Freedom—A state man has struggled to attain throughout the centuries—
Is hindered only by the locks and prisons in our own mind.
(The following is an excerpt from REPAIR Your Life – INSIGHT)
“As you move through the stages of REPAIR, what was lost in your life becomes clearer with every day that passes, as well as the desire to regain it. The Twelve Steps start to make sense, old messages are difficult to access, new ones spring out automatically. Your memory opens with things formerly hidden or lost. In the stage of Awareness you assembled pieces to the puzzle that your life had become. It is time to put the pieces together so you can see the complete picture and comprehend what previously was obscure.
What you have been doing up to now, whether you realize it or not, is healing. Your fragile ego has not only been in a weakened condition, it has been battered. With little faith in ourselves, we often do our own battering. As you proceed through the process of REPAIR, you slowly strengthen your self-esteem. Now you realize you are not to blame. Over the years, your perpetrator, like Pontius Pilate washing his hands, either directly or indirectly, placed the blame for his wrongdoing on you.
One of the ways in which he accomplished this purpose was through the use of subliminal messages. Subliminal messages have diabolical power and take root even more than blatant ones. If your perpetrator was your father, his subliminal message could have been, It’s okay to sleep with married men. This may have been one of the directions you took as an adult, thereby breeding self-loathing. It is difficult to have healthy self-esteem when you feel you are covered with garbage. Another one may have been, It’s not okay to set sexual boundaries.
You were literally programmed to acquire a belief system at an early age that wasn’t yours. The truth has a way of making sense, and as you moved through this program, truth became insightful.”
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The above excerpt begins the fifth stage of REPAIR – I for Insight. It is my hope that as you read this you will realize the power of Repairing the damage done by your child sexual abuse. Everything that happens to you is somewhere in your unconscious mind, that part of your brain that is not aware. Periodically you will experience something in your current life that briefly spirals you back to a former time, one you were not aware of. It is as if you have a mind full of rooms, most of them locked. You know better than to open them. Unleashing a tiger that will devour you is not a good idea. So you struggle to keep all of these rooms locked. But the opening of these doors, getting at the truth – once you are committed to recovery – is what is needed to obtain insight. The subliminal ones are the most difficult.
I am an addict to house cleaning. That might not be a good thing but when I become obsessive about it I need to go read a book or listen to music or play with my puppy or call one of my children. I know where this obsession came from and knowing the source helps me to understand better and thereby handle the tiger. When I was eight I found my mother on the kitchen floor on her knees scrubbing a linoleum floor that was so worn the pattern was no longer evident. I hated seeing my mother this way. She had been putting on weight, especially around her middle and she always wore the same green and white striped tent like dress.
“Let me do it for you momma, please! I can do it.” I begged and pleaded and she finally allowed me to finish the floor. It gave me a great sense of accomplishment, something that is and has been the driving force in my life. My mother was grateful and the next day when she was getting ready to wash walls wanted to know if I would like to do it. Of course I would. For the rest of the years before I ran away from home I was given the majority of the cleaning (my sister hated it and since she couldn’t be convinced my mom never had her do much). By the time I graduated from high school I not only was working a full time job (which my parents chose, one where I had to turn my money over to them and no I could not go to college) but on evenings and weekends my mom farmed me out to neighbors to do their cleaning while she pocketed any pay. It was only accessing my Subliminal Messages room that I was able to discover why I was so obsessive-compulsive about cleaning. Some would say that is good thing. I mean it could be heroin instead. But the truth is that anything that you become obsessive-compulsive about is not good. It is a symptom of a neurotic state, one that can lead to anxieties or phobias.
The moral to this story is, Don’t ask your mother if she will let you wash the floor!
