Believe it or not!

As a young child, one of our clients was  locked in the basement of her family home when she was naughty. Once she had experienced several of these dreadful punishments, just the mention or the  implied threat of the basement was enough to make her fearful and behave.  These experiences gave her many negative beliefs,  for as an adult she was still petrified of the dark and had a horror of closed or locked doors. She still also felt angry with her mother for subjecting her to this terrible punishment.

As she began the process of eliminating the negative beliefs and feelings she had attached to these incidents, she gradually become calmer and more rational. After a while she came to understand that her immature imaginings and the powerful negative feelings attached to them, had blown these incidents up out of all proportion.

In fact, after removing the negative beliefs on these incidents, she was able to look at them rationally and remember more accurately what had happened.  She and her sister were sometimes sent to the basement when their mother had had enough of them, but the door was never locked and what she believed were hours spent down there was in fact probably just a few minutes.

What happened here was a child’s immature Frontal Lobe imagining the worst, and her untrammelled feelings running wild. She had imagined these incidents to be much worse than they really were and as an adult her illogical, childish memory of these events brought up all the awful feelings associated with them.

From the first experience of the basement which became so frightening because of her mother’s anger and frustration whilst issuing the threat; her learned terror of the dark and being locked in; and her young mind’s ability to negatively predict the outcome of such punishment in the future; her imagination had created the basement as purgatory and it quickly became her worst nightmare. This seems true of many other seemingly innocuous statements that might be experienced by children as threats. They are turned into negative beliefs that remain locked in our brain to haunt us forever.

Memories might fade and become distorted as we age, but our feelings don’t. In many cases, these feelings only intensify as we grow older, taking on a life of their own, relived each time we experience something that reminds us of an earlier, similar situation.  This of course makes us all mindful that sending children to basements, even with the door open, might not be an appropriate punishment for young children with over-active imaginations and zero logic!

Here are some other examples:

Wait until your Dad gets home!