Healing the Abuse -
Building Faith in Ourselves

In the previous page, Memory Shapes Us, I described the critical role that memory plays in how we think about ourselves, and how our spirit's energy is focused. When verbal abuse fills our memory with hateful lies, our spirit sickens us with depression and stress, and our thoughts about ourselves become distorted. If the abuse is severe and prolonged, we can even lose touch with the reality of what we really are and begin to believe the abusive lies. This is brainwashing, a subject that, not surprisingly, I wrote about when I was in the throes of abuse.    

It is a tough road to heal this damage, but it can done. In fact, I believe that if we make ourselves safe from abuse and adopt some simple habits, that with time we can completely erase the effect on thoughts and our spirit.

Stop the Music

Remember that our memory is the product of a flow of ideas coming in, and the loss of older different ideas. Well, before we can make any serious progress on filling our memory with the right stuff, we have to stop the hurtful lies that we've been subjected to. Otherwise it just becomes a competition. And competing with the anger and vehemence of a BP is a losing proposition. My STBX, at her worst, would escalate and escalate and with more and more energy and ugliness until she achieve the control she wanted. It will help to push back against this with positive messages, but it is impossible to heal in the face of it. So the first and foremost, for healing to really work, we have to be safe from verbal abuse.

It is all about Reprogramming

Remember that our memory is a cumulative, but limited storage. It represents our recent experiences most strongly but it also represents some older experiences. As experiences become very old, they are displaced by newer ones. This is how abuse overcomes our reasonable knowledge of ourselves. It simply floods our memory with lies. Eventually the lies start to make up significant part of our view of ourselves.

Reprogramming: We can heal the affects of verbal abuse in exactly the same way that the abuse damaged us: by loading our memory with truth. I said that memories are formed when we choose to remember, and also when experiences are important. The key element, I believe, in both these routes is belief. The experience, whether something said to us, something we think, or something we perceive from the actions of another person, have to represent something we believe.

So to undo this damage, we need to embark on a sustained program of stuffing truth into our heads! Simple! But.... HOW??

Starting from a Bad Place : The problem, when we are in the throes of abuse, or recently emerged from sustained abuse, is that we have lost faith in ourselves. We have been brainwashed, and have accepted the lies and now see ourselves, at least partly, as those lies define us.Just trying to think "I am not a selfish, hateful person," we probably wouldn't make much progress because we have come to believe the lies, and therefore this message is rejected before it can into our memory.. Even though we have a cognition that we are not selfish or hateful, we have lost faith and we don't really believe that this is true. Without belief, it is hard to impress the statement into our memory. We need some kind of jump start to get some input into us that rebuilds some of that faith.

Support Communities Build Faith: I talked about how helpful support communities are when we are just getting started with a healing process. This is because the communities resonate with faith. When we screw up our courage and raise our heads in a support group, we embraced with faith. People that we don't (yet) know assure us with perfect confidence that we are good people. And their faith in us can be the jump start that gets us out of a terribly stuck place. This could also come from healthy, supportive family, or even from therapy. But I think it would take a lot of therapy to deal with the impact of sustained verbal abuse. 

If you have never participated in a support list, you should. Support lists surround you with people who have been where you are; who have walked in your shoes; and can feel your anguish. Whatever your concern; whatever hurts; whatever you stumble over; someone is there to reassure and encourage. It is, in Peck's lingo, an expression of grace. 

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Igniting Faith: Belief in ourselves

Faith is the act of believing even when our reason tells us it is not so. 

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Reprogramming Ourselves

Ultimately, each of us must be responsible for changing the programming in our memory. 

© 2004-6 Richard, 21CP and Dalkeith Press