My local family is Irish Catholic, and while I was not raised in the RCC tradition, I feel the religious traditions of my family have been very influential, although not directly.
Guilt is a huge motivator in the ways my family thinks of things. I manage to feel guilty about things that are silly for very long periods of time.
For instance, I still regularly think about a moment in time in which I got mad at my friend for coloring most of a coloring book I left at her home. I feel bad about it because she felt like she was making a gift for me, whereas I felt like she was using up my toy without my permission. As the story perhaps suggests, this happened a long time ago. I was probably about 7 years old. I'm 33 and I still think about it at least once a week.
There are things like this in my life. I hold grudges against myself that I can't seem to let go of, even though the more rational, forgiving parts of my brain and spirit know I am being silly. It doesn't seem to change the ways I feel about myself.
I think I even developed (thanks to crap boyfriends and some upbringing stuff) a tendency to smash down feelings of pride or desire and beat myself up about them. Like, when I start to think something good about myself, my brains says, "No, stop! This is the way to arrogance or disappointment! You are crap!"
This often leads me to feel like I don't deserve good things. It is a way I learned to cope with people who treated me poorly. A helpless feeling of loving someone who treats you poorly can make us feel like we deserve that treatment. If this person treats me poorly, it's because I deserve it. I start to feel like I don't deserve happiness and happiness starts to make me feel uncomfortable. It almost feels unsafe.
Life is weird, right?
Sometimes I feel guilty about my blessings. I don't know how to accept success because I spent a lot of time telling myself I wasn't worthy of good things. When good things come along, I sometimes push them away because they don't feel safe to me.
All of this is to reference something I lost. It was an OWN (Oprah Winfrey) thing, but I can't recall who she was talking to. The question I learned to ask myself is:
"Instead of feeling guilty, can I feel grateful?"
It's a way of orienting myself toward more truth. It's a way of discerning whether my soul actually feels like I don't deserve something or whether it's a behavior I've learned through abuse.
Breaking these cycles in myself will hopefully help me raise children who don't get trapped in them.
