REWIRING THE ATTIC – WHAT ARE THE LIES IN YOUR ATTIC?

We’ve talked about mangled thinking, how our thought processes becomes distorted and the negative self-talk takes over, deafening us to other possibilities.

Now I want to talk more about what I call “Rewiring the Attic”, or rewriting our inner dialogues. But before we can begin to rewire our attics, we need to acknowledge what exactly it is that needs fixing. We need to become aware of the things we are saying to ourselves deep down underneath the cacophony of noise we surround ourselves with in order to drown out those whispers.

People who suffer from depression experience a relentless onslaught of “self-talk”, most, if not all of it, self-derogatory and steeped in many years worth of self-hatred. And I’m willing to suggest that most, if not all of that self-hatred is steeped in lies that we have either been told (or sometimes misinterpreted) by parents or other significant others while growing up, or lies/stories that we have created in our own minds to explain situations that we didn’t understand at the time…and when children don’t understand frightening or confusing situations, they will often create their own reasons, usually to their own detriment.

So, let’s talk about the lies that are at the root of MY mangled thinking and negative self-talk. See if any of these sound remotely familiar…the reasons for the lies being there will differ, but the basic message of the lies probably won’t.

I heard variations of these from the time I was a very young child until I moved out of the house at 18 years old…”oh don’t go play over at __’s house, you’ll wear out the welcome mat.” “You’re a nuisance.” “Get that ugly look off your face”. “Look what you made me do (while taking a handful of pills). “No wonder nobody likes you at school”. “You’ll never fit in anywhere if you think like that.”

Now don’t those make me sound like a terrible child? That’s what I believed too. Ugly. Unwanted. Nuisance. Unloveable. Misfit. Stupid. Unacceptable. Those words were firmly etched on my being well before my 13th birthday.

And what horrible wicked things did I do to deserve those things being said to me? I asked if I could go play with my friends. I asked about my baby sister…who had died, but my 5-year-old mind didn’t understand. I wore ugly coke-bottle glasses and still had to squint up my face to see the TV. I preferred to read books and listen to music in my room instead of watching TV with my brothers (who always got to pick the shows). After taking almost two hours (no exaggeration) to do the dishes (I did dishes for the entire family of 6 all by myself every night for nine years), I left a roasting pot in the sink to soak overnight.

It took me over thirty years of struggling through undiagnosed, inexplicable chronic sadness, a major breakdown, a suicide attempt, a beautiful letter from my Dad and years of therapy to dare to challenge those words and the self-hatred that had me writhing in agony and shame for being born. And when I dared to hold those long-held beliefs up to the light of dawning Truth, I finally realized that they were all lies. But they had caused so much pain and damage all those years, it would take a lot of hard work and discipline (and faith) to undo the damage and rewire that attic. In fact, as most of you know, it's still ongoing.

If you suffer from chronic depression, there’s a really good chance that you also have ancient “lies in your attic” that are feeding your negative self-talk. You may not even be aware that they’re there. It takes courage to face them down, to believe that there’s another possibility. But until we face and name them as lies, we remain crippled by their unfettered power over us.

Enough for now…more on “Rewiring our Attics: Where do We Begin” on Tuesday…