Friday 9 September 2016

Childhood Brainwashing - A Prison Without Walls

I've been doing a thirty-day online course with the Baggage Reclaim School, which was created by Natalie Lue, author of the Baggage Reclaim blog and several wonderful books.  The course is titled, Tune Into Your Inner Voice (and Calm Your Inner Critic).

I was drawn to this particular course because, even though I've been delving into the deep, and often murky, waters of my inner self, healing childhood issues, working on my self-esteem, etc. for a couple of decades or so, and I've more recently been clearing all manner of issues with kinesiology - there was still this thing inside me that I couldn't put a finger on - until now...  Enter my Inner Critic!!!  Fortunately, I'm already well acquainted with my Inner Voice/Higher Self - She has led me to the most wonderful people, books, and experiences, including this course.  But the Inner Critic has evaded my notice - lurking away inside me in its many guises, not exactly putting criticism into words, but, instead, holding me back through fear and feelings of being undeserving of happiness.  To put it another way, the brainwashing I received throughout my life has created a compliant, polite woman who can't even draw or paint because she's too afraid to rock the boat of what she's allowed to have in her life.


Each of our parents abused us in their own way, which I won't go into here, but one event had lasting repercussions.  When I was about four, my parents had a couple unknown to my sister and I over for dinner.  When one of them spoke to me, I got all shy, and just hung back – as so many young children do when meeting new adults.  My father belted me in the chest, barking at me to answer them...  He hit me so hard it knocked me over.  I don’t remember the incident at all, but I always knew there was something that had happened, because I remember the events that came afterwards.  I stopped kissing my father good-night, and became terrified of him.  Instead of apologising, which would have healed the situation, and allowed me to feel safe around him again, he made it his job to annihilate me psychologically and emotionally, and to make me dependent on him - thus making me believe I couldn't cope without him.


It was so difficult feeling angry towards my father when growing up, not only because anger in little girls was unacceptable, but because everyone seemed to like him.  He was handsome and friendly, helped at the school, participated with my sister and I, drove us to school dances, took us on holidays as a family – so how could he be an abusive father?  And how could I hate and fear such a wonderful man?  To this day, I feel totally perplexed by those inconsistencies.  I feel brainwashed, and although I’ve done decades of reading, writing, burning unsent letters, clearing with kinesiology, talking to psychologists, etc, I still feel this deep fear of retaliation from others with whom I may need to set boundaries…


And I only know what happened all those years ago because, in my late twenties, I went to a Numerologist and she asked me if I was an abused child.  She said something happened when I was four, and if I didn’t know, to ask my mother.  Which I did.  And Mum told me what had happened that night.  Several years after that, my Kinesiologist also picked up something to do with my father that happened when I was four.  And a couple of years ago, the Physiotherapist I’d been seeing told me that my sternum was concave rather than convex, though not in a way that suggested a birth defect.  I asked her if it could have happened when I was belted in the chest at around age four, and she said the bones would still have been soft enough then, so yes, it could.  Up until that point, I’d always maintained that I wasn’t physically abused – 'just' emotionally and psychologically abused, gaslighted, brainwashed…  The thing that hurts the most, though, is the unanswered question – where was my mother, and what did she do about it?  I think (I hope) everyone would have been shocked by the event, but it was the mid-60s and it was fairly common practise for children to be abused in some way.


After my rejection of my father, I became his scapegoat, and then I seemed to become the scapegoat for the entire family, plus bosses, co-workers, lovers, friends…  I’m so tired, and my immune system is ailing (I have Myalgic encephalomyelitis).  I've been working hard at becoming well - on all levels - and I feel ready (and willing) to take off this heavy cloak, to lay it down once and for all, and live the days I have left in Lightness and Joy…  I believe these Inner Critics so many of us have are the product of brainwashing from our parents and other ‘authority’ figures from childhood, and I've been feeling for some time now the need to reprogram my mind, which I’ve begun...


For years, I’ve wanted my father to change, giving him the power to set me free, but then I realised he can’t, and it’s up to me to change - and to free myself.  I hope this coursework will help me get to the bottom of it, because I’m holding myself in a prison that may not have been of my making, but to which I hold the key…



Love and Light to All  xxx