Day 8 Emotions Connected to Pain

I do believe that I am having some success at recognizing the emotions that are connected to my pain. I think the educational activities have been extremely helpful as well as the journaling in providing clarity on what those emotions are and what they are related to in my life. I have realized that I am pretty unkind to myself and have very little self worth which causes a lot of pain and has been for most of my life. For some reason I never connected the two, but as soon as I read it in one of the educational activities, it was like a light bulb went off in my head. My pain is directly linked to my self worth, and it has always been extremely low, whether I like to think so or not. So I think a huge part of this journey for me is going to be focused on self love and self care in order to stop these "unworthy" thoughts in my brain. I also think that my long lasting feelings of anxiety and sadness have conditioned my mind to be extremely fearful. I was journaling about an experience I had when I was very young, I think in pre- K, where we watched "The Secret Garden" movie for some reason. The beginning of the movie started out with the main characters parents dying in an earthquake. I am not sure if this is the first time I realized the death existed but I definelty believe this event made me realize that everyone dies and we have no idea when, including my parents. I was paralyzed in fear and have suffered from extreme depression and anxiety since. I carry around the trauma of having deep depression and anxiety as a child. I did my best to repress the "bad" feelings to feel less scary or to make myself and my parents feel that there is nothing wrong. I didn't want to be "broken." I was taken to a therapist at a pretty young age due to my anxiety and I would not talk to the therapist at all. I think the thought process behind this was that if I didn't talk to the therapist about my feelings then those feelings did not exist and there was nothing "wrong" with me. This has been a huge realization for me and this repression of anxiety and depression and even anger has continued my entire life. No one wants to accept that they have mental health issues but I think accepting these issues as part of myself will go along way.