The Benefits of Brainwashing

I know the term "brainwashing" has a negative connotation.  Usually you hear the term relating to cults that rape young girls and commit mass suicide.

Those are rather extreme examples of a belief-changing technique that advertisers and society uses on all of us daily.  Perfectly sane people would not spend so much money on brand name crap otherwise.  Or think that formula is better for babies than human milk...but that's a whole other rant.

Today, I want to talk about the benefits of brainwashing.  You can use this very same technique to cleanse your own brain of beliefs that are detrimental to your well-being.

Think about how advertisers inundate you with pleasurable or scary images, repeated the same key words and phrases over and over.  Some of them try to guilt you into following their orders.  Others try to lure you by presenting something you might want.  What they are really doing is nurturing the fear of lack - of not being, having, doing enough to be accepted by our peers.

Fear of lack drives our economy and our society, but it doesn't have to rule our lives.

You can wash your brain of that scare-mongering bullpoopy.

You can replace your fear-based beliefs with beliefs based in love and trust.

I'm not talking about religious beliefs, although those can certainly change too.  I'm talking about your day to day beliefs about who you are, what you care about, how other people are, how the world works.

The truth of the matter is that if you believe you can't do something, you won't be able to do it.  You won't even give yourself a chance to try unless you have a little spark of hope inside you, just waiting for it's chance to ignite into a purifying blaze, transforming that old limiting belief of can't into the empowering belief of can.

If you didn't have that little spark of hope inside you, you wouldn't be reading this.  So read on.  Hope is the key to happiness.  Hope opens the door to love.  Love is the cure for fear.

It's a simple formula, but not even remotely easy.  When you've been afraid all your life of not having enough, not doing enough, not being enough, raised by a society that runs on those same fears, it takes a lot of work to ignite that spark of hope into the cozy ember of love.

Most of us can't go from one extreme to another overnight.  Most of us can't go to bed believing nothing we do matters and wake up believing that everything we do matters.  Most of us have to go to the "maybe I can do something that matters", then to the "this thing I do matters to me, so it probably matters to someone else," before we get to "Yes!  I'm making a difference!"

You might find the following questions enlightening if you answer them honestly to yourself.  It works best if you only do one fear at a time.  If you make a list of fears, you'll probably find that many, if not all of them, are related.

1. What are you afraid of?
2. How does that fear interfere with your happiness?
3. What belief does your fear reflect?
4. What do you need to believe in order to change that fear?
5. What steps can you take to make that change?

I'll go first.

1. I'm afraid that I'm not good enough to be accepted and supported by my peers.
2. This fear keeps me from speaking my truth, from finishing my passion-fueled projects in a timely manner, and from going into situations where I might make new friends (or be rejected, or worse, ridiculed.)
3. I think this fear reflects a belief that my worth lies in the opinions of others.
4. In order to change this belief, I need to find worth in myself in order to replace that fear with love for myself and trust in the universe.  I need to believe that I have inherent worth, or at the very least, that I have created value with my life and actions.
5. I can repeat an affirmation to myself many times a day along the lines of, "I am valuable."  I can make a list of all the things that I've done that have helped others.  I can make a list of all the positive things others have said to me reflecting how valuable I am to them.  I can put both of those lists in places where I can often see them, and make sure to read them every day or whenever I need the boost.  I can choose to cut people who say negative things or inspire feelings of unworthiness in me from my life.  I can choose to stay away from images, talk shows, "news," and other media that inspires negative feelings in me.  I can treat myself with the same unconditional love with which I treat my child.

The list in number 5 could be longer, but I didn't want to bore the pants off of anyone still reading. ;)

Sometimes I think I believe something, only later to realize I was wrong.  For example, for most of my life, I thought I was very mature for my age.  Last year I underwent some major healing, and when I looked back over my journals from earlier in my life, I was shocked at how immature I'd been.  And at how damaged I'd been.  I'd known something was wrong with me, but I'd had no idea how bad it was. I couldn't know how bad it was until I healed enough to see it.

I didn't think of it that way at the time, but I healed myself by brainwashing myself.  I isolated myself from the people and media that felt bad to me.  I repeated positive affirmations to myself over and over until I believed them.  I took care of my body's needs first, and then started working on my mind and spirit.  I'm still working on my heart.

And yet...

I feel like a totally different person.  A happier person.  A healthier person.  And I still have a lot of healing ahead of me.

I've been thinking about this for weeks, so I thought it was time to share.  I hope the ideas in this blog post help unlock something in you.  <3

On the Path to Healing Anxiety

I was thinking yesterday about my path to healing, and how that path is reflected in my writing.

In my first memoir, I show the extent and causes of my personal damage and my first steps toward healing and empowering myself.

In my second memoir, which I'm working on now, I show my experience with homelessness, faith, and healing the Major Depression that plagued my life.

In the third memoir, which I'm living now, I'm figuring out how to heal my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and resulting anxiety.  Now that the depression is gone, what remains is fear.  I've felt the fear for so long, as long as I can remember in fact, that I had to recognize myself in someone who suffers from severe anxiety before I really noticed it.

There are so many sources for my particular brand of PTSD.  I could have felt my mother's fear while I was still in her womb and my father was abusing her, and I'm sure I witnessed the abuse as a toddler.  My mother abused me when I was a child, and died while I was a child.  I was raped at 17, and three more times when I was 18 or 19.  (One of my coping mechanisms is poor memory.  I don't remember most of my life.  Which makes memoir writing even more of a challenge!)

Somehow, though I was diagnosed with PTSD when I was a teenager, I only recently realized that I have anxiety issues.  Bright lights, sudden movement, sudden noises, loud noises, repetitive noises, subwoofers blasting bass, and suddenly becoming aware of someone's presence...these things don't just startle or irritate me - they terrify me and set off my fight/flight response.  My body responds to those everyday occurrences as if its life was in danger.

First I tense up, adrenaline flowing freely.  At that point, I might notice what's happening and calm myself with breathing exercises or a change of scenery, or even a bit of humor to diffuse the tension.

But if I'm distracted and don't notice my need for relief, or if I'm unable to get away, the tension builds and the fear turns to rage.  Like the incredible Hulk, but way less dramatic.  It's a fear/rage monster, and if I haven't had enough food, sleep, or stress relief, that monster can and will take control of my body and say and do violent, abusive things.

When the monster takes over, I don't have to throw things, or scream.  All I have to do is look at my poor toddler, and he will burst into tears and run away, and I will realize that he saw the monster in my eyes, calm myself the fudge down, and go find and comfort and apologize to my baby.

Thank the Gods I know my triggers, how to calm myself; how to take care of myself, to step away from my baby so I don' t make him a victim; how to apologize when I hurt his feelings or frighten him, and how to get us both laughing so we heal those little wounds before they become scars, or worse.

My plan is to heal the anxiety, not just manage it.  I'm learning how to trust the inherent goodness in myself and in the Universe.  This time next year, I want to truthfully say, "I healed my PTSD."  I want to be able to sleep soundly through the night, feeling totally safe and secure.  I want to know in my heart as I know in my head that everything is and will always be exactly what I need it to be in the moment.

I want to teach my son to have that faith, that trust, that security.

Ramblings of a Mama in Mourning

I'm reeling, and I have to write somewhere, so I'm writing here.

When my mother, Susan, died at 32, we saw it coming.  She had an incurable disease, got sicker and sicker, and died slowly at home, surrounded by loved ones.

Tonight, my friend Susan died.  She was also 32.  She had a 2 year old son who won't remember her except through the stories of the many people who loved his mother.

I met Susan when my son was 8 months old and we both attended our first "baby-que."  Susan and I, and many many other mamas, had chosen the same midwife, and our midwife hosts a baby-cue every October, bringing together hundreds of her mamas and their babies.  Susan was pregnant when I met her, and she resembled my mother a bit, and had my mother's name, and I thought that was a neat coincidence.  We sat together in the grass and chatted most of the time I was there.

I think I told Susan about the mothering group I'd joined a few months earlier, and either she already knew others in it, or she joined shortly after.  My life started falling apart after that baby-cue, so I lost touch with just about everyone I knew.

Susan and I could have been great friends had I remained in Orlando and active in the mothering group.  When she suffered a stroke Monday morning, I discovered that we had dozens of friends in common, in and out of the mothering group.  People I'd known in high school somehow even knew her.  And every single one of us was praying, lighting candles, sending love, healing, and positive energy and asking all our friends and all their friends to do the same.

I wanted to believe that she was going to live.  Because perfectly healthy people don't just drop dead, damnit!

Susan was vegetarian, fit, active, radiant...and I'm morbidly obese, trying to be vegan, inactive, and radiance is my goal for this year but I'm SO not there yet...I know it's cliche to have survivor's guilt, but why the Hades is she gone and I'm still here?

And what are the chances that a person would know two women named Susan who would die at 32?!

And...

And...

I feel so helpless. 

I want to give every single hurting heart a huge hug, to help them to know that Susan has just gone Home, and she'll be there to great them when their times come, radiant as ever, and that if they just close their eyes and reach out with their hearts they can connect with her love and feel her wings closing around them.

I found out Susan had passed fifteen minutes before my tutoring shift was over.  I knew when the phone rang what I was going to hear, but I answered it anyway.  My student's brother heard me say that my friend had died, and just before I left he rushed downstairs to give me a picture he had colored to make me feel better.

I think it's a flower.

It does make me feel a bit better.  :*)