Good Old Fashioned Conditioning

I’ve spent my entire life believing I’m not smart. I sort of “know” I’m smart, at least in some ways, but I usually still feel “stupid.”

Maybe what’s happening might be a form of an emotional flashback? Feeling young and vulnerable, operating from the same emotional mindset and with the same emotional tools as I did when I was a child? Possibly.

But another part of it is just good old fashioned conditioning. If we’re told over and over again that we’re stupid, we start to believe it. Repetition works its way into our brain, whether or not we initially believe what’s being repeated.

When the people SENDING the message that we’re “stupid” are people who have known us a long time, maybe who even share our name and DNA, maybe people we were dependent upon for years … it becomes REALLY hard to truly test or second guess that message.

The thing about the belief that I’m not smart is, there’s no way to really disprove it. Not to my satisfaction, anyway. Someone can point out lots of ways that I seem gifted or talented, and I’ll just counter that stuff  by saying it doesn’t count.

Is that what a “mental filter” is? The thing where we decide that the good stuff about ourselves “doesn’t count” for various reasons … but all the bad stuff, well, of COURSE that’s all true. Is that what a mental filter is?

It’s all a bunch of BS in my opinion.

Smart people get treated like they are stupid every day. It has nothing to do with intelligence. It often has to do with someone’s desire to control us by lowering our self-esteem.

A part of healing, I think, is to consider the possibility that maybe, possibly, we ARE smart … that the people who told us we weren’t maybe had some other agenda.

Interesting thought to ponder.