I joined Road to Self because I was struggling to understand myself and why I am repeating the same mistakes, not only with others but also with myself.  The Road to Self program helped me to understand how my narcissistic mother and sister live within me and how they ruin my life. After completing this course, I became more aware of how to understand my behavior, beliefs, and how I can change my negative thoughts about myself and the world to more positive ones, ultimately leading to a calmer life.  This program is amazing. Thank you, Jerry, for all your support and clarity.

Joining the Road to self program is the best decision I have made in a long time. I am 44 years old and live in Sweden. I grew up with a narcissistic mother. I have always felt different, out of place and thought there was something wrong with me. I know now that my whole life I have been programmed in a certain way and there is a way out of it. I struggle every day with low self-worth, chronic anxiety, and am dependent on what other people think about me. I am longing to come out of this cage that I have been living in for so many years, My mother passed away 1,5 years ago which resulted in a major life crisis. Who am I? I am confident that it is possible to change my negative thoughts, believing that I am good enough, but it's not done overnight. I need to work on this, and it is hard. But I will not give up. The program also made me realize that I am not alone, so many people have similar experiences, and this is a great support. I hope one day I will be free to live my life the way I want to.

The Road to Self program helped me realize that I am a scapegoat. It was disturbing at first to realize this, although it's comforting to know that I can stop trying to be someone that they can accept because they never will. To me, that means to be concerned about my own self instead of being concerned about what they think. It's freeing. A lot of work needs to be done, but at least I'm more grounded and have a direction. A lot better than these self-help gurus who say just be positive or control your thoughts, and it will all be ok. That stuff is so temporary.

I had been doubting my own thoughts about my experiences with my family, thinking I was the crazy one. Road to Self taught me that I was actually the only sane member in my family. I have been using the program tools to solidify my own thoughts and to believe in myself. I do not feel lost or broken anymore. I am finally finding clarity, hope, and deep peace.

The Road to Self program helped me by showing me just how real my struggles are, because others share their struggles with the community. It just shows it's not all in my head (although it is, in another way 🤔). I joined Road to Self because I wanted to do something concrete about my situation and take up the challenge of helping my best friend in this world: me. Thanks for all you do.

The Road to Self helped me realize how easily I gather evidence against myself without even knowing it. I had still been allowing my family’s voices to live through me, even as a 55-year-old adult. Seeing that pattern for what it is was strangely freeing. Like a raw egg, the guilt and shame cracked open under their own weight. And there is no putting it back together. Thank you.

The Road to Self program helped me in three vital ways. 1. The Family WiFi concept gave life and form to Bowen's Undifferentiated Ego Mass which allowed me to see it as something I'd actually lived and had not yet transcended. I kept the modem when the relationship and stayed connected to the guilt and punishment. Specifically for me, the power of the WiFi takes blame out of the equation, serving as one of the best means of maladaptive coping that my mother used to survive her own inner turmoil. She reinforced it with graphic threats of suicide and other themes of life and death as part of my shame-existence bind. Adults from “good enough” families in these situations with people who have BPD often lose perspective, and I was a child. I had to learn to accept and normalize many things to survive, and that all became part of our family WiFi. Though messages directed at me were personal, the concept gave me a lot of cause and liberty to embrace self-forgiveness. My parents moralized everything, and the concept took much of that imposed moral sting that made things more emotionally complicated. 2. While working through the program, I finally accepted on a deeper level that I had been abused. It took me fifteen years studying the codependency literature before I could admit that my mother's behavior was beyond just immature and ill-advised but actually constituted abuse. Part of what held that together was my own wishful thinking of childhood to keep me positive enough to move forward with life. In a way, I was their greatest defender, gaslighting myself into believing that they were different than other parents who abused their children as if they had no real agency of their own. I finally admitted to myself that my parents did have full agency and always chose what was easiest for them as opposed alternatives that were in my best interest. Not all of their choices were bad, but the band ones were tragic and came late and at a high cost. I also found the liberty to realize and admit that my mother was often jealous and vindictive which I have avoided and denied most of my life. I'm not sure that there was a direct cause-and-affect reason why, but I finally relinquished the fantasy that I would be able to find some grand act that would win my mother's good favor. With this came the irrational expectation that my mother's temperament and behavior would mellow with age. I've lamented for 40 years about what I did in my adulthood that caused my mother's belief that I'd betrayed her. A few weeks after I finished the modules, I realized that her disposition towards me never changed at all. I was the scapegoat as a child, and suddenly, I realized that the only change in my mother's disposition or my status in her eyes was in my mind. I needed to believe when I became an independent adult no longer under her roof, her heart would soften because I would no longer be a daily trigger and burden for her. (I then remembered several situations where I had lived out grand actions of service and longsuffering for her In grand BPD form, she'd soon deny them and gaslight me, claiming I was a liar whenever I alluded to them.) 3. After I completed the modules, I seemed to sponaneously stop claiming that I'd chosen to reject my parents, assuming the blame for my No Contact status with them. As I was completing the first module, I realized that I'd never done much work around how my parents disinherited me. They very glibly informed me that they'd disinherited me, right at the time that I believed our relationship had never been stronger. In fact, as I reflect back on the Road To Self program, images of my parents' home and the nearby places I associate with it and the person to whom they told me they'd decided to leave their (very modest) assets appear in my mind. I wrote a letter to my parents, and I then wrote a letter of blessing to my same-aged peer in my neighborhood who is set to inherit everything, so much as I know. They would not even tell me who was handling their affairs as if they knew they'd done something very wrong, expecting me to act out. Eighteen months after this, I relocated, and catching a ride with a friend, my mother showed up on my doorstep the day after the movers brought my belongings to my new apartment. Her friend would pick her up five days later, and I wish I'd taken her straight to the airport to fly home. Minutes before she left, she instigated the verbal altercation of a lifetime. She'd claimed for a decade that I was demon-possessed, even though the ministers I sought for deliverance/exorcism claimed that I was not demonized (which only angered her). Not long before disinheriting me, she claimed that only Jim Bakker (of the PTL scandal in the 80s) could outwit the particularly tricky demons I had., expecting me to fly to his new TV studio on Missouri to meet her to “finally get rid of the demons.” At the end of her visit, after telling me sarcastically that “we'd all be better off” if I killed myself (???!!!), when she started with the claims in the argument after saying such cruel things, I became angry and decided that no one should have to endure such madness. In fact, were it true, I would want to do all to remain connected to my child at all cost. When she returned home, after much phone drama, my parents responded with their own very limited contact which progressed to drastically dwindling phone contact and snail mail letters . My many requests to meet me at a halfway point of the two-day drive between us to work with a conflict resolution specialist (at my $ expense) were never acknowledged. Eight years later, they washed their hands of me in a snail mail exchange, noting that they'd already “adopted” a far better replacement daughter in my stead, and Jesus would never allow me into heaven for my unforgiveness. For the best part of twenty-one years, I've taken full blame for choosing low contact, “shoulding” all over myself. After grieving over their disinheritance of me, I finally honored myself by remembering that all of these things transpired simply because I asked for my mother to stop claiming that I was possessed and apostate. I then allowed myself to feel, embrace, and own all the evidence that my parents' love for me was entirely conditional and had always been so. In the wake of that, I am now processing the history of profound evidence that the parenting I received was definitely not “good enough” (school phobia, serious somatic illnesses, a peptic ulcer at age 9, CPS report threats from public school, Christian school enrollment to avert CPS threats, putting me in the care of alcoholics and child molesters, ACE score of 7, etc.). And I feel no shame about it. Thank you for the program!

I’ve been no-contact with my family for over two years now. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and one of the clearest. At first, I felt like I had betrayed something sacred. I carried so much guilt, and part of me still wondered if I was the problem. But I knew I couldn’t keep living inside their dysfunction. Since then, I’ve worked hard to build something of my own. To find who I am without their voices in my head. I don’t feel as tangled in their patterns anymore. The guilt. The self-doubt. The reactivity. Much of it has softened. Some of it is quieter. I finally feel peace where there used to be turmoil.