Don’t want to keep feeling this way

I grew up with a mentally ill mother.  She had dissosociative personallity disorder – it isn’t well known, but you have heard of its first cousin, multiple personality disorder.  As a result, my entire life was a crisis – living in a home where even the slightest mistake in your wording could send your mother into a suicidal tailspin made me learn to turn all my negative feelings on myself (as a child, hating myself was always far easier than being blamed for a dissosociative episode or a suicide attempt – and, yes, she did directly blame me for some).  I’ve been trying, in my adult life, to work through my past.  I’ve always been afraid of becoming like my mother, but I’ve realized I’m not her but she damaged me a lot, especially in the sense that I always think I have to be strong for everyone around me and turn everything inwards.  So, still, if I have too much work to do in too little time, I can’t help myself, I end up hating myself for not being capable enough.  It’s always stuff like that.

I avoided applying for teh kind of jobs I was actually qualified for after I graduated college because I was scared of not being able to measure up.  As a result, whenI realized I couldn’t live on minimum wage, my jb history prevented me from being considered for the better jobs.  Around the time I was beginning to realize this, I got pregnant.  My daughter, now three, is disabled, so I feel even more pressure to be a perfect mom for her than I would if my child were “normal.”  Especially with the additional expenses of therapies and adaptations for her, I realized that I needed to go back to school to get a better job.  So I entered school for my Masters degree last summer.  Since then, my husband has lost his job with minimal prosepcts of finding another one and we are living off of our daughter’s social secutiry checks and my studetn loans.

Today, we realized we were out of money.  Our bank account is negative and I have $20 in my wallet that will probably be used for gas to get to school today.  I feel like it was my responsibility to take care of this family financially (my husband and I have the opposite gender roles as you see in the normal household) and I f-ed up.  Majorly.  We don’t get more student loan money until September.  We’ve already been asking for financial help from family and friends and are at the max they were able to help us with.  I’ve applied for food stamps and I’m working on my degree, so I’m superficially doing everythign right.

Yet, I still hate myself every day.  I hear voices in my head telling me that the reason these things keep happening to me is because I’m such a horrible person and that my family would have a better chance of surviving without me to mess everything up with my own needs and goals.  I can’t get them to stop.  I’ve been to counselors, and the best thing that ever worked for me was CBT therapy, which I kept up with for a while.  The problem is that the voices come unbidden: I can intellectually understand that this stuff isn’t my fault and that I’m doing the right things and that I’m an ok wife and mother, yet emotionally, I still hate myself and think they’d be better of without me.  I can try to ignore the voices that tell me these things, but it seems like it just causes them to shout louder.  What makes me want to die isn’t a desire to die (I love my family and I’d never want to leave them or be without them) so much as it is, I think, a desire for all these horrible thoughts to stop.  I’m 30 years old – I’ve been tryign to work through this stuff since I was a kid, but it never works, and I’m sick of hating myself and hearing voices telling me the only reason we’re suffering is because of the evil within me.

I don’t know what I’m hoping to get out of writing this, except that I have noone to really talk to about this stuff (it scares my husband, so I can’t talk to him), and I feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders, I’m overwhelmed, and, though I love many aspects of my life (like my family), I hate my life and myself and this thing we call living and I’m sick of feeling this way!