My dad was hyper-critical and verbally abusive. My negative self talk is in his voice, using his language. I can't speak for everybody else, but for me the qu

My dad was hyper-critical and verbally abusive. My negative self talk is in his voice, using his language. I can't speak for everybody else, but for me the question of "why" seems rather straightforward. Unlearning that is hard. You probably make mistakes from time to time, as do I. Only, that's an invitation for my dad to show up with some useless invective. It's completely involuntary, and I eventually learned to fight back -- essentially, telling my dad to shut up and go to hell -- and that's what helped me reduce it to near zero. The sad thing is that my dad was a pretty cool guy, if we ignore the bad, and I liked him a lot. But the good parts of him don't live on in my subconscious in such a visceral way.