Mary, I'm going to try to keep this short as possible. I'm going through something similar to what you describe.

After years and years of working on my issues, I arrived at a place that I felt very happy and comfortable. I knew that there was one more piece of the puzzle that I hadn't figured out but I didn't have too many years left and wanted to spend the rest of them having fun. So I let it go.

The piece was, I had never really let people get very close to me. I had trust issues somewhat and I figured it was (please don't judge me here) simply because I'm fairly intelligent and most people don't "get me" and so that's ok. Anyway, I was ok with it. I had a great life, a wonderful son, a loving and supportive husband and things were pretty good.

One day, something happened that led me in a direction (I won't explain it because it would take too long) that made me look at something from my past. Damn! What I learned was I was a bipolar child. Bipolar children have very specific behaviors that are mostly out of control. Well, I had behavior that was out of control when I was young and my mother was a strict disciplinarian and would beat me. She never did it in front of my brothers and sister, but she would beat me to the floor, I cried, she cried, and I remember being horrified, not understanding how someone who loved me could be doing that to me. This continued for quite some time. It did eventually stop due to the intervention of someone I call "my angel" but I won't go into that now. But this interaction between my mother and I created in me the assumption that I was a "bad child" which I lived with my entire life. After that, what else could I do wrong? Nothing else mattered. If I could not please the one person who was supposed to love me beyond everyone else, who could I please? She also was not an affectionate woman. So, there was no hope for us kids.

Recently, in Intermittent Outpatient Therapy, we took a Self-Esteem test. Surprisingly, I came up with extremely high self-esteem. What else was evident, however, was that my trust level was ZERO! BINGO! I don't have low self-esteem. I have PTSD. This is because i've been actively working on these issues with my therapist for the past 6 weeks in therapy.

I want to tell you......every single day, without missing one day, for the past ten years, my husband has told me he loves me and that I am the most beautiful woman in the world. He told me that at first, he could tell I didn't believe him. But he says that now, he can tell that I believe him.

Sometimes, it takes convincing.