Your welcome Eagle.

God Bless

With love
Leigha

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…

Eagle

Your post really emphasizes just how damaging words can be - how we really need to send out words that uplift, that encourage, that show love - always.

Evie, How true, especially around children. A young child's interpretation processes can't yet filter out sarcasm and idioms, nor do they know enough about human nature to just put it down to PMS, or that Mommy's having a bad day, or all those numerous other hectic reasons why parents might say those kinds of things to their children.

Children just hear what they hear, internalize it to their detriment and, like weeds in the garden, those words begin to take over, gradually killing off the good stuff.

The words we speak out loud and the words we speak to ourselves! Both are equally important. I believe the internal words are the ground work for what comes off our tongues.

Eagle, your posts are reminding me of all the wisdom in your book. I thoroughly enjoyed getting a picture of your faith story.

Dotsie, it's so true that what we think inside of ourselves manifests itself in our behaviours, attitudes and speech. We don't always recognize that connection (as Smile puts it, the mind-body connection), but they're inseparable. I'm going to speak more on the practical aspect of that thought-behaviour connection in part 2 of this "rewiring of the attic" topic tomorrow.

As far as my faith story, that too will be coming more indepth eventually...although I'm willing to go wherever the questions lead me.

I suppose this could come across wrong, but my own faith story constantly amazes me too. It really hit home while struggling through my 2002 breakdown how incredibly faithful and awesome God has been in my life since early childhood...I'm sure those faith experiences (like the dreams) are the only reason I survived intact for so long. It's as if God was personally keeping me safe until He knew that I was ready and evolved enough to begin to deal with, and bring healing to, the damage. (And how else can you explain the coincidence that, although a loner and misfit all my life, when I most needed to be, I was the most surrounded by people who would love me back to life!)

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.

Hi all, I PM'd Eagle because I thought this poem had relevance to the current topic, and she asked if I could post it here. Some of you may have seen it before, as it's in "Cosmic Brownies".


Good For Nothing


For three hours each night
months and years in a row
mother confined her eldest daughter
to the slip-covered confines of the living room,
interspersed a litany of
“My children are rotten and they always hurt me”
with a repeating barrage of
“You’re stupid, you’re ugly,
you’re good for nothing.
You think you’re smart but eventually
the world will realize it’s all a facade.
You’ll never amount to anything.”
The girl was being punished
for talking back, speaking out,
asking questions, growing up.
She had to sit in the same chair
until mother grew tired and went to bed.
She assuaged herself by counting;
sometimes a given epithet would be
repeated as much as fifty times in an evening.
The girl, certified child genius,
was too smart to believe she was stupid,
but for years she thought she was ugly
and self-sabotaged every chance she had of success.

A decade later
on the brink of a nervous breakdown
the mother sought out her estranged daughter,
tried to rationalize the earlier abuse.
Mother, who was the youngest of a quartet of sisters,
spent three years after high school caring
for her dying cancer-ravaged father.
Afterwards she wanted to attend art school
but was told “Girls don’t go to college”
so instead married a soldier just returned from war.
They produced four miserable children
and moved to the suburbs where
she assumed the burden of full-time housewife.
She worried that her eldest daughter,
smart-mouthed stubborn wild-child,
would never find a husband
or adapt to a world where women
routinely squashed their dreams,
so she tried to make the girl fit into the mold
that she herself hated.
She thought she was doing the girl a favor
and was forever disappointed that she had failed.

It was well into adulthood,
and only after four bouts with near-death
that the daughter finally looked up into the dazzling sky
and sprouted wings.

©Meredith Karen Laskow

Thanks Meredith, It's definitely relevant to everything we're talking about here. Thank you for sharing.

I wrote a rather bleak poem when I was a teenager, starting off with the words "I'm just a nobody in a no-man's land" ...whenever I read it, it brings tears to my eyes to remember those terrible years of feeling hated and worthless. I'm so glad we've both found our wings and our own piece of that dazzling sky.

Epiphany of Possibility: an excerpt from Chapter 7

(waking up after my suicidal overdose)

It was 4 a.m., dark, and I was alone in ICU. As I lay there in those early morning hours, with bits of charcoal stuck in my teeth, and tubes pumping lifesaving fluids into my body, an amazing wondrous thing began to happen. Love. Washing over me, bathing me, baptizing me in tangible warmth I had never felt before. I felt it, flowing right through my blood, touching every cell, every thought, every scrap of life beating within me. For the very first time in my life, I actually knew without any doubt whatsoever that I was loved.

I had never felt that warmth of certainty before. People started walking through my mind, one by one, looking right at me, smiling at me…Mom, Dad, my brothers Dave, Rob and Gary, Kate, Father Louis, Father Basil…an endless procession of people…and for the first time ever, I knew to the core of my being that they loved me, and always had.

Why had I never seen it before? Why had I never been able to believe it before? It was so clear to me now. It was an incredible, life-altering epiphany of love and possibility.

There was no looking back. The effects of that early-morning epiphany were astounding, lifting me far beyond even my own hopes and expectations of recovery. I was so genuinely glad to be alive and couldn’t wait to get started on the rest of my life.

The residue effect of my "epiphany of love" was that since I now knew with such clarity that much of what I had believed in most of my life was a lie, I had to wonder how many more lies lay simmering deep down inside of me, crippling me, and controlling my life from unknown hiding places. It wasn’t an easy, immediate escape, coming back from that hellhole. I had spent a lifetime caught in the firm grip of those dark lies.

I had to begin to rewrite my entire repertoire of inner dialogues. It was hard work and at times, very arduous. It took constant vigilance and lots of perseverance. I had to be diligent in my willingness to be brutally honest with myself. I had to take every belief and every perception I had of myself and hold it up to the light of truth. If they were true, they withstood the light. If they were lies, they simply couldn’t stand up to the exposure, and we were able then to rewire that part of the attic.

I couldn’t do it alone. A network of faithful and supportive people stood by me all the way…Dr Reynolds, Kate, Dr. C, Father Louis, Father Basil, and my family, especially my brother Gary who called me just about every day for many months. They encouraged me, mentored me and nourished me with their steadfast faith in me.

Indeed, they loved me back to life.