What Are You Telling Yourself, Di?

This one is for you, Cheryl! Or shall I introduce you to the world as Dr. Y? Either way you were a great therapist and I miss seeing you regularly.

So blogging friends, let me tell you about the greatest lesson I learned while seeing the dear Dr. Y. She actually taught it to me the first or second session but it seemed to take me about 2 years to really internalize it and make it a valued part of my normal everyday thinking.

Do you know we have paths in our brains and to think differently we have to reform them? There are physical reasons, called neurons and synapses and dendrites, that make it hard re-learning and changing beliefs. Educators are taught that it is important to discover what a child knows and then to plug the added info into their knowledge. If the knowledge is eroneous then the work will be harder. Unlearning is not easy and most of us resist it naturally.

And as the dendrites thin with menopause.....well, learning is tougher as anyone like me who returned to college at middle age can tell you. The hardest lesson was the one that retaught me to relate positively to myself. I really had to work at it to make it my own and without Cheryl's frequent reminder I might have given up. I didn't think it would ever become second nature to me to cut myself slack but often it now is.

What did I constantly tell myself? "There is something wrong with me," was a pretty consistent recording sometimes worded as "What is wrong with me?" "I should not be needy." "Having need is bad" "If only this person would approve of me then I would be ok." "I have to be the best because then I will be special." "I am so stupid." All of these lies I believed and told myself along with a myriad of others.

Cheryl had this uncanny way of reading my thoughts and when I switched to judge myself mode she would ask THE question. "What are you telling yourself?"

At first she had to ask the question for me to remember to be careful with where my mind was taking me, but pretty soon I was asking it when I felt the panic inside begin to rise. For a long time, any time the anxiety or emotional pain started, I asked, found the lie, replaced it with the truth and walked around mentally saying the truth over and over in my head. Then slowly but surely I noticed I flipped into switching to the truth without consciously having to go through finding what I was telling myself. It became me. And then finally the truth rose up first as soon as the difficulty faced me and I never even flinched.

Most of the time now it works like a well oiled machine. The gears turn and I tell myself mistakes are ok, I dont' have to be perfect, I am allowed to be human like everyone else and have human needs, and what others say or think doesn't define me. I can take most blows that come at me and move on, but occasionally I get that call into the principals office and the heart pounds and I have to ask myself once again "Di, what are you telling yourself?" Disapproval by authority can really kick me hard but some time alone and "Di, what are you telling yourself" usually fixes me up pretty quickly.

I encourage you to try it, but remember it will take time to reprogram that computer in your head and lots of practice. Maybe tape THE question up around the house, or get a friend to remind you when you sink into the old ways of thinking. And always, try sitting in God's presence and hear his words to you. I guarantee you he is not telling you that you are stupid or have to be perfect or that abuse was your fault. He knew that shame and condemnation didn't work or he wouldn't have bothered to die and release us from the law that brought shame.