Mistakes and self esteem

Yep, I think we all fell out of the guilt tree and some of us hit every branch on the way down! I think peope with ASC are more likely to feel a presumed lack of competance and be more sensitive to mistakes, probably because we've grown up being told we're clumsy, bad or wrong and yet it's never explained why or how we could do things differently to avoid mistakes.

I absolutely agree. I think it's trauma response after being bullied and told there is something wrong with us etc.

I absolutely agree. I think it's trauma response after being bullied and told there is something wrong with us etc.

No Iain I can't give you links as this comes mostly from my own thiinking and experience. But empty chair exercises have long been used as a theraputic tool, you don't give the pain back literally, but metaphorically, I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. In a sense you do stop the pain chain in it's tracks, if you accept what it teaches you about yourself and how you related to others. It's often as simple and profound as something like not passing on that particular pain to our own children, through how we choose to parent, our kids may still have problems, but they will be different and hopefully not generations deep.

TheCatWoman said:

I think it's a pain chain, stretching back generations, but we can break this chain, by giving it back to the person who it belongs to, not using it to keep our wounds open and allow them to heal.

That is an interesting approach - kind of biblical in an eye for an eye sort of way.

When you throw the pain back at the causer then the pain has been passed on so who do they chain it onto next? Does not breaking the chain mean stopping it in its tracks though?

I confess to not being educated in this approach so can you tell us more or give us a link to somewhere with reliable views on it please?

So many people have internalised a person/people from childhood who were critical, who we could never do anything right for, or were humiliated by, especially in front of others and it ends up with these people sitting on our shoulders commenting negatively on everything we do. It's like a wound that never heals, it's pecked open on a pretty much daily basis because we feel we don't match up to the expectations of others. It's not just ND's that do this, NT's so it too, but maybe not to the same extent, it's hard to know because people rarely talk about outside of a therapists room. I've used the empty chair technique with others and I've done it myself when in therapy, to stay with my adult self and imagine those critiacal others to be in the chair opposite and tell them that what they said and did were totally wrong and unreasonable, how could they expect a small child to know such things and get something new right first time? We all have our own variations and people we may need to give all this pain back too, I think it's a pain chain, stretching back generations, but we can break this chain, by giving it back to the person who it belongs to, not using it to keep our wounds open and allow them to heal. We are far less likely to pass this pain chain onto others if we can break the habit in ourselves, it plugs a hole were our confidence and sense of self and feelings of worth fall down. it may feel very strange at first to have a small puddle of confidence at the bottom of a now empty well, but if we allow it to stay healed, we will stop feeling like imposters, get to know our own genuine strengths and weakness and generally learn that we're not so bad after all.