From those immediate negative self-assessments, we dive deeper, reinforced by old admonitions playing in our brain. We may be adults, our parents and teachers perhaps long deceased, but their deprecating, wounding, critical, even, at times, cruel or abusive, remarks play over and over as if we were still children, being scolded for "our own good."

With help of those judgmental tapes playing repetitively in back of our minds, we easily move from annoyance at a simple mistake anyone could have made to a global view of our own ineptitude: "I always blow it . . . I can't do anything right . . . Why am I such a failure?"

Why is it so much harder to forgive ourselves than to forgive those we love? Is it because we don't love ourselves as much? Is it because we expect more of ourselves? Or is it that we know ourselves too well, painfully aware of our dark secret places and our internal shortcomings? We are hard on ourselves because we have a deep, subconscious, lifelong belief that we don't quite measure up.

The maggot gnawing away at our core is made up of a long string of events starting when we first became aware of world and began to hear word "No!" It continued through a childhood of making mistake after mistake, as we all do when learning new skills, and through adulthood as we are judged by our bosses, our spouses, our customers, with heaviest emotional jolt of being laid off, ultimate rejection of our self-worth.

Psychologists have studied authority-child interactions in both home and in school. Remarkably, feedback to child, in both environments, is more than 70% negative with remainder either neutral or positive. Is it any wonder that we grow up to view ourselves as not quite good enough, mess-ups, or even total failures?