Roy Masters
The root of most of your mental torment and suffering lies in childhood self-doubt. Resentment towards your father's failing is no doubt behind the vicious cycle of worry affecting your health. If your father fails you then you may also think that God has failed you.
Spiritually speaking, the father you can see represents the Father you cannot see. Dad has a very heavy responsibility as a heavenly bureaucrat. The faith in his indwelling goodness ought to be a positive influence, a roundabout way of confirming the faith in what you were born to believe. Resenting your father always negatively impacts that faith, severing the connection from the unfolding inner heavenly nature.
“Doubting oneself,” is the term we use to describe this life-changing traumatic event. This struggle between faith and doubt is perpetuated your entire life through rebellion against authority, or, through trusting, putting too much faith in others, hence setting up a special someone to save you. Eventually, resentment toward their emerging faults reinforces the old self-doubt that came from resenting your dad.
Resentment in the present towards all those “father’s” you can see, continues to separate you from the Father within that you cannot see. That is what your anxiety and despair is all about.
"stop placing your hope for salvation in anyone, because that guarantees cruel disappointments."
There are two reasons for the perpetuation of self-doubt, one that springs from the other. The first one is resentment toward look-alike people, places, and things, especially look-alike father figures. The second reason is trusting in another person to save you. This is what leads back again to resentment and despair, because, as you must know by now, they will always fail.
The problems that rise from doubt are extremely complex and dangerous. Fortunately, the cure, if you can grasp it, is extremely simple: forgive your father. You achieve forgiving your father and retrieving faith in God through dropping resentment towards those parent substitutes in the present. Therefore, stop placing your hope for salvation in anyone, because that guarantees cruel disappointments.
Giving up resentment is also pivotal to letting go of past judgments, including the judgment upon your judgment of others that turns into self-judgments. You call it being too hard on yourself. When you doubted your self as a child, you became wrong and that wrong is ashamed and loath to admit it is wrong. You want so badly to be right. Well-meaning people, who help build your confidence, only cause more self-doubt, because they are helping you believe in a self that went wrong.
Once upon a time when you believed the lying accusations that you were stupid and crazy, when you really were not, that is when the confusion was planted. Now, when people ridicule or support you they only compound that original confusion. What follows you now is a conscience that says there is something wrong, but you do not want to listen, because you want to be right so badly. Fortunately, your conscience is not the enemy… it only wants you to awaken. Because you connect doubting to losing faith and causing everything to go wrong in your life, doubt has become a bad word, for which reason you are afraid to doubt a second time. However, you do need to doubt again, this time to believe that you are wrong, simply because it is the truth that will set you free.