REWIRING OUR ATTICS: Where do We Begin - Truth”

(Sidebar: I know these are long entries, but they’re leading somewhere…stay with me)

Once we’ve begun to acknowledge that much of our negative self-talk stems from lies we’ve been telling ourselves for most of our lives, then it’s time to begin to replace those lies with truth. Together with self-knowledge and compassion, truth will become our “roadmap” out of the darkness, part of the tool kit we need to manage our depression. (And please remember that these insights are meant to be used in conjunction with medication and professional therapy).

At this point, although the words may look like it, I’m not talking about religious or universal truth, but about MY own core personal truth. Here are my four core truths:

1. I am loved.
2. I am never nor shall I ever be "beyond redemption."
3. God has not abandoned me – I am not alone.
4. I am more than my depression…depression is not the totality of who I am.

In order to be able to believe those core truths about myself, I had to acknowledge and then break the power that those old lies had over me. And to do that, I had to find my first truth, and that was the truth behind the lies.

Where do the lies come from? That is a surprisingly important piece of the puzzle. I had to be willing to acknowledge the true beginnings of the damaging words that were etched on my brain and still causing so much pain. Through therapy and my own digging around for answers, I came up with some startling truths about those lies.

1. My mother DID love me and really did want me to be born.
2. My mother lost a baby when I was five years old, an event that I couldn’t fully understand until many years later, but which permanently scarred my self-image, as well as every relationship for the rest of my life, precisely because nobody helped me to understand.
3. My father, who rarely hugged me or showed any outward display of affection, also deeply loved me – and there was a very simple explanation for that lack of affection, which bore no reflection on me whatsoever, which I didn’t know about until my mid-thirties.
4. Many of those things my mother used to say to me were things she had grown up hearing when she was a child. She was often merely passing on her own mother’s words, not her own feelings about me personally.
5. My mother had painful emotional/mental issues of her own, which went undiagnosed and untreated. A child would naturally be oblivious to that possibility, but it would have made all the difference in the world for me to know all that.
6. Parents are sometimes tired, grieving humans, who become distracted and frustrated by the constant demands of raising children (four in our house); they fling words out in anger and fatigue, which means they often didn’t realize what they were saying, much less actually mean what the words are saying to me.
7. Many of the phrases that became entrenched in my brain as truth may not have been the exact words that were originally said to me. Those words went through my sensitive interpretation process and came out the other end completely askew…but who would have known to check it out at the time?!

[Sidebar: Unfortunately I have to add another possibility to the list of truths, which doesn’t pertain to me personally, but may well fit someone else’s experience, and that is that some parents ARE cruel and vindictive and do deliberately inflict damage upon their children. That’s a different scenario, and probably not within my expertise to tackle here.]

So I’ve discovered these truths about my lies; I’ve realized that there is the possibility that I misunderstood some of the things people said back then. Maybe the words I’m remembering (and using to beat myself up) aren’t quite as true as I originally interpreted them to be. Now what?

I begin the long journey of extricating each damaging word out of my inner dialogue and figure out where it’s coming from. I examine it to see if it actually fits me or not. I hold each one of these negative “beliefs” about myself up to the light of who I know myself to be now, and what I know to be true about me from other sources (therapy, faith, friends). If that belief is a lie, it will not stand up to the light of what I now know to be true. If it’s a truth, it will remain so.

But please hear this: if this is going to be the healing process that it can be, we have to be willing to be brutally honest with ourselves…up until now we think we have been honest with ourselves, but believe me, it will take even more brutal honesty to believe the GOOD TRUTHS about ourselves than it did to believe those negative lies about ourselves.

Here’s an example of me checking out one of those long-held “beliefs”: Because my Dad rarely hugged me or displayed any affection toward me, I grew up estranged from him, believing that he didn’t love me, and that I was ugly and untouchable. After my suicide attempt in 1984, I finally dared to face that agonizing “belief” head on, wrote my Dad a letter and asked him outright if he loved me (what did I have to lose?!) He wrote me back a beautiful letter, surprised at my question. He had never even imagined that I had doubted his love. He affirmed his profound love for me and went on to explain how his religious upbringing had been severe in terms of being taught to never touch a young female after puberty. So he carried that teaching out to the extreme. It explained everything. It was so simple, something that had never occurred to me, but made perfect sense. (Sadly, though, it turns out that those teachings had actually become grossly askew when run through his own interpretation process –but he never checked it out, so never knew that hugging his daughter was okay! Do you see a pattern emerging here?)

This is what we have to do with those negative beliefs that we fling at ourselves. Check them out. Ask for clarification if necessary. You might find that you won’t even have to ask, because your eyes are older and wiser now and more able to see the circumstances for what they really were at the time (like my Mom grieving over the loss of her new baby). Most times, we will discover that the negative “truths” we’ve been telling ourselves for so long are sad misinterpretations of a young child’s confused mind.


I’m going to stop here for now. I am going somewhere with all this...Self-Knowledge...Compassion...the tools that will help us manage our depression. But if anyone has questions or concerns, please ask and I'll gladly take a detour.