/feels/ - Advice & Venting

>ignore the memories I have of her
There's your mistake. Deal with it; see a shrink.

>>106701
the risk with doing this is that plenty of shrinks keep you dwelling on the past and externalizing blame constantly - sure, you'll get the satisfaction of having someone cheer you on as you blame people, but you won't feel any better, you'll remain reliant on them for emotional validation, you'll ruminate on your past perpetually, you'll become a progressively angrier and self absorbed person, and you'll lose your locus of control and feel even more disempowered.

>>106698
I found meditation and Jiddu Krishnamurti were basically the only things that helped engender long term self esteem and (contingent on this) compassion for other people

This is just my personal experience but I don't think feeling like garbage has anything to do with self-esteem.

I don't know how abusive your mother was during your childhood or if this is applicable, but abusive parents [neglect is abuse too] or a dysfunctional household [divorce, convicts, alcoholism, drug abuse, etc.] has high chances of resulting in C-PTSD or personality disorders [developed in response to trauma] in a child.

Childhood trauma is like a rust that eats up iron from the inside.
Say there's a child that had a healthy childhood. Once the child is an adult, the child would be a perfectly functioning individual with healthy childhood experiences which makes the adult feel full and complete.
But trauma prevents this from happening, and trauma arrests the child at a specific emotional maturity. The child copes with trauma through avoiding her problems [avoidant], dissociating and being emotionally detached throughout her life [schizoid], hating everything she sees around her [antisocial], becomes attention-seeking [histrionic], seeing the world in black and white extremes [borderline], developing a false image of herself and blow her self-image [narcissism], and so on.
All these are destructive ways to cope with trauma that deny the child from living a proper and healthy life that helps her mature into an adult, and a complete person. So what's common in a lot of these experiences is that, once the child becomes an adult, she feels like an adult only physically, but something is missing and incomplete inside that the trauma and abusive parents prevented to nurture within. I think this incompleteness is the thing that causes the feeling of garbage because this leads to some sort of grief and feeling of emptiness, because it's as if a child that failed to become an adult had died.

There's a trick to improve self-esteem. You simply don't. You don't need "improve" it. You just make sure you don't do anything that hurts it. Buddha the incel says "Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule." I don't know how evil your mother is and how abusive she was, but you have to learn to forgive her to move on if possible, or you have to learn that your mother does not influence your life anymore and reject her if she was a truly horrible person.

>>106708
>plenty of shrinks keep you dwelling on the past
Then go with CBT therapy, and stop finding excuses to stay as you are. The worst you can do is do nothing and watch your life going by. At least read books on the matter.
>>106710
You can move on without forgiving; forgiveness isn't a magic pill that'll cure you (especially when abuse can still be going on as an adult: your mother doesn't hit you anymore, but I bet she still denies being a shitty mother, and pulls a lot of triggers). Forgiveness is the result of healing, not the other way around, and there is no forgiving someone still hurting you.
Understanding is a better strategy. Just understanding the shitty parents can be enough (generally that means understanding the shitty grandparents). In the end, you'll just see: "oh she could have done better, she didn't, fuck her for that, but I can understand why".

>>106712
>Forgiveness is the result of healing, not the other way around, and there is no forgiving someone still hurting you.
I fully agree. Understanding is more important than forgiveness. Only after I understood their circumstances and talking to them, and listening to how they survived their childhood was I able to feel less resentful towards them.

It's not easy to forgive something horrible like sexual abuse or physical violence. This is horrible parenting, and I'm lucky that I haven't experienced such things. It's a purely personal choice to do that or not I guess, and I used to and I sometimes still do blame my parents for how I turned out to be, but I don't really feel angry or resentful towards them once I understood that they had been battling with their own issues and trauma themselves, and there's some dysfunctional inter-generational transfer of trauma and repetitive cycle of abuse going on.

>>106713
Shit, I mean, you should never forgive sexual or extreme physical abuse [like being locked up in a room or beaten till you bleed].
These parents should be sent to prison and any ties to them has to be severed for life!