your 'symptoms'. 

Since I'm doing my own therapy, the history is already known.  And I will take you through bits and pieces of it in time.  Reinventing Your Life has assessment tools at the start of each chapter on the differnt schemas/lifetraps.  Jeffrey Young has also authored/coauthored a number of questionnaires or inventories that measure schemas and the ways people use to cope with them. 

I, like others, show manifestations of more than one schema.  The two most obvious are Defectivenss and Emotional Deprivation, which seem to go hand in hand.  I can also see bits of Subjugation and Failure. 

You're meant to choose your most dominant or core schema to work on first, but I can't really pick whether I should work on the Defectiveness or Emotional Deprivation.  I'm tending toward the former because its where the shame comes from, and the shame is what comes the most, because its there under everything else.

Defectiveness it is.