Beating myself up terribly today

Just feel the need to put this out in some place so that I’m not carrying it around alone without any support.

So, I’m currently in grad school to work in mental health myself, and I’m currently in an internship. I just had to meet with a couple of higher-ups today to discuss certain areas I need to improve so that I can succeed. It’s to a point where they’re taking off a big chunk of my caseload, too.

They were gentle with me the whole time. They told me that no one’s disappointed in me, that they see me being hard on myself and are making affirmations one of my goals, that they’re just making adjustments to nip things in the bud that could hurt my career if it doesn’t change, etc… so, logically, I know I’m in my head.

But, I can’t help but feel humiliated. I’ve been crying this whole day, just firmly believing that I’m a failure, that this whole thing is embarrassing, that I’m letting my professors and my supervisor down. I can’t shake off this warped idea that my areas that need improvement are being shared to all these people because they want to put my failures on blast, or that I’m the only student out of my cohort who is struggling this badly to the point of even needing an intervention like this, Or that me not having completed certain tasks for weeks shows that I don’t care about this internship. And that’s just to name a few of the many, many negative thoughts that are going through my mind.

Sometimes it seems like it would be easier to just give up, because this entire mental process is so debilitating. It even feels pathetic that I’m putting myself through this, when I was literally approached gently and with a ton of reassurance. Just wish I could snap my fingers and make the pain go away.