The Book of Days (A Journal) V: The Tape in My Head

Copyright 2010-All Rights Reserved

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.

The Book of Days IV (A Journal) : Emotions

Copyright 2010- All Rights Reserved

Emotions. People don’t like to name emotions. Don’t like to talk directly about them. For example, nowadays, people say things like “She has feelings for him.” When I hear that, I want to ask…which feelings are you talking about? Although I’ve figured out that the word feelings is used as a synonym, most times, for the word love.

It annoys me when people aren’t direct about their feelings. I do understand that when you name them, you become vulnerable in a sense. Still, I have to ask: Are people afraid to name the emotion love? Maybe. Love is powerful, named or unnamed. It is a force to be reckoned with. But it’s a good force, I think. So why are we afraid of the good?

Last night, I read about feelings. A quote from John Bradshaw: “When out E-motions are not mirrored and named, we lose contact with one of our vital human powers.”

Yes. I understand why naming them is important. When you ignore them as if they didn’t exist, it can get you in trouble. They don’t like to be ignored or rendered invisible. The mirroring part of the quote I had to think about for a while. I think when my parents, my mother, to be exact, would not acknowledge ( read “mirror”) certain emotions I had when I was growing up, it did some not-good things. For one, it can make you crazy when your caregiver doesn’t acknowledge/mirror/validate that you have feelings whether those feelings are “approved of” or not.

The point is not to approve of them, I think. The point is to acknowledge. Without shaming or negative judgement. What I remember is being told that certain feelings, like anger or dislike, were “inappropriate.” The message was that I had no right to feel the way I did because my mother didn’t approve of a particular feeling that I was feeling. Situations like that are shaming. What happens is that emotion gets hooked into the shame feeling so you struggle not to feel it because the shame part eats you alive.

I read once that emotions have no label in actuality. That we label them “good” or “bad” and in all the places in between. I read that emotions simply exist and we weigh them down with the baggage of our experiences. The weight that we give them translate into the labels. But those labels are false faces. A mask. Or perhaps a delusion.

Anyway.
I didn’t know that our emotions are vital powers. What a fascinating thing to contemplate. How can emotions be powers? Much less “vital” powers. Power is a force, energy. Synonyms for “vital” are: vibrant, life-supporting, invigorating, alive, indispensable. If emotions give us fuel to act then I suppose they are powerful. This makes me think of emotions as powerful “magic.” Is that possible? I don’t know, but why not?

Also I read that emotions—for instance, sadness, fear, guilt, shame, joy, anger—give us fuel to act.” Power, again. Energy. Fuel. Propulsion. Do we act from the fuel of emotions? Well, it’s easy to point to anger and say that it fueled my actions. But what about guilt? What about shame? What kinds of behaviors do those things fuel in me? In us?

Many people think of feelings, of emotions as things that make you weak, vulnerable, leaving you without defense. Or they think of emotions as things uncontrollable, or things needing to be controlled and tamed… wild things. Things needing to be imprisoned.

But if emotions are powers—vital powers, then they shouldn’t be imprisoned. If emotions are vital powers… life-giving, invigorating powers, then they are gifts, it seems to me.

What do you think?