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It was Rev. Carl Bean who first shined the light on the tape we carry in our heads. He was the one who told us about all it that particular Sunday.
The tape in my head. Everybody has one, I suspect. Some of us know about it and some don’t. After that sermon, I was able to find mine by the slimy trail of toxic shame it leaves inside me. I was especially able to find it through tracking down one overriding voice taped long ago and stored carefully in the crevices of my brain… the Auntie tape.
My tape comes from my past. From my childhood. Yours does, too, I imagine. Whatever the origin of yours, the tape now sits there in the dark of your brain… a nightmare ready to hunt you down and drive you crazy. It sits there waiting the optimum chance to click on automatically. (Or maybe yours is always running, its sound being just below the threshold of hearing.) Whichever it is, when the tape jumps into action, the sound blows into your brain at a screeching volume. It yells horrendous, soul-breaking things at you. Maybe yours doesn’t yell. Perhaps it whispers in a hypnotic tone. Perhaps it lectures you in a rational tone of voice. Whatever. It doesn’t matter, the debilitating, destructive effect on you and your life is the same.
Though I have other voices inside my head—the twelve monkeys being a notable example—these others don’t necessarily originate from one person or time in my past. The Auntie tape does. Whenever it finds an opportunity, the Auntie tape clicks on. The voice on the Auntie tape is ALWAYS unloving, severe, harsh, mocking. It beats me with its cat-o-nine tails, draws blood by reciting its standard list of my failings, shortcomings, and imperfections.
The tape in your head pounds away at you like a hammer determined to break your spirit down into hard little pebbles. It natters at you, telling you that you’re lower than the dust on the ground. That nobody will ever love you and if somebody does, you don’t deserve it. That you couldn’t touch the hem of so and so’s coat. That you’ll never be anything worthwhile. That you’ll never be happy and why bother to try since you don’t deserve to be anyway. That your life is and will always be hell—one long, grim struggle to keep going through a desolate landscape. It goes on and on until you’re ready to dive off a cliff or the nearest tall building to escape.
When I found out what was going on with my tapes, I looked at the effects on me. It had kept me blind and miserable.
Without my knowing or realizing, it had conned me with distorted thinking; it had deluded me into believing lies about myself and other people; it had tricked me into doing self-destructive things. And I had attracted people and things that were the same as I. But there is an antidote to the effects of the tapes, I found. I call them Mirror Affirmations.
I stand in the mirror, look myself in the eyes to fully “see” me and I say things like this:
I love you just as you are, Frankie.
You are a good looking woman: Beautiful inside and out.
It’s okay to be who you are—not perfect, but whole and good.
You’re lovable; I love you and other people do, too.
You deserve all of life’s good things.
You’re a precious and worthwhile human being.
I’m growing and sometimes that’s painful, but it will pass.
Sounds hokey. Sounds way too simple to work. It does though.
I wish I had known about it when I was younger. A lot younger. I think they might have saved me or helped me avoid falling in some nasty ditches and some hurtful quagmires. I never knew, when I was younger, that affirmations could change my reality—the reality that begins (and ends, really) inside me and that manifests itself outside of me. I never knew that I didn’t have to live up to or live out someone else’s evaluation, opinion, or expectations of me. I never knew that I needed to love myself before I could allow you to love me. And that if I didn’t love me, I’d do everything I could to make the tapes in my head become my life’s reality. Which, ultimately, could rob me of living a life of serenity, of joy, of hope, harmony and balance. But, I know now.
So now when the tape clicks on (or the volume goes up to blast-off level) in my brain, I remember what to do. I say one or several of my affirmations. If I have to first shout for the voice on the tape to shut up, I’ll do it. Then I say the affirmations I need. However many times I need to say them. Which shuts the tape off.
Too bad it isn’t permanent. But some ogres you have to vanquish over and over, I’ve learned. That’s just the way it is.
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