Thoughts and words can do more damage than many of us imagine. A number of my counseling clients found that they had been held back or obstructed in their natural psychological development by a single sentence, phrase, or idea from their youngest years, which had entered their minds at a critical moment of fear, exposure, or self-consciousness, and become stuck there, like a computer virus on a hard drive, repeating its insane demand or neurotic claim. Every one of us has the wherewithal to become free of such ideological microbes; all we need do is commit ourselves to the quest.
via Fashion and the Slavery of Self-Imagery | Daily Renewal: Freethinking Bipartisanship.
9 Responses
You do me honor. Many thanks.
You are welcome! I’m really enjoying your blog and wanted to share!
You mean like when my mom told me not to wear black because it made me look like a black widow spider?
Oh, mean!!! Bad mom! Mine did things like that, too — very perfectionistic, I was never good enough. But rarely about my appearance, usually just pushing me to do better at everything…. I think it was the result of being raised in the depression era, but then my dad was never like that with me. I guess he was with my brother, though, so maybe it was a gender thing — Moms pushing daughters and Dads pushing sons, dunno.
Like my high school English teacher who said she thought I’d make a good literary critic, which has forever resonated as an opinion from a trusted authority figure that I’d not make a good writer.
My step-dad said girls were not good in math and convinced me it was hopeless for me to try. Since I quit trying, he was right. I didn’t do well. Therefore, I hated math.
Algebra was the last math course I took because I was convinced I would not do well in geometry.
That STILL happens way too often, Darlene! Or girls are discouraged by peers because “guys don’t like smart girls”, or girls are discouraged by counselors because “you want to get all As in your classes to look good for college, and math might be hard” etc, etc… I HATE it — I wrote a whole book about it a few years ago, in fact. Turns out both sexes perform equally in mathematics until 9th or 10th grade, which is when this crap begins.
Go here for book links: a lot of this is out of date, but much still applies…
http://www.sdsc.edu/~woodka/donna.html
Donna,
I thought I’d leave you a reply here on your comment on Creative Every Day blog about getting unstuck making collages. Have you tried setting a time limit when you work? Pull out things that you have already collected and give yourself 30 minutes to pull something together. Some times limitations also help — say pick a color and only work with that one color. Let me know how it works for you.
xoxo k