The Self-Care Mindset

CHAPTER 10Self‐Communication

“Who's thinking, who's talking? Am I my inner critic or my inner coach right now?”

My mom grew up believing she was a mistake. She told me the story of how she was born an illegitimate child, at least that's what you would call someone like her in 1936, when my grandmother was a young woman who got pregnant without being married. According to my mother, she was a “Saturday night gone wrong.” My grandmother was sent away to give birth in shame and my mother was then taken in by my great‐grandfather (the blacksmith), to be raised in the town where my grandmother's 12 other siblings lived. Yes, all 13 siblings lived in the same town. My mom grew up as the black sheep, rarely seeing her mother, my grandmother, who was away at school to become a hairdresser.

In addition to my mom telling me stories about how she wasn't included in birthday parties and ate cake alone in the bathroom, she shared how my grandmother blamed her for never becoming a well‐known opera singer because getting pregnant ruined her life.

My mom struggled with feeling unwanted and unworthy of love. It affected her relationship with both me and my dad. Of course, being bipolar added to her emotional struggle and the turmoil of my upbringing. I asked her once if she was ever happy and she replied, “Not very often, and not for very long at a time.”

She was completely stuck in the inner dialog of not being good enough and feeling like she didn't fit in or belonged. Her life was all ...