Oh, Decimal, sounds awful... so incredibly painful. If it's okay I'll imagine I'm sitting with you in silence this that bl**dy voice gets quiet and leaves you alone. You don't deserve IT!
I know the power of the inner critic telling you that you don't deserve help, or love, or hope, or kindness, or anything at all. That you're a broken machine because you aren't good enough and never will be.
For me, I go into long periods of time where the voice talks and talks and it's like I'm giving myself some ridiculous imitation of control by letting it do this to me, till I'm all empty of emotion. From anxiety I go straight to exhaustion and numbness and seeming calm because I'm too tired to take any more so I feel emptied. I feel temporary relief, till the whole cycle starts again.
Learning about trauma and cptsd is the one thing that has recently begun helping me see what this critic is doing and why. No, not the "why" I always believed (that it's doing it because I'm worthless, evil, waste of oxygen) and still believe much of the time, but the real reasons. The things that were done and said to me, which I internalized. Even if I don't remember them, having this vicious critic in my head means they happened. I don't need to remember them to weaken the critic. I try to focus straight on it in the present. Slowly, reading books and thinking them through one page at a time. It's hard for me but worth every second of effort.
I have enormous holes in my memory too. I remember far too much

I remember traumatic things I desperately wish I could forget, but not in sequence. And many things are gone, or distorted. My whole life is one big trauma, one big wound, totally hazy. Childhood, also as an adult, everything is as though I'm in a deep fog till just recently. I try to catch memories and they slip away or seem illogical, chronologically impossible.
I guess I'll never really know my life, but I can know who I am here and now.
Glad you're here.
