Hello, good people!
Don’t Believe Everything You Think is a helpful tool for Preemptive Radical Inclusion. We most often talk of it when talking about how we have internalized cultural misinformation, bias, marginalization, and oppression.
But it also includes what we think about ourselves.
This is a time of year in the northern hemisphere when there is little sun, much weather, and holidays full of compulsory family time, or conversely, the loss of not being able to be with the family we want. Reflecting on the presence and absence of family can lead us to reflect on our history. Who we are, and from whom we came.
This might be accompanied by grief and reminders of how our family was or was not present and healthy in our lives.
This is a time when old messages, put in our psyches and sense of self by people who may have been intentionally evil or may not have known better, arise as if they have a life of their own.
I call them the lying liars, those who put these negative thoughts about my worth or competence into the very core of my being.
Some of the lying liars were the ones who lied to us about our worth, our value, our strength, and our capacity.
Other lying liars told us how much better we were because we were white and/or men and/or straight and/or Christian and/or able-bodied and/or …
Other lying liars told us how we were unworthy because we were women and/or femmes and/or queer and/or trans and/or BIPOC and/or…
Other lying liars told us we were unworthy because we were bad, failures, unable to fit ourselves into their mold and follow their instructions for control. Those lying liars assessed goodness according to compliance and competence by obedience. They were wrong.
There is little limit to what the lying liars might have implanted in our minds.
But we can interrogate them, those thoughts, and check out if they’re true.
The first move to determining if a thought or idea is true is to figure out where the idea came from.
Did it come from those we have now been able to identify as lying liars? If so, they are automatically full of reasonable doubt. We can assume they are wrong and make them prove they are right instead of the other way around.
Did these old messages of shame or unworthiness (ours or others) come from those who thought they had our best interest at heart and did the best they could but who passed on mistaken and harmful ideas and beliefs which they had inherited from their own lying liars? We need to extend our curiosity and limit the power of those thoughts. We can assume they might be wrong and explore other possibilities.
One of the core lies is the lie of individualism, the idea that we must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps even if the boots are worn and the straps are broken. Getting healthier and whole does not have to be self-care as a solo experience, but we can care for one another in community. We share and repair bootstraps.
Truth be told, I don’t think we can become whole without community care. Individualism itself reinforces the old lies by limiting our access to new messages, access to meaningful, honest, vulnerable, supportive relationships with others.
We can support one another and hold up what is good, strong, and beautiful in one another and replace the words and ideas of those lying liars with love and accurate reflection. This can come from those who know and love us and have our best interest at heart now. We can replace the words of the lying liars that lead us to make our own mistakes and cause our own accidental harm with a more accurate representation of reality, of how the world works, how it can work when we join together and collaborate. We replace those words by the practice of becoming more whole while helping others be more whole as well.
Seemed like the lying liars couldn’t stop squelching your goodness. But you can stop letting them live in your head unchallenged. As quickly as you reach out to a child or beloved to tell them that the harmful idea they have about themselves is not true, let others reach to you.
We can choose to help one another, love one another, lift our individual and collective goodness, replace false thoughts with curiosity and positive reflections. Then we will discover new truth, and then develop wisdom.
We can apply this tool of Preemptive Radical Inclusion to ourselves, too. We do not have to believe everything we think about other people, making space for them to be themselves, authentic; and we also don’t have to believe everything we think about ourselves. We can seek out and uncover our inherent worthiness.
We can claim a benediction, a blessing, as our birthright, to
love your people, and let them love you.
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CB Beal (me) has been writing and teaching using the framework of Preemptive Radical Inclusion for over a decade. Would you like to read more about this here? Let me know.
Do you have ideas about how we can engage the lying liars in our heads in a way that grants grace for growth and takes the power out of old, lying, shaming messages to begin to replace them with messages about the wholeness of your heart and capacity to do good? I would love to read them here.
As always, respectful conversation. My blog posts here are like we are sitting around in my living room. We engage one another with kindness and curiosity, seeking to bear witness, not to win points. And on posts like this one, we are careful, if we name harm, not to describe it in detail so that we don’t cause further harm to others.
Love, me
(edit of OP from 2017)
