My self disparagement, hyper critical of myself and others can be ‘tuned up’ so as to focus sharply on what I can do to max loving kindness in collaboration and in community with others.
An additional aspect of this was how I judged my parents, faulting my father, telling him “you didn’t do a very good job”. I at the time didn’t recognize the very many good aspects of his parenting such as reading to us, a lot of hugs and joking and playfulness, trips to the library, playing baseball and basketball with us. Looking at it now, I deem I blamed him and my mom as a way to avoid taking responsibility for my own life, my own happiness. That destructively critical capacity that I’ve chronically have had toward myself can be redirected toward constructively critical connection with others, which requires the same toward myself. There’s a sort of self-absorption, self-worshipping aspect to being unreasonably hard on myself
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