Reddit reviews The Inconsequential Child: Overcoming Emotional Neglect

I have fought this dragon, I have some weapons to share. It's a big dragon, and detailed examples help, so this is a long post. For even longer-form content, here are some books I can recommend:

• The Defining Decade
  
• Feeling Good
  
• The Inconsequential Child: Overcoming Emotional Neglect
  
• 10% Happier
  
  Here are your weapons, in no particular order.
  
  First: understand that you are not broken.
  
  You are having a tough time deciding on a course for yourself. That's okay. You are having a tough time finding joy. That's okay too. You don't think "anything is worth it". That is okay, and it presents you with a goal: to find enough meaning that the effort will be worth it. That goal probably seems far fetched, but it is possible.
  
  I used to think that I was broken. I used to think that the things people had done to me and the circumstances of my life had left irreparable harm. I was wrong, and you are wrong too. You are imbued with the same worthiness as every other human being, no matter what. You are worthy of love and happiness, you are worth respecting, you are worthy of having a supportive group of friends, your opinions are worth hearing. You deserve sincerity and honesty and you are allowed to fuck up.
  
  You're also 20, and it is understandable if you don't know how to do most things, as you have never done most things more than once or twice, if ever. You can learn and improve yourself through effort. You are not broken.
  
  Second: understand the difference between thoughts and actions and feelings.
  
  When we have thoughts, they are not a direct experience of the world, they are a projection of reality into language. Thoughts are "said" by your internal narrator, which is part of you, but not all of you. Deliberate or practiced (i.e. automatic but not reflexive) actions are the physical equivalent of thoughts.
  
  Feelings are a direct experience of your physical body: you feel hungry, you feel tired, you feel a tight muscle in your back, you feel anxious. Babies without language feel these things too. These feelings are part of you, but not all of you, because they are temporary.
  
  If you have never paid attention to your thoughts vs. feelings, that's okay. But self-awareness is a powerful ability, and will make your life a lot easier, and it can be learned.
  
  Third: upward spirals.
  
  Feelings naturally become thoughts and actions. We practice it all our lives. An aching pain becomes "Ow, I should stop.", a feeling of abandonment becomes "They don't want to talk to me". Your mapping is not fixed and can be improved with practice: marathon runners translate their aches into "I should change my form," social people translate their feelings of abandonment into "I miss them, I'll reach out and see if they want to talk".
  
  No feelings->thought translation is "better" or "worse" than any other, there are only "upward" and "downward" spirals. Upward spirals are mappings where negative feelings lead to thoughts and actions that tend to lead to positive feelings; downward spirals are mappings where positive feelings lead to thoughts and actions that tend to lead to negative feelings.
  
  So, you want to learn to work in upward spirals. This means you need to be willing to try difficult things, and risk failure, which is scary but not fatal, and infinitely rewarding. If you are risk-averse, that's okay. You can take as small a risk as you are comfortable with, it will develop a sort of meta-confidence about your ability to handle future risky situations.
  
  cont...