I think I was cognitively aware before, but became aware today in a more emotional way, that I regularly treat and think of myself in a mean-spirited way. Not conscious criticisms, just mean-spirited. Not kind.

I treat and feel about myself the way my mother treated and felt about me. Then I felt proud and "secure" that I'm "copying" my role model. Very bizarre.

She couldn't help it. Really. I spent a lot of time studying her. It was important to my survival. She couldn't help it because she learned it from her mother (whom I knew), who probably learned it from hers (whom I didn't know).

I've been in and out of therapy most of my life. Was cognitively aware of something "evil" in me, and tried to address that in therapy and other ways, without a lot of success.

It came to me cognitively earlier this week, no emotion attached, just a thought -- my family was narcissistic and evil and I have pockets of evil in me, too. Thinking like that about my mother and grandmother are big no-no's in my psyche, and so I can (used to) get a big sadistic glee out of beating myself up for thinking things like that, which invalidated the thought, or something like that.

I used to have pretty good separation between my thoughts and emotions -- therapy sought to "correct" that. But without any knowledge of what was underneath and the effect it would have in the various stages of being partially activated, I'm not so sure that was a good idea.

I also kind of functioned OK socially, as a codependent and people-pleaser when I wasn't being aloof and intellectual. I can really see now how that DOESN'T work and wrote about that in my OP.

But I also now see how I was letting my friends down, just as my mother had let me down, once I got to depending on her. I was doing to them what had been done to me. Not consciously, of course, and I would never get in that kind of fix now to begin with. But, if I hurt them, then they wanted to stay away from me, which was a pretty good for them! Because at the time I was the way I was and they were the way they were. I'm not blaming them, and not blaming me.

I may be a better person, though, if I can find a way to be "kind" to myself. My family of origin faked it well. It was something. The best they, and I, could do. But no real "kindness", like I had with my late husband and, to some extent, my children.

This will be a difficult thing to do. I don't like myself. I'm ashamed of a lot. Beating myself up was the "kind" thing, the thing our "kind" of people did.

But I don't belong to that family any more -- long story. Maybe I never did. Maybe nobody ever really did. So somehow I need to start something new inside that I don't have any example of. Many of the therapists I saw had the same fake kindness that my family did. I wonder if that's why they went into therapy in the first place! So, for me, it ended up the blind leading the blind, and I couldn't internalize anything from the therapists because they didn't have it either!! Maybe some do, somewhere, but I'm not trying that again. Too unreliable.

Kindness. What is that? I know now what it's not, maybe. Maybe that's a start. Or at least that's where I am at the moment.