As we grow up we became so convinced that our parents did things the wrong way that we decide we’ll be different. We’ll do the opposite. If our parents were strict, we’ll be lenient. If our mother nagged our father, we might commit never to nag. Ironically, as we attempt to be the opposite, we create a whole other set of problems.

The brain is always seeking to follow patterns that have been set. Especially anything that happened prior to the age of 8 goes into our subconscious minds as truth. A child’s conscious mind has no filter to accept or reject anything. Thus, there is no gatekeeper on the subconscious mind. Everything goes into their subconscious mind as truth and becomes their operating system.

That’s not just what we’re told or what was said to us as children, but also what we observed and our assumptions we made about how the world works. This becomes the operating system we live by. Or we’ll always be seeking to correct the problems we perceived in our families and the world.

Parents Shape Our Childhood Beliefs and Perceptions

Even the best of intentioned parents can adversely affect a child’s beliefs and sense of reality by how they respond to crisis, money challenges, how they treat each other, by how organized or disorganized they keep their environment, how much parents work or don’t work, and countless other things. That doesn’t even take into account outside influences like the media children watch, what happens at school, or other people or challenging events.

Based on all of this each child interprets events through their unique processing system, their personality, their resilience. This is why six children can grow up in the same home and each have completely different views of what happened and how they will choose to live their lives.

The older I get the more I realize we all screw up (negatively impact) someone. It’s inevitable. Unless you live like a hermit with no human interaction, never marry, and never have children. Then you only negatively impact yourself. Then again, what in the world isn’t right because you’re not bringing your goodness and brilliance to it?

I had the most amazing parents anyone could ask for but I still have had to work through distorted views about relationships, money and workaholism.

I wish I knew all this before my kids were born or when they were little. Perhaps I could have more consciously considered what I allowed Into their minds and what truths I wanted to place there.

I would have stopped to consider this like the following:

• Is this behavior what I want my child to think is normal?
• Do I want them to have a relationship dynamic they’re seeing modeled in our home? Or in the media they watch?
• Do I want them to think this is normal and recreate it throughout their lives or buck it so tenaciously they create a new set of problems?
• Do I want them to respond to taxing situations the way I do?
• Do I want them to think about money the way I respond to it?
• Do I want them to have a marriage like mine?

And even then… after all you do they will have their own stuff they’ll have to work through because of the way they interpret your very best efforts and everything else that happens.

The Good News

Perhaps that’s what life is all about… discovering what is really true and coming to know we all make mistakes. We all screw up someone. That’s humbling. It can make us more compassionate and forgiving … especially if we turn to the only person who can truly help us let it go and forgive ourselves and others …. Jesus Christ. He is the Great Physician and quite frankly the Great Therapist. I am so grateful He’s patiently helping me work through my own misperceptions and to forgive myself and others.

The beautiful thing is being “screwed up” isn’t a permanent thing if we choose to allow God’s healing in our lives and let Him restore “beautify for ashes.”

The good news is, there are ways to correct these programs. And when we learn a better way of functioning, we can have a really beautiful life. I work with people to help them correct their limiting beliefs and patterns. There is hope.

If you’d like to talk about how to retrain your subconscious mind, please hop on my calendar for a free 20-minute strategy session.

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