I’m a nasty bitch and always have been

[Wanderislu]

The hatred I have for myself began to tip over into other people in my twenties.

Objectively, I’m successful, financially pretty ok with wealthy ish background, lots of friends, slim, reasonably attractive and when ‘on form’ and feeling ok can be a great friend; patient, kind, extremely understanding. I can be good fun and lightheaded and people seem to like me. But probably wouldn’t if they knew the truth.

fundamentally, and pretty much all the time I hate myself. I have snippets of seeing myself in the ways I describe above but it’s not consistent behaviour. I have crumbled further in recent years, made more mistakes.

I text a best friend’s boyfriend when I was 17. I knew fully what I was doing and knew it was wrong at the time.

in my early twenties I had a bit of a social crisis. Friends from school getting married etc and I just shrunk away. I didn’t got to one of the girls hen dos and I lost my circle of friends from school. It still makes me sad now. I did reach out but they were quite cruel so I didn’t try again afterwards.

at uni I used to see a guy in our friendship group in secret and then one of the girls started to like him. We carried on in secret even though she would talk about how much she liked him. When they found out they did forgive me but it was never the same again.

in my twenties I had a lovely relationship but couldn’t cope when it became more intense. I remember once I actually ran off down a canal and he had to chase me. I shouted that I didn’t love him.

I had an affair in my late twenties with a married man. He claimed to be separated and at first I believed that but a few months in I found evidence that he was definitely still very much married. I carried on.

I can be lazy at work. I’m paid a decent amount of money and some days I do the absolute bare minimum. Probably 10% of someone in nursing or another job that SHOULD be paid well. I’m awful.

i don’t get on massively well with my family. There were problems growing up in that my sister was seen as the one who could do no wrong and I was the tear away. That narrative has continued and I am not really part of the family unit in any real or genuine way. That makes me sad as my family are actually good people really, even if they made mistakes bringing us up.

I lie easily and naturally. There are lines that I draw where i wouldn’t lie and for example I would never lie to the police or about something serious. But still, I can lie and I do it well. I do it often if it benefits me. I hate myself for this.

I am intelligent and I know it and can often outwit other people in stressful situations. I had a partner who was in a very high up job, well educated and switched on. if we had an argument I would absolutely wipe the floor with him. I cannot stand myself for having this quality, my mind is always in overdrive and I am, most of the time, one step ahead without realising. I can never relax and be genuinely happy.

I confided all this in a therapist before and she said because I had self awareness this was a huge plus point and that someone who was genuinely unkind and evil wouldn’t even question themselves. How can that even be true?! I probably KNOW on some level that by analysing myself it can lessen the blow of what I do and how I behave in terms of others’ perceptions…which just makes me even more of a nasty and manipulative bitch, not less. Im still behaving the same way even though I recognise it’s not right. I am even worse than someone who doesn’t recognise it!!

When I feel alone or stressed I can be absolutely awful to my family and partner. It’s like I hate myself so much that I want to be hated by everyone else. I can’t really control the words that come out of my mouth and it is like an out of body experience. I’ve explained this to them in calmer moments but of course there’s little sympathy because a) it sounds like a feeble excuse and b) I’m still being an utter cunt and why should they care the reasons behind it.

I hate myself when I am ‘on good form’ these days because it almost scares me that I am capable of such varying degrees of behaviour. I no longer really can tell if the nice me is the real me. How can I know.

Ive made so many mistakes and lost so many people and because I can chat and engage and be a good friend when I am feeling ok, I manage to recruit more people in my life which I tend to later fuck up. I do have a few long term friends of ten years or so but we are very close and I guess it’s just that we get on so well that it’s been fine.

I am now mid thirties. I have some very good friends but my relationship with my family is very fractured and I often reflect on all the awful, manipulative, selfish things I have done. I do not cope well and I will either have days where I am absolutely brilliant and could be the most in control, sunny, kind woman and days where I don’t wash, can’t hold a conversation without getting angry and then spend significant time in tears. There is no middle ground.

I am so worried I will end up in a very awful state and unable to function at all.

There’s also plenty more to that list of things I’ve done. I once bought a cat from a rescue centre when I had a crisis in my twenties and then took them back a few months later as I felt like the cat hated me. Who the fuck does that.

From what you have described, this sounds very much like a personality disorder. Look into MBT therapy.

Have you ever considered you may be neuro-diverse? There’s a lot of self-sabotage going on there for someone so self-aware and analytical.

(from an autistic fuck-up with a dazzling array of poor choices in my past)

@EdgeOfSeventeenAndThreeQuarter I don’t know because I can function ‘normally’ (probably not the right term) when I really want to or when I’m feeling ok. I can be totally rational and calm. I’m just an absolute mess.

@ParisNoir how does a personality disorder happen? Have I always had it?

I'd also look at neurodiversity. I used to be the same until I was diagnosed with asd. I'm not horrible and I'm not shit or evil, my brain just works differently.

Echoing PP. There are shades of me in my youth there and you also remind me of my daughter. She was diagnosed with BPD and now has an autism diagnosis. I strongly suspect I have autism though I’m undiagnosed. My younger life was sexually chaotic and I lied a lot. I’ve calmed the fuck down in middle age and I’m much happier and more secure in my sense of self now.

I think you should read this
www.goodreads.com/book/show/43866.Reinventing_Your_Life

This sounds very much like a schema from childhood - I'm not a psychologist but recognise it from that book

www.schematherapyonline.com/defectiveness-shame/

it’s a spectrum - so you can be “normal” to a degree. I’m fucking marvellous in a crisis (eg massive car crash) - then have will have a wobbly in Tesco because someone’s stood in front of the grapes.

my past is full of peaks and troughs where I feel like two different people. The one who achieved “everything” and the one who lurched from crisis to crisis.

as women we’re socially conditioned to do a very good impression of “normal”… then the valve goes.

You are giving yourself a bloody hard time, why don't you stop berating yourself for a moment and consider this.

Why have your taken responsibility for the family fractures, especially as you seem to be saying your sister is the golden child, and I assume by extension you were the black sheep? Have you thought about the damage that has done to your self esteem and self image?
Have they really been selfless loving parents?
Have they had no part in the difficulties?

What you describe in your teens and twenties is normal stuff! We all did things we were not proud of, it is called growing up. I lost most of my old friends too, there were so many cat fights when we were young, but eventually we all drifted in different directions not intentionally but that is what people do. The married man is married, you were not, so why are you the bad guy?

You sound avoidant in relationships which is why you can't commit, and maybe that is based on insecurity? A lack of belief that you are worth it?

We are ALL capable of doing horrendous things, of lying and hurting others. Every time we choose not to we are displaying restraint and maturity.

I think you need some psychodynamic counselling and CBT to reframe your negative thoughts, and to explore your childhood. You need to learn to love yourself flaws and all. None of us are perfect, and you shouldn't expect to be

That book Adam recommends is excellent - the bible of my 30s.

im nearly 50 now and “pass” for normal - but that’s because I’ve very consciously shaped my life - and as PP stated “calmed the fuck down”.

Samantha Croft
autism in women check list
quite an eye opener

Look at borderline personality disorder, it doesn’t make you a bad person you just seem to struggle to regulate your emotions. Do you have poor impulse control?

Sorry craft ,not Croft .
samantha craft

PS My cat bites me, and has done for 14 years!!! Cats are not known to love humans....and I was scared of her a little, so she carried on biting

This is not a sign of your horrible character op, just that you are not a cat person. You see everything in a prism of self hatred, so you are blaming anything that goes wrong around you, on yourself. It is misplaced. The cat was problem in the rescue centre in the first place because it didn't like people.....it was not you.

‘Sounds very much like a personality disorder’ is pretty strong.

The most concrete examples are from op’s 20s. It’s not at all uncommon to be selfish and have under-developed empathy at this age.

Being lazy at work is extremely common. You can’t compare a job where you constantly have to motivate yourself and where low productivity can be easily hidden with something like care work. Many people wouldn’t worry or feel any guilt at all about it either.

Wiping the floor with people in arguments? Being better at arguments says nothing about you morally.

All the stuff about being horrible, saying awful things, lying - no way of knowing here what is behind that or how bad it actually is.

Most of this is self-perception. As a reader, a lot sounds very normal and the rest I can’t gauge. If you’re concerned, op, I’d try a different counsellor or maybe a different professional (psychologist or psychiatrist) to explore this and explore potential diagnoses.

In fact the cat example is the perfect one.

Cat is in rescue centre because it does not like people
Op picks up cat and tries to love and bond with it
Cat still hates people
Op feels she can't bond with the cat, after a while gives up, takes cat back
Cat still hates people
Op blames herself, and thinks it is a personal failure on her part that she could not achieve the impossible feat of making cat like people
Cat still hates people, and is now in a new home and hates them as well.

I identify with parts of what you've said (except being slim haha) being the tear away as opposed to the good-as-gold sibling and pathologising all of my less good actions and traits, being a bit scared of what I might be capable of as the ongoing narrative for so long was that
I was highly intelligent but not good.

I do think that you should keep getting therapy, with being up and down, having days where you can't wash and unable to concentrate on work. I would also echo exploring neurodiversity. Could also be ADHD?

However what jumps out is how harshly you judge yourself and apportion blame to yourself without really discerning what your role was in an event or your accountability. Genuinely, none of what you mention is anything like as bad as you think.

Texting a boy you shouldn't when you were 17? You were a kid, let it go!

At uni, well to be fair you weren't cheating with the guy, the other girl just happened to like him too. Again were very young. The girls from school abandoning you at a hard time because you missed a hen do was frankly their dick move, as was the married man starting an affair without mentioning the inconvenience truth of his marriage. You adopted a cat and it didn't work.out? Happens! You took it back to the shelter, not left it by a motorway.

In none of these situations did you intentionally hurt anyone or initiate the issue (maybe except when you were 17 but forget that

Work, well, it sounds like you could do with a new challenge. If you can get the job done by phoning it in and make good money fair enough though. If you're genuinely doing that and not either avoiding tasks or palming them off onto someone else then you are simply in a job that is easy for you.

You appear to be minimising the impact of being sidelined in your childhood. That has a massive impact on the core beliefs you hold about yourself, how other people view you and how you view the world.

The teenage/20s stuff I could relate to and don't think it's as bad or as abnormal as you think.

Giving back the cat could be evident of a core belief of not being lovable.

Can I ask why you left therapy? Is it because you found someone being empathic and non-judgemental of yourself difficult to sit with?

Check out the book Running on Empty by Jonice Webb. It's about childhood emotional neglect. I'd recommend looking into that before diagnosing yourself with a personality disorder.

Like others have said I’d seriously consider ASD and ADHD. Sounds like you have gotten pretty competent at ‘masking’.
I am also going through a similar experience and am beginning to accept that I’m probably neurodiverse.

I also deeply analyse everything in my life on a regular basis - such as things that happened in childhood, late teens etc. I’m 38 now

As soon as I read this I thought 'personality disorder'.

The fact that you are aware that your behaviour is manipulative is really, really good. So many carry on for years and think that everyone else is the problem. Personality disorders can start in childhood (sometimes with traumatic events) but you should research them (there's a wide spectrum) and then talk to your GP who can refer you to a specialist kind of therapy,

Your self awareness is positive. I would also suggest you see a psychologist (not counsellor) as it could be personality disorder. Is that something you have considered?

It is difficult to find someone really knowledgeable in his area but worth perserving.

What do your good friends say about your behaviour?