A Sad and Sorry State of Disorder. Tracy Barker

had a problem with believing someone who backed this up. When I say I didn’t have a problem, I don’t mean I took it on the chin and it was water off a duck’s back – far from it. It hurt like hell and usually resulted in me taking a step further into the mire of self-hatred and self-destruction. But it was easy to believe. It has always been easy to believe.

      When people complimented me in any way, I was confused. I wondered why they would say something like that. What was the catch? What did they want? Were they being sarcastic? Were they setting me up to fall? Was it a sick sort of joke?

      Because I was confused as to the exact nature of their sinister motives (I was certain this is what they were), my mistrust intensified; here we have a slippery person who is to be avoided at all costs, and if avoiding them is not possible, we need to keep a really close eye on what they’re really up to.

      I’m not entirely sure how I managed to trust or, rather, how anyone managed to break through my fortified defences. I have had many people tell me I’m good at various things: painting, making jewellery, writing. True enough, I’ve always enjoyed these things but under my hypercritical eye this has never meant I’m good at them. I assumed therefore that people were merely trying to encourage me to ‘distract myself’ and do something I like doing.

      It was not until I was well into my therapy that these little droplets of affirmation began gradually to soak into my psyche. Combined with learning how to challenge my negative automatic thoughts (NATs) and confronting my intrinsic suspicion, I slowly allowed myself to believe that when someone saw something good in me there might possibly be a grain of truth in it.

      I had to begin to trust in the world around me: that it wasn’t conspiring against me; that it wasn’t out to trip me up and make a fool of me; that there was a small chance that I had (and deserved) a place in the world; that the world was not entirely unsafe.

      Hardest of all, I had to begin to trust myself. As I began to find myself, I had to trust what I found, including the weaknesses and flaws that I had to ‘own’ (God, how I hated that phrase in the Therapeutic Community!) as part of what made me who I am. As I began to discover my own mind, I had to trust in what I thought and felt, as much as I was able to make sense of it in the early days.

      As I said, this is an ongoing process, and it is often an uphill struggle. On a bad day, it is all too easy to feel worthless and mistrustful of others and myself, and I can’t say I always manage to rise above those feelings. But even that is okay. It’s okay to feel low, fed up or even worthless, because these feelings are part of me, and I am (mostly) okay!

      Nowadays, a stranger passing me on the street might smile at me because she is a nice person, and I might smile back because I am a nice person too. Or they might not smile because they are in a bad mood, or I might not smile back because I am feeling low, and so on…and that is okay. Because I am learning that who I am is okay.