Healing Your Emotional Self (11 page)

Negative beliefs and negative thought patterns can continue to affect your identity and self-concept unless you consciously work on chang- ing them. In chapter 2 I listed the common beliefs created by the seven types of emotionally abusive parents. Following are some other common examples of thought patterns that people who were deprived and/or abused have. The underlying beliefs that support these thoughts patterns are in italics. Make a note of any of the negative beliefs that you relate to.

1. I can never trust that anything good will last. It will either end or go away.
   People are not trustworthy and neither is life— both will disappoint you and let you down.
   

2. I have no control over my life or what happens to me. I just have to accept whatever happens and try to make the best of it.
   What I said or did never stopped my parents (or other care- givers) from abusing me. Nothing I say or do makes a differ- ence, so why bother?
   

3. I am helpless to effect changes in my life.
   I was a victim in my childhood and will always be a victim.
   

4. I am to blame for the pain I feel and for my problems.
   If I had not done things to make my parents angry or done things wrong, I wouldn’t have been punished.
   

5. The only time I feel good about myself is when I am giving to other people or helping other people.
   The only value I have is what I can do for others.
   

6. I cannot be assertive, because then other people will not like me.
   If I speak up about what I need, other people will think I am selfish.
   

7. I should never tell anyone when I feel hurt, disappointed, or angry, because I will make the other person feel hurt or angry.
   I am responsible for other people’s feelings.
   

8. I should never talk about what goes on in my family, because I am being disloyal.
   Secrets are to be kept and never talked about—even with other family members.
   

9. I can’t trust my perceptions.
   My parents always told me that what I thought or believed was wrong.
   

Core beliefs about yourself are the foundation of your self-esteem. To a large degree, they dictate what you can and cannot do—in other words, they form the basis of the rules you live your life by. Generally speaking,
negative
core beliefs dictate what you
can’t
do, for example, “I shouldn’t even bother to get that job. No one is going to want to hire me because I’m not a good communicator.” On the other hand,
posi-

tive
core beliefs encourage you by
affirming
your abilities, as in, “I know I can pass this course. I’m smart and I’m capable of learning even difficult concepts if I put my mind to it.”

Negative parental messages also set us up to have unreasonable expectations of ourselves and others. In my case, I desperately wanted the approval of others (especially my mother). I came to believe that if I was exceptionally “good,” I would finally get that approval. This led me to have unreasonable expectations of myself in terms of how hard I worked at being a good person and at achieving success.

Exercise: Your Core Beliefs

1. Think about the way your parents treated you as a child. Based on this treatment, what false beliefs and unreason- able expectations of yourself and life do you think you developed? Completing the following sentences will help you see clearer.
   

   When my father (“ignored me”, “criticized me”), it led me to believe that I (“am unim- portant,” “am incompetent”).
   

2. Continue to complete this sentence until you have no more responses:
   

   When my father , it led me to believe that I
   

   .
   

3. Now complete the following sentence. Once again, con- tinue until you have no more responses.
   

   When my mother (“expected too much of me”), it led me to (“expect too much of myself”).
   

4. Make a list of the beliefs you developed due to your par- ents’ treatment of you when you were growing up, using your answers from the sentence-completion exercise and the preceding examples of negative beliefs.
   

5. Make a separate list of the unreasonable expectations you have, based on the ways your parents treated you and your early childhood experiences.
   

Identifying these false beliefs and unreasonable expectations is the first step to exorcising them from your mind. If you are still uncertain as to what your false beliefs and unreasonable expectations are, the assignment at the end of the chapter will help.

It may seem to us that our negative beliefs and unreasonable expectations of ourselves and about life are permanently installed in our brains and that changing our minds about these negative beliefs is near to impossible. But the truth is that it is possible to change even the most negative, unhealthy, and destructive beliefs. In the next two chapters you will be offered more exercises and activities that will help you in this process.

Changing your core beliefs can take a great deal of time and effort, but it is definitely worth it. By doing so you will be able to alter your view of yourself and the world in a significant way. Earlier I wrote about how having emotionally abusive parents is like looking at yourself in a fun-house mirror, causing you to see yourself in a distorted way. Getting rid of negative core beliefs about yourself is like replacing the fun- house mirror with a nondistorting one. Instead of seeing yourself as a tiny monster, you see yourself as normal sized and proportioned.

Psychological Truths of the Week

Problems with low self-esteem and poor body image are often caused by negative parental messages communicated through emotional abuse, neglect, or smothering.

The only real alternative to self-judgment is knowing the truth about who you are. If you have a deep belief that you are worth- less, you must discover where that belief came from and why you believe it is true.

Mirror Therapy Assignment #5: Your Self- Talk Diary

This week begin to keep a self-talk diary or journal in which you record your self-statements or inner monologue whenever you

feel angry, sad, depressed, guilty, and so on. It will no doubt be difficult at first to catch yourself in the act of thinking negative thoughts, because they are often so ingrained. It might help if you try to identify situations in which your self-esteem is partic- ularly low, such as when you feel incompetent, stupid, or espe- cially unattractive. Carrying your self-talk diary around with you will help you record your feelings and self-statements while they are fresh in your mind. Describe the
situation
(“I went to a busi- ness mixer and no one approached me to talk”), your
self-state- ments
(“You’re so fat no one wants to talk to you”), and how you are
feeling
because of the situation (“ugly”). Here’s what your self-talk diary pages might look like:

6

Emotionally Separating from Your Parents

When I say “I” I mean a thing absolutely unique, not to be confused with any other.

—U
GO
B
ETTI

There is no ache more Deadly than the striving to be oneself.

—
Y
EVGENIY
V
INOKUROV

I was supposed to become her, if I had turned out according to plan. I was trained to repeat her life, daughter becoming wife becoming mother. I carry her fears and limitations in weights around my wrists and ankles. My body was molded first by her own body and then by the words she wrapped around my feelings.

—L
OUISE
M. W
ISECHILD
,
The Mother I Carry

O
NE OF THE PRIMARY REASONS
adults who were neglected or emotion- ally abused as children continue to buy into their parents’ negative beliefs is that they are still too emotionally tied to their parents and have not completed the individuation process. Individuation is the act of becoming a separate person from one’s parents and one’s family.

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Those who have a history of neglect or abuse tend to remain enmeshed with their family of origin out of the desperate desire to get what they did not get when they were children. But the sad truth is that most of us will never get from our parents what we missed out on in childhood. We need to accept that we have to grow up, even if we don’t feel emotionally equipped to do so.

You may have worked hard to be different from your parents, and you may have been on your own for quite some time, but this doesn’t mean that you have become separate from them emotionally. This takes more than just getting older—it takes emotional maturity and conscious effort on your part.

In healthy families, emotional separation takes place naturally and gradually. It begins during the rapprochement phase referred to ear- lier (from two to four years of age), when a child first discovers she is a separate self from her parents. During this time it is essential that a child have experiences that validate her ability to be separate without feeling abandoned. Even though a child has a mounting need to find her own place in the world, she still requires physical caretaking from her parents as well as needing to be loved by them.

But sometimes parents and other caretakers have a difficult time allowing both independence and dependence. For example, Marie preferred to play alone and spent a lot of time in her room instead of sitting with the family at night and watching television. This hurt her mother’s feelings. Because her mother took it personally and felt rejected by Marie (as is often the case with smothering parents), she distanced herself from her daughter each time she went into her room at night. By doing this, Marie’s mother sent her the message that it was not okay for her to have a separate self.

Some parents only feel comfortable when their children are dependent or needy, and they may discourage any signs of independ- ence in them. This is especially true of smothering or emotionally incestuous parents. For example, when a child is beginning to walk or to explore the world, a healthy parent will respond with appropriate support and encouragement, applauding each small success. An inse- cure or anxious parent, on the other hand, may respond by inhibiting her child’s efforts and by ignoring or withdrawing from her child.

Adolescence is another period of accelerated growth and a push for independence. During this typically tumultuous time, most adolescents are extremely rebellious, insisting on doing things their own way and rejecting their parents’ suggestions, values, and some- times, rules. They are inexplicably angry with their parents, blaming them for anything and everything that goes wrong in their lives. This is actually healthy, since anger helps adolescents to separate from their parents and discover their own identities.

Unfortunately, neglected or abused children often do not go through adolescence in a healthy way. They are often too afraid of their parents or too afraid of rejection to rebel against their parents’ values. And they are often too caught up in trying to gain their parents’ approval and love to work on developing a separate identity from them. Abusive parents often do not want their children to separate, or they lack the skills to help them separate in a healthy way.

How do you go about emotionally separating from your parents and completing the individuation process if you have yet to do so? How do you replace your parents’ distorted mirror with a more accu- rate one? Emotionally separating from them may include any or all of the following: providing yourself with the encouragement and support you did not receive from your parents, expressing the anger you have been afraid to express, acknowledging your unmet needs, and facing the fact that the time for getting those needs met by your parents is over. It also includes grieving for all the pain, rejection, abandon- ment, and betrayal you experienced at the hands of your parents or other caretakers.

Individuation also involves resolving your relationship with your parents in a conscious way as opposed to constantly reenacting the relationship with others, namely your spouse and children. One of the ways that adults who were abused or neglected as children create a false sense of connection with their parents is by unconsciously repeating their lives. If they do what their parents did, they do not have to feel separate from them. It is as if they are living their parents’ lives instead of their own. In this way they never have to become sep- arate people and take responsibility for their own lives.

Enmeshment

Many survivors have a very difficult time acknowledging the abuse or neglect they suffered at the hands of their parents and an especially difficult time becoming angry with them. This is partly because they don’t want to have to face the truth and come out of denial, but it is also because they are too enmeshed with their parents.
Enmeshment
is a term used in psychology to describe an unhealthy dependence on another person. In order for some people to admit what was done to them, they need to develop their own identities separate from their parents (or other abusers).

We remain enmeshed with our parents in the following ways:

By continuing to stay in denial about how they treated us

By withholding our anger concerning their neglectful or abusive treatment

By completely taking on their values and beliefs without any analysis or questioning