Barriers To Critical Thinking

I have had a bad sense of self-concept for a far back as I can remember. I have grown up with parents that have told me what to do, how to do it, and when to do it just about all my life. I let it spill over into my adult life as well. My mother controlled just about my every move up until just about five years ago. In turn I had little to no concept of who I was or will become it was whatever my mother wanted me to be or do for her. I finally broke free of her hold on me and started to view who I was and who I wanted to become. It is still an ongoing struggle for me to figure this out. But I am now becoming the woman that I want to be by letting go of her and her control over me. I am back in school working on the degree that I want to have. I am working on my relationship with my daughters and husband to be a good mother and wife to them as well as a good person to myself.

I believe because of this type of upbringing I have become self-serving biased to a lot of things in my life. I would almost always see others that have grown In their lives, like when my younger sister graduated from college I felt like a failure because I felt I should have graduated before her because I was older than her. Instead of being happy for her and congratulating her on her accomplishments I felt sorry for myself. This I think leads back to my mother telling me I would never make anything of myself and I should just go back to my husband and me a wife and mother and stay home like I should be doing because I could never do anything else with my life. I have since change my ways of thinking with a lot of help from my daughters and current husband. I tell myself often that I am a good person, I cannot control others but I can control myself and not have someone else control me.

Besides fueling the original anger, venting anger more often results in guilt, lowered self-esteem, mild depression, anxiety, embarrassment, and an exacerbation of the original conflict