This week, I would like to focus on a topic of high importance for all child abuse survivors – reprogramming your thoughts or your mind. As I have shared before, I am working through Beth Moore’s Breaking Free Bible study. I know that many of my readers are triggered by religion, so I am going to take the wonderful truths that she shares for deprogramming and reprogramming your thoughts and apply them without getting into religion. However, if you are not triggered by religion, I recommend working through this study and using your faith to help you along the way.
I am working through Week 9, which has the focus of “The Steadfast Mind.” The techniques that Beth Moore discusses have worked for me outside of the context of religion, although using your faith (if you have one) can be even more powerful. I intuitively followed her same methods to break free from some of my childhood “programming” without having the same structure that she presents. I will combine my own experience with her structured method to provide you with a way to break free from childhood programming.
Let me start by defining what I mean by childhood programming. Most of the people who are reading my blog are no longer living with their abusers, but they still feel “imprisoned” by the abuse. Beth Moore calls these prisons “strongholds.” Here are some strongholds that I have broken free from that might sound familiar to you:
- “I am fundamentally unlovable.”
- “I cannot trust anyone.”
- “I am not safe.”
I will use the first one as an example. The abuse I suffered as a child sent me the message that I was fundamentally unlovable. I internalized this message and fueled it with my own thoughts. As I did this, I built an internal “prison” or stronghold that held me captive for most of my life. The truth is that I am not fundamentally unlovable, but I believed it to the core of my being.
Because I believed this lie, I acted and reacted as a person who is fundamentally unlovable. I let people treat me like crap because I did not believe that I deserved better. I did not set boundaries because I thought the people (non-abusers) in my life would leave me if I made any demands whatsoever. I hated myself and would “punish” myself because I believed I deserved it.
I stayed locked in this “prison” for decades, but I found a way out. This week, I will share my method with you, which is an adapted version of the method that Beth Moore shares in her study. I will keep these blog entries free of religious triggers until Friday, but I will also use non-triggering language to point those of you with a faith to ways that you can weave your faith/spirituality into reprogramming your thoughts/mind.
Photo credit: Amazon.com
Blooming Lotus 
I could use some of that! I have been working on this for a while though. The hard part is to remember to do the “replacement thought” when I’m having the “bad thought”. The reason is because sometimes the thoughts don’t even feel like thoughts. They come as natural as breathing or posture… it’s done so often that it just feels like part of me, like my arm or something, so I don’t notice it.
Good post Faith, thanks. I needed a reminder that I’m on the right track.
Peace,
mia
Perhaps fundamentally all programing is you are not you, you are what we want.
I think it is important to know there are different dynamics of different types of programing. The best one place source I have found is http://www.endritualabuse.org/Simple%20to%20Complex.htm Written by Ellen P. Lacter, Ph.D
This is not a worse than thing it is a different thing. Being taught to read, write and math and then being told to forget is different than not telling about trauma.
I took the route of dealing with the trauma first and then the memories of the programing which were not physically traumatic came to me.
Deprogramming and Reprogramming Your Thoughts/Mind « Blooming Lotus…
I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog :)…