Being raised in a hyper-critical environment and how it pollutes your mind

I don't think anyone will ever really like me. Even my friends, I can't help feeling they talk to me only because they feel sorry for me. I know I'm being unfair, we've been friends for more than fifteen years and they've never let me down. On the other hand, I think I've let them down more than once, just by being me. I don't think I can do anything well for an extended period of time, there's always going to be something wtihin me that makes me fuck up, or something bad in the way I am that will eventually destroy everything I touch.

My mother used to say that nothing I ever did would be right, so I embraced that. Even if I got high grades at school, it wasn't good enough, not real intelligence, but dumb luck. And high grades were an everyday kind of thing, so if I ever got less than a certain grade, she'd get very mad at me. I don't think I'll be able to do much with my life.

My physical appearance will never be right either. She used to say I was fat, until she started to say I was skinny because she thought that way she'd be able to manipulate my brain into losing weight. She sometimes forgot and called me fat anyway, and then she corrected herself and said "not fat, skinny", in a sarcastic voice. I've always been on the fat side, rather than the thin, I know that objectively.

I'm also easily manipulated. Depending on the person I'm closer to the most, who is usually the person who seems to like or to agree with me the most at the time, I can see myself agreeing to even stupid, vile ideas that I would never really hold by myself. I think I'm very empathic, and in my case that's a disadvantage, since I try to put myself in the place of the other person so hard I end up thinking like them for a period of time. I fear backlash for thinking the way I actually do, because that's what my mother used to do, calling me worthless for disagreeing with her. And then I feel bad, because that's not how I am. It's pathetic really, I know, needing validation so badly. But so far I haven't found a way to fight that back.

Sorry for my bad English and the wall of text.

/r/raisedbynarcissists Thread