Retraining My Brain
Posted: Tuesday, October 21, 2008
by Tex Norman
What I do is linked to what I feel.
What I feel is linked to what I think.
What I think is based upon what I believe. My beliefs are based on inculcated words and experiences filtered by memory and etched through repetition.
To be better I am going to have to change my beliefs, my thoughts and that means retraining my brain.
I was raised by blackbelt fundamentalists who had an inflexible view of what humans had to do to stay on God's good side. The God I was raised with hated sin, and was willing to send me to hell for any infraction, He was delighted to roast me in hell for all eternity for the smallest infraction and to toss me into a lake of fire where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth and the worm is not consumed.
My parents were (subconsciously I hope) stand-ins for a jealous, angry God and they yelled at me, belittled me, threatened me, or beat me on a daily basis for flaws both real and imagined. I wrote some poems about these abusive highlights that I have posted here in SearchWrap:
You Killed the Baby (from Life Lines and unpublished book of poems)
Shaped Notes (from Life Lines: an unpublished book of poetry)
The most powerful people in my world thought that I was stupid, clumsy, and willfully disobedient. By age six I was told that I had caused my mother to have two miscarriages, and therefore I was pretty sure I was guilty of murder. Six year old killers cannot be too pleasing to God. To make me a good person, a person that might, one day, be saved by God, I had to be perfect, and they were going to torment me into being just right.
It didn't take long before I was convinced that they were absolutely right, I am a bad person and a loser. At first I needed to be reminded that I was slow, that I was lazy, that I couldn't do math or read, or write, because I didn't have those gifts. My father was a wantabee artist, so, according to them, I was a budding artist. I would never do well in school. Any resistance to my parents was not seen as the actions of a tired child, or a child testing the limits, or a child expressing individuality; it was sin that would get my soul tossed on the burning coals of hell. Eventually, I got to where I could do all that abuse of myself all by myself.
After a time, however, I no longer needed them to tell me that I was missing the mark, falling short, that I was dumb, that I made bad choices, that I was not fervent enough in my faith, and that I had very little chance of being successful in my life, or in the afterlife. But then it is not unusual to carry guilty and shame from a rough up-bring. Consider the following poem by US Poet Laureate, stanley Kunitz:
The Portrait by Stanley Kunitz
My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.
So what now?
I actually ended up working as a Child Protective Case Manager working with families where abuse and neglect of children has been determined by court. My job has been to go into home and create tasks and provide services in an attempt to improve parenting skills, eliminate the hazardous conditions, and to ensure that any risk for the children had been eliminated or was at least diminished and manageable. The job gets to me from time to time, but one of the positives that has come out my work is that I now know that I didn't have it the worse. There are a lot of children that have gone through and are going through much worse.
It doesn't mean that my wounds are not wounds. It just helps me see that it could have been worse.
I also came to believe that my parents were not premeditated tormentors. I've come to believe that my parents were doing their very best. They were too young to have children. They were religious nuts, but they had been raised by religious nuts. My mother was chronically depressed, and she was raised by my chronically depressed grandmother. My father was what we would call today, bi-polar. They were poor. They did not believe in birth control, but they did apparently like sex, and so we had a big family. Their stress and crooked thinking lead them to make some parenting mistakes.
It was important for me to see the burdens and stresses on my parents, because it allows me to forgive them. I also came to realize that what happened in my childhood exists in my memory, and memory is never what happened, it is what I felt about what I selectively recall.
So if I am to really release my childhood traumas, and change my beliefs, thoughts, and feelings I am going to have to retrain my brain. But how?
1. Awareness
The first step to any healing is being aware. Right now, I need to be aware it when I start mentally beating myself up. When I cuss me out, chew me out, belittle me, insult me, and urge me to just give up because nothing is going to turn out all right anyway, it is absolutely essential that I realize what I am doing and make a conscious decision to stop it.
2. Assess my safety .
Often I make very bad choices when I am afraid. Since I have this history of seeing myself as incompetent, unlovable, and worthless, I am also afraid that once the world figures it out, they will see that I am even worse than they had thought, and I will suffer some horrible consequence for being me.
Part of my Awareness is to stop and ask myself, "Am I safe?" If the answer is NO then I need to take action to get safe. I need to run, or dial 911. The thing is, almost always, when I ask, "Am I safe?" the answer is, "Yes."
Maybe I am worried about what might happen later. Maybe I am afraid. Remember that FEAR is anticipated pain. But what might happen is not what is happening right now. " Am I safe right now?" If the answer is, "Yes," then relax, and take time to assess your now, and move on to number 3.
3. Counter
I must counter my encounters with self-loathing. This means arguing with my allegations against me, and using lots of affirmations.
Google the word, Affirmation, and you will find information on how to write your own affirmations. You will find lists of affirmations that you can just use right now, without having to be all creative. If you are in a down period you just may not have the energy, at first, to be creative.
4. Fake it, Pretend, Practice
Fake it 'til you make it.
I'm preaching to myself, but if feelings come from behavior, from what we do, that means that behaviors do not come from feelings. If you wait until you feel happy to do happy things, then you will wait forever. You have to do happy things even when you don't feel happy. The actions lead to the feelings. The actions do not lead to the feelings immediately, but the actions do lead to the feelings eventually.
If you haven't got it. Fake it! Too short? Wear big high heels, but do practice walking. ~Victoria Adams, also commonly known as Posh Spice
The word fake has a negative sound to it. A better word would be to pretend.
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend. ~Jacques Derrida
Perhaps practice might be a better word than pretend.
Practice does NOT make Perfect (as in totally without flaw), but it does per fect (as in getting you further and further away from imperfection.)
It may take practice to think more positively and more compassionately, but just as you must train a puppy to behave the way you want it to, you must train your mind to behave itself. Otherwise, like the puppy, your mind will just make a lot of messes. ~Tom Barrett
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