We can create healthier inner landscapes

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ll of our emotions serve a purpose. Being disgusted by the look, taste, smell, and other features of physical objects such as rotten food and open sores serves as a warning — these things might be harmful to ingest or touch. In this way, disgust keeps us safe from pathogens and disease — and even potentially harmful people.

“My mother was horrible to me. When I remember the look on her face when she spewed her dripping sarcasm, her vicious insults, I feel like I want to throw up,” says Dina.

Naturally, abuse generates feelings of disgust. We want to expel the emotional toxin from our system. Doing so is a vital step in restoring our sense of goodness and lovability. It’s an essential part of the therapeutic process for victims of childhood abuse.

But how does the behavior of another person become woven into our inner fabric? How does remembering or experiencing revolting treatment make us sick?

The Inner World

Here’s how I think of it. Picture a child’s brain filled with soft landing pads, primed to receive and hold ideas sent by significant adults. If parents send words of love and approval, a landing pad receives them and using the original words as instructive models, constructs receptors to more efficiently capture them in the future. By the second decade of life, when words of love and approval are sent, they’re quickly absorbed by the receptor units.

Unfortunately, when parents send words of criticism, complaint, disapproval and so on, a landing pad is established for negative comments. “What’s wrong with you??” quickly finds its receptor and lands there. Parents whose faces communicate displeasure, annoyance, and disgust (and let’s face it — these are the faces worn in the moment by most angry parents) create landing pads for rejection. The more negative a parent is, the more landing pads there will be, cluttering the inner world of a child with revolting emotions.

When this child becomes an adult, she’ll be exquisitely sensitive to signals of rejection from others. A thoughtless remark from a friend, spouse, or colleague will find a long and firmly established receptor to swallow it whole. Feelings of shame and inadequacy take root on multiple landing pads across the brain, poisoning the inner atmosphere.

In a highly positive brain, the same thoughtless remark would have trouble finding a landing pad. It would bounce off the surface of positive landing pads and be ignored, reframed, or otherwise discounted.

Creating Landing Pads

This metaphor helps us understand how important it is for parents to regularly employ positive words and radiate accepting faces. Doing so fosters the development of healthy and protective landing pads and receptors capable of ensuring a lifetime supply of joyful emotion. Short-fused parents, accidentally seeding landing pads of repulsion and rejection with their words, tone of voice, and unpleasant facial expressions, saddle their kids with landing pads primed for self-disgust. Compliments won’t “fit,” but insults will find a perfect home.

How do you know if your own brain has been loaded with an insufficient supply of positive landing pads and an oversupply of negative ones? Simply notice how you respond to both praise and criticism. If praise feels uncomfortably excessive or not quite true, while criticism feels comfortably familiar and somehow “right,” you’ll know that you lack positive landing pads and have a surplus of negative ones.

The cure? Renovate! If you’ve suffered from childhood abuse, seek the help of a trauma therapist.

Otherwise, self-help will be sufficient. Just take three minutes a day for as many days as desired, to do a “landing pad meditation.” Sit with your eyes closed, breathing slowly for about a minute. Keep your eyes closed and continue breathing slowly, but now imagine a loving, smiling face in front of you, looking straight at you and softly uttering praises such as, “You’re competent, kind, smart, good. You’re beautiful/handsome, loving and lovable. You’re precious and valuable, needed and appreciated.”

Continue in this way for a couple of minutes, rambling off any positive trait you can think of. Take a final deep breath in and out and end the meditation. Deep breathing ensures that the words will penetrate into the parts of the brain that create and maintain landing pads. Kind words ensure that your new landing pads will soon outnumber and replace the old, self-loathing ones, creating a healthier, happier inner landscape.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 902)