There are many websites dedicated to correcting the mistakes people like me make when
we are singing along with a favourite tune. We didn’t quite hear the lyrics correctly, so we insert words that we think we are hearing, even if they don’t entirely make sense. I’m not talking about obscure folk songs, but some pretty famous hits.
Among the most notorious are the Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams are Made of This” (not “made of cheese”) or Jimi Hendrix “Excuse me While I Kiss the Sky” (not “kiss this guy”). It’s not something we are even aware of, our brain automatically fills in the blank, and from then on, every time we hear that song those are the words we hear.
Fortunately, the ramifications are relatively harmless. The worst that can happen is that you are singing along with some friends, and you are embarrassed when they point out that you aren’t singing the correct lyrics.
In real life however, the consequences of hearing something incorrectly can be life changing. No baby is born with insecurities. They have fears, such as the fear of falling or the fear of abandonment, but those are survival instincts. What I mean is that no baby is likely to think to themselves “my hands are too chubby” or “my head is way too big for my body”. I think of their brains as brand new computers, just waiting for someone to input data, and that’s where things can go terribly wrong.
I have both participated in and facilitated enough workshops/retreats/professional development groups to know how easily that data being in-putted can have devastating effects. For example, I know a man in his sixties (I’ll call him “John”) who as a young child was playing downstairs with his siblings while his parents were upstairs entertaining company. John heard is father talking about how smart his kids were, but then he heard his father say, “that Johnny, he’s a dummy”.
John grew up, went to college and recently retired from a very successful career. But no matter his accomplishments or the accolades he received, John constantly struggled with the self-belief that he wasn’t very smart, all because that’s what he heard his father say so many decades ago. Did you notice I didn’t write “that’s what his father said”. I wrote “that’s what John heard his father say”.
What if he got it all wrong? What if his father had actually said “That Johnny, he’s no dummy”, which is a backhanded way of saying that John is intelligent. Imagine how different his life could have been if he hadn’t spent decades with a small voice in the back of his mind whispering, “you have these people fooled, you really aren’t smart enough for this”?
That was just one instance in his childhood that effected John for the rest of his life. What about all the other input his young mind received, from siblings, friends and even his teachers? It isn’t hard to picture another 8-year-old telling young Johnny that he was “useless” because he dropped a fly ball during a baseball game. Even if John forgot about that insult hurled at him in the heat of the moment, it’s still part of the data that influenced how he thinks about himself today.
And finally, what if John’s father really had said he was a dummy. Does that make it true? Perhaps that morning John had spilled some milk, or there was some other reason his father was temporarily upset with him.
We can’t change the past. But we CAN change our perception of the past, and that’s what I’m trying to do. When I become aware of a negative self-belief, I no longer try to just stuff it back down and ignore it. Instead, I bring it out into the open and examine it. I ask “what makes me think that of myself and is it true”?
I can’t always trace that belief to its root source, but I can always answer the question “is it true”. Inevitably the answer is no. That doesn’t necessarily mean it instantly disappears from my psyche. Sometimes it will surface again and again. Each time it’s smaller and less potent, and eventually it dissolves back into the nothingness from which it came.
It’s really easy now to Google the lyrics for almost any song. It’s not so easy to go back in time to find out if you misunderstood something. But it is worthwhile asking the question; is this true?
Because sweet things really are made of this.
Namaste.
Derek Hinchliffe
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