What's really the UPSIDE in being your "worst enemy?"
It's one thing to be able to acknowledge, accept and monitor your shortcomings and/or flaws, so they’re less likely to harm others. It's quite another, to keep yourself under a microscope, for fear you'll become someone you don't wanna be, if ya just relax into living your life and finding your bliss.
Humans never realize how the subtle, critical things they say to themselves have serious and cumulative emotional, spiritual and physical consequences. Many take pride in being “aware” of and on top of their faults or flaws~ so (God forbid) others can’t point ‘em out and take us by surprise! This isn’t self-awareness, folks. It’s self-abuse.
I was exactly like this, until I got a lot smarter around thirty years old, and realized how detrimental my ‘fault-finding missions’ were to me. In short, they ensured a low level of depression was always present. I invented what I now call, ‘power tools’ around that time for myself, to eradicate this denigrating automatic reflex I’d learned, in response to having had an emotionally unstable childhood.
By the time we're 5 years old, our character, our nature, our personality and our values are set in stone. Our formative years are strongly influenced by our parental units, and we tend to adopt their value systems, for better or worse.
Can we change later in life? Only if we have the right kind of guidance from someone who knows how to help us literally REPROGRAM our negative inner critic, and become genuinely self-affirming! True and lasting HAPPINESS isn't attainable without this change in our behavior. Neuro-pathways in the brain cannot be rerouted into healthier tissue, which permits self-harming compulsions to shrink, and ultimately cease.
The upshot? NOBODY who is "hard" on themselves gets to evolve into being a joyful, contented soul. Check-in with yourself on this, 'cause the proof's in the pudding.
We remain the person we were at 5 years old until we physically die, UNLESS there's a fundamental paradigm shift in how we view and relate to ourselves, for this is the only measure that alters how we show up in our world. Anything else, is wishful thinking and pure folly (and determines precisely how much shit we’re willing to accept from others)!
Along these same lines, when people become wealthy, it alters their personality NOT ONE BIT. Honest, caring, thoughtful people stay that way, once they get rich. Others, not so much. It's kinda like alcoholism: If you were a narcissistic asshole BEFORE ya got sober, you'll be a narcissistic asshole AFTER you stop drinking (and I've known a few who are).
Troubled teens are hard to turn around, because the die was cast by the time they turned five. People's basic natures do not change. The biggest mistake some of us make romantically, is naively believing they DO, to fit our fantasy of who WE need 'em to be.