Mother Knows Best... sometimes...

How often do you make a comment in passing not realising the impact it might really have?

This postcard; which I saw on the PostSecret blog this afternoon reminded me of the countless times I've heard women comment on the influence their mothers unknowingly had on their lives. The little things their mothers never knew they did that upset them.

"Oh, you've put on weight since I saw you last"

"Are you really that hungry?"

"You're sister has such beautiful skin"

"Why don't you (sing, run, work, dance, do anything...) like your sister/brother"

"You're so much like your father"

Most of the time comments such as these are said without the intention of causing hurt but intention or not, they hurt. Moreso than causing hurt, these comments stick with us, in the back of our minds and every time we doubt ourselves these are the things we remember.

"My mum thinks I'm fat."

"I shouldn't eat that, Mum would be horrified."

"My sister is so much more beautiful than me, no wonder noone ever looks at me."

"I can't sing (run, work, dance, do anything) well."

"Mum hates Dad, she's never said anything good about him, she must hate me too."

There's one truth, as children, we know above all others; mother knows best. So if our own mother believes all these bad things about us they must be true, she wouldn't say it if they weren't, right?

If your mother ever said anything like this to you, she probably didn't mean it, probably meant well in fact. Maybe she just wasn't thinking about what she was saying. Most importantly, she was wrong; sometimes we all are.

As a child it may well have been true that our mothers knew us better than anyone else, as adults that no longer holds true. Go out and create your own truths; eat with joy, sing loudly, celebrate your beauty and be proud of the ways you are like your father, he wasn't all bad either.

What is Real?

Every now and then I have a light bulb moment; in a flash, everything seems clear. I know exactly what I should do and how to do it, or I just suddenly understand something that has seemed beyond my grasp previously. We all have those moments right? Problem with my mind is that just as soon as there is clarity it is surrounded by mud, or at the least, fogginess. The moment is irrevocably lost.

It happened again this week. I had the television on in the background, as I so often do (and know I shouldn't) and there was a segment on a current affairs program about behavioural psychology. Specifically it was about people who intermittently cannot control their temper; apparently this is now a behavioural disorder, seriously. I couldn't get my head around that; how can it be that a person can control their temper most of the time but intermittently, randomly even, they lose that ability? It seems the whole world has gone mad in assigning every personality flaw a behavioural/mood disorder denying people the power of personal responsibility. Where is the line between "I screwed up and now I have to pay the price" and "I have a behavioural disorder and cannot control this"? Is there such a line? How can you tell if a person has "intermittent outburst disorder" or is just an abusive asshole who loses their temper?

This line of thinking, of course, led me to thinking about how I would then be judging myself. Post Natal Depression, Generalised Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, Severe Generalised Depression, Insomnia, etc, etc, etc, yes, you could say I'm a bit of a fruit loop. (You could, you don't have to!)

What if all these disorders weren't real? What if they'd never been labelled, if I'd never been diagnosed? Well, of course, the reality is they would all still exist, I would still have to deal with all of them but what if I could just change my thinking? What if I could just decide that I would not suffer from these disorders any longer? What if I pretended, "fake it 'til I make it" until I just didn't have any of those disorders anymore?

In that moment I really believed it to be possible; if I just "went to bed earlier", if I just "got more organised", if I just "stopped worrying". Then I could be me, the real me, me to my full potential. So I decided I would do it, the next day. The next day hasn't come yet, it probably won't come, maybe if I just take baby steps I'll find that day somewhere down the track... maybe I won't.

(It is worth noting that even though I didn't end up taking the "fake it 'til you make it" approach, I did a couple of days later hear a news article stating that researchers have found that there is a gene variant leading some people to be predisposed to depression. This seemed to blow my whole "pretending" theory into chaos. A (Dr) Google search however will quickly show that as with most medical research there are no firm answers, one study shows genetic variants another dismisses that theory just as readily. Here comes that fog again...)