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