If you are a human being, you likely receive negative messages throughout your life from family, friends, partners, colleagues or bosses. You can’t totally escape other people’s jealousy, misunderstandings, immaturity, assumptions, selfishness or hidden agendas.
When I was doing my research of more than 1,000 successful women about their love problems, I saw curious and often worrisome findings about managing negative messages.
It was clear that the most potent sources of negativity originated from both early family life events such as poverty or death of a parent as well as the caregivers’ words and actions during the women’s upbringing. Childhood was ground zero for the planting of both good and bad seeds of parental messages. Adulthood, for many of the women, included grappling with their choices, attractions, missteps and fears that stemmed—often unknowingly—from these early misguided, cruel or uninformed parental actions.
Yet, some of the women who had abusive, neglectful, critical, depressed or addicted parents were able to turn down the volume on these messages and thrive. It also became clear that terrible childhoods do not close the doors on happiness, success and optimism—especially when it came to love.
The confident women in my study certainly had their share of setbacks, disappointments, and wrong choices of men, but they were not only able to rebound, but they were also more likely to recognize when the negative messages cropped up and to build skills that eroded the power of these destructive messages. As several women said about their love life, “It might have taken me a while to rebound from hurts and to find love, but better late than never!”
So, I am passing on some of the top tips from the women who triumphed over their negative childhood messages. The goal is to arm yourself with Emotional Kryptonite—the substance that could weaken Superman. I’m asking you to use these tested ideas to weaken those unwanted and unloving messages—and fortify You!
Top Steps for Weakening Negative Messages
1. Know the words, ideas, and agendas of your caregivers and parents. Get a large sheet of lined paper and start writing about all the unkind things that were said and done when you were a child.
2. Identify the conclusions about you and your fears that resulted from their actions. On another big sheet of lined paper fill in the blank in the sentences below:
My childhood experiences and events taught me to fear….
My parents’ words and behavior made me believe the following things about me are…
3. Realize and accept that many of these messages are NOT about you but about how your parents think of themselves. Write down your answers to the following questions. What do you know about how your parents were raised? What do you think your parents think of themselves? How did they transmit these fears, beliefs and messages to you?
4. Develop a checklist of how you want to view yourself and what you want from life and love. Write down your answers to the following questions. What would you like to change about you? What self-believes do you want to toss out? Which ones are not true? What kind
5. Recognize how this self-view and childhood experiences affected your past love relationships. Make a list of the important intimate relationships from your past. For each one write about how your negative childhood messages, self-view and events played a role.
6. Become mindful about the activation of your personalized Emotional Default Drive with your partners and dates. Observe your feelings, bodily reactions, interactions, troubling issues and choices of men. Pay attention to how your self-view might be prompting you to do things such as minimize mistreatment.
7. Remember that all these tips are part of a lifetime journey of learning about you and creating a person with self-respect, positive self-regard, confidence, and emotional smarts. It’s never too late.
I’d love your input. Please post a comment below and join me on Twitter: @LeslieBethWish
