A person might believe, through a falsely negative 'self' image that he or she is an awful person. Lana was like this. She experienced depression after her marriage to an alcoholic broke up. It turned out that as a child, from the time she was very young, her alcoholic mother, would tell her in a particularly vicious way that she had never wanted her. 

This meant that she always carried an inner sense of being 'awful'. She kept this hidden from others and from herself.  In fact, she has not behaved in any 'awful' way at all, ever. But this deep-seated, negative 'self' image meant that she had a hard time relating to other people, because she experienced herself as 'less than' others, and separate, different and 'unlikable'.

Lana is trapped by that negative 'self' image. Her energies are channeled through that self, and it provided her with her unrecognized feel of herself. After the marriage break up the negative self took over and to her it became just how she was and always had been is. She tried to be positive, but her image was that she's negative. 

Trying to be positive when it's in you that you're negative adds to the rigidity and tension. This is true even though she was more positive for a while. Eventually she came to the therapy program, started to recognize and accept what was in her as herself, and developed her process of letting go . For a while she had a therapist to help her, but in time was able to continue her process through her affiliation with Al Anon.