Melissa's mum told her she was worthless. It took a catastrophe for her to realise she wasn't.

"You're useless," Melissa's mum spat at her as a child. "You'll never amount to much."

As she grew into a teen, the barbs only got deeper. 

"You're a fruit-loop," her mother told her, in response to an eating disorder that consumed her.

As a woman, when her marriage ended, her mother blamed her for that, too.

"The slut is on the phone," she'd yell out to Melissa's father, whenever she called home.

This abuse, unrelenting and hard to read, is laid bare in a new memoir entitled With What I Have Left, written alongside Jo Toscano, that details her journey back to self-love, through the most devastating of diagnoses.

"When you grow up, the way your family does things becomes your reality, your way of seeing the world," Melissa tells Mamamia.

Watch: Some signs that you were raised by a narcissistic parent. Post continues after video.

"I never slept over at people's houses, didn't get a lot of insight into how other families did things. I'd see parents on TV encouraging their kids, speaking gently to them, but it wasn't how it was in our family. Of the four children my mother had, she seemed to turn most of her hatred onto me."

After a childhood marred by illness, and in spite of her mother's cruelty, Melissa still grew up to achieve big things. While on the inside she was plagued by self-loathing and a growing problem with self-harm, the external markers of success were impressive. Married, with a thriving career that included international travel and a six-figure income, everything Melissa achieved seemed to be a mark in the column against what her mother had told her - without ever truly convincing her that she was 'good enough'.

Then, out of nowhere, life threw her a curveball. 

Watching television one day, Melissa's brother noticed there was something strange about the way her head was moving.

"He said 'something's wrong. You're watching it like the screen is moving around," recalls Melissa. 

A series of tests - first with an eye doctor and then a neurologist - quickly revealed a devastating diagnosis: cerebral atrophy.

"The cells in my brain were decreasing in size," Melissa writes in her memoir, "when the brain becomes atrophied the brain and the neurons that keep it connected become smaller. The atrophy could affect the whole brain or parts of the brain, which means that certain functions controlled by that part of the brain could be impacted."

The upshot, Melissa's doctor told her, was that it was likely she would be confined to a wheelchair by the end of that year.

"Something just clicked in me when he told me," says Melissa, "and I thought, no way. No way is this going to take me out."

In order to cope, Melissa began talking to her disease. It talked back. And through those conversations, she began to be able to stand up for herself in a way she had never been able to with her own mother.

"Deep down inside, there was an underlying thought that lay at the bottom of my consciousness," writes Melissa.

"I deserved this disease. It was yet another layer of sickness that had been imposed on me by fate. By God, the universe, or whatever controlled our destinies. My mother had always told me that I was a bad person, and having the disease was in proportion to my degree of wickedness."

Her story - told in heartbreaking detail and spanning the lowest lows a person can endure - is ultimately one of healing; if not in the physical sense, then healing of her own inner child, a little girl who desperately needed just one voice opposing the onslaught of criticism that she internalised.

It's for others like her - people whose inner voice has been poisoned by someone who didn't have their best interests at heart - that Melissa says she has published the book.

"I realised that there were other people who could be helped by learning about my own story," she says. 

"I want people to know that there can be light at the end of every tunnel. My illness is progressive. I have a disease, and I will die - but the way I look at it is, why be so serious about everything? You need to adapt. I have learnt to adapt, and to meet situations head-on. And most of all I have learnt that my mother lied. I'm not worthless. I do deserve to be here and live, so that's what I'm going to do, for as long as I can."

With What I Have Left by Melissa A. James, with Jo Tuscano.

With What I Have Left, by Melissa A. James with Jo Tuscano, New Holland Publishers, RRP $29.99, available from all good bookstores or online.

Want to read more memoirs? Here are our top recommendations:

• Looking for a good autobiography? Here are the 10 best memoirs we've ever read.

• GINA CHICK: 'We got through cancer and the loss of our child. Then something else broke us.'

• In 2020, Julie Goodwin entered a mental health facility. This is what she wrote in her diary.

Feature image: Supplied.