Talking Picture

I went away for the weekend, spending it with some friends and a really strange thing happened to me. I was sitting alone in a room which was decorated with a series of victorian paintings of women and children. When I sat down I started to consider the painting directly in front of me of a little girl standing in a garden carrying a basket of flowers. I thought it was badly done and her eyes seemed strange, they didn't seem to suit her. "You're an ugly thing," I thought and to my shock I got an answer back, in my head of course. "Stop persecuting me. You're always persecuting me." And then in my mind's eye, I could see her cowering in a corner and I was standing over her shouting, "What is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?" It doesn't take a genius to recognise that this is all a conversation with myself, about myself. The way I was treating her was the way my mother treated me. The incident arose because I was overwhelmed by anxiety, for no apparent reason, earlier in the day. I felt so frustrated by this I kept asking myself why, telling myself to calm down, and I guess beating myself up in general.

So three gold stars for being a lunatic, but what do I do with this?