Basics

I was very helpless and entirely dependent on my parents. More than anything, I feared being abandoned.

I believed that I was the center of the universe, that I caused everything which happened.

Despite their best intentions, my parents sometimes "abandoned" me.

These abandonment experiences were intensely traumatic, painful, horrible to me at that time.

Developmentally, congnitively, I couldn't understand what was happening; e.g., that my mother was busy or tired so that, even though I was hungry, she couldn't feed me right away.

From my perspective, I was torturing, terrorizing myself.

As a result, I came to _feel_ deeply that there was something inherently wrong with me.

That is: from my perspective, I was causing myself the worst imaginable trauma, and therefore, I felt I was deeply, inherently bad and wrong.

Because my mind was so young and undeveloped, this wasn't something I could understand in a cognitive sense, this was something I embodied as a felt sense of my reality.

Another way to say this: my experiences were experiences of feelings, not thoughts. They were emotional experiences, not cognitive experiences. My mind wasn't yet capable of cognition.

Because of this, my evolving memories of those experiences were "emotional memories".

Also, I internalized ways (coping strategies) to try and mitigate or avoid these experiences.

Here's the paradigm:

"I know there's something very wrong with me, but at least I can try to do things so that I won't get abandoned and feel so incredibly awful."

Feeling Wrong

What's that familiar feeling of the self? I'm just sitting here, doing this. What does that feel like? A lot of times, it doesn't seem to feel like anything. I have physical sensations, my upper back is hurting....

When I was very young, I felt like I was the center of the world, the center of the universe, the center of everything. I thought that everything that happened had something to do with me, that my mere presence affected everything that I perceived.

Because of this, whenever anything went wrong, I thought it was my fault. Of course, things often went wrong, and so I got the sense that I was very bad, fundamentally problematic. And, no one told me differently. In fact sometimes, people told me that I was a failure.

I didn't know exactly how I was bad, because it wasn't one thing or another that seemed to be my fault; it could've been anything. And so that general sense of wrongness within me grew. I couldn't think well enough to make sense of it...I was just too young, and my mind still hadn't developed much of an ability to reason.