Erase and Replace

When I woke up this morning, the thoughts in my mind were those of gratitude, peace and accomplishment.
I’m still sober, my brain wires are slowly reconnecting and I’m making peace with my family and my conscience. No hangover, no remorse, shame falling away.
Instead of getting on with the day, though, I chose to stay in bed. Bad idea.
In a matter of moments, the good thoughts disappeared and my mind was bombarded with pellets of anger and resentment.
Keen to discover what had triggered this drastic mental change, I got up, prayed, made a cuppa and rolled a cigarette to cast my mind back.
During the good thoughts, I’d remembered a peer at the treatment centre I’d completed from about a fortnight ago. He’d been asked to leave because the dual housing benefit (for his council flat and the treatment centre) could no longer be paid due to government cuts. Only homeless people could be helped now.
I feared for him and sent out a silent prayer to wish him well. He’s a good sort.
Then, in a flash, my mind switched to a peer who’d taken an almost witchlike pleasure in watching me fall apart at the hands of the treatment centre that threw me out a few months ago.
Because this peer was foreign, my mind insisted that her situation would be completely different. Her benefits officer would find a way to continue to pay for her privately rented apartment in Balham and her treatment.
Then, I pictured the little girl who was run over and dragged under the car of the Iraqi man who’d just been granted to stay in the country for life on grounds of human rights.
I saw an image of the killer in my mind’s eye. I listed his crimes in my head; death by dangerous driving, robbery, theft, intimidation, drug-dealing, affray, breaking and entering.
Then I saw the little girl’s father, bewildered and dazed by the court’s decision.
By this time, I was fuckin’ mad with anger.
I got up and knelt at the side of my bed, humbly asking for these thoughts to be taken away from me.
Ten seconds later, they were gone and I could think again.

Aside from the amazing help I’m receiving from AA, which keeps me clean on a daily basis so long as I’m honest with myself and go to meetings regularly, I’ve been reading a book about how the mind works called ‘What to Say When You Talk to Your Self’ by Shad Helmstetter.
It’s the sort of book that I’d have thrown away a few years ago.
The main focus of the book’s message is that our beliefs, attitude, feelings and behaviour are governed by what we were told as children, and that we can change the programming in our subconscious mind by consciously talking ourselves into a positive, productive way of thinking.
If, like most of us, we’re told from the age dot that we can’t do that and we shouldn’t do this, that we must walk this way and eat that way, watched with beady eyes for any false move and glared at if we put a foot wrong, the memory stored in our brain will tell us that the world is a pretty scary place and that we shouldn’t do anything out of the ordinary. It’s the perfect recipe for a life of fear, doubt and rebellion (or submission).
By the time we’re out of nappies, we’ve been told ‘No’ thousands of times and maybe taken a few slaps along the way to drive the message home.
Some of you are probably thinking, ‘Hang on a minute! I don’t hit my children, I hardly ever say ‘No’ to them unless I really need to and I was certainly never hit as a child. I’m a well-adjusted person and I love my parents. They only showed me kindness.’
If this is the case, and you’re not fuming about what you’re reading, then you’re probably the exception to the rule. You were nurtured and encouraged. You were taught the difference between right and wrong without scolding. Your parents were always fair and honest with you. They were united as role models and never fought. They never hit you and only said ‘No’ when they thought you might come to grief.
You are very lucky to have been given such an inspirational start to life.
Unfortunately, you are one of only a few, and that number has dwindled as society continues to degrade itself.
Conclusive evidence shows that, just as in your case, we bring up our children in much the same way that we were. This compounds Helmstetter’s theory that parental history repeats itself and that good parenting is essential to a person’s well being.
No matter how hard a parent tries to do things differently, the end result is almost always the same, and the cycle continues through the generations.
For those of us who have experienced pain and shame in childhood, this experience has been appropriately coined as ‘Toxic Shame’, because the shame points to the primary carers who unconsciously (or, even sadder, consciously) pass on to their own children the same defective values as they were shown.
In much the same way that a bank’s computer system stores information, allowing people to withdraw funds based on their financial liquidity, the way we accept or decline information is based on the memories that we stored in our subconscious mind from birth.
Our freedom of choice allows us to buy heroin or a house, cocaine or childcare, booze or oranges, but the choice we make is driven by our perception of ourselves.
We think and do things that are bad for us because our subconscious mind tells us we want or need it to get through the day, just as a well-adjusted person buys food, juice and a ticket to work every day.
From our early years, each of us formed a composite picture of ourselves. Our experiences, our acceptance of what we heard from others and what we told ourselves became the foundation for the mental programming that directs us today.
Helmstetter came up with the idea that the only way to change our programming (‘I can do this’, ‘I’m not sure I can do this’, ‘I can’t do this’, ‘I don’t want to do this’ or ‘to hell with this’, ad infinitum) is to consciously go about erasing the old subconscious memory in our hard-drive and replacing it by talking ourselves into a new set of positive instructions.
The brain, that three-pound cauliflower that is many times more powerful than a personal computer, has no choice but to take the information on board.
Hal 2000 wouldn’t approve.
By doing this on a daily basis, our brain slowly erases the old memory and replaces it with a new one.
Helmstetter says in his book, ‘It changes the programming, which creates the belief, which develops the attitude, which creates the feelings, which control the behaviour.’
He also notes that the problem with most self-help books is that, once the book is read, the reader then fails to retain the book’s message. The initial power of the message is discarded and the reader recedes into his old ways.
The same can be said for Keep Fit books. We know that fitness is good for our body and mind, but if we don’t get fit, we won’t get fit. However many Keep Fit books we buy, the change only comes from doing what we read.
The problem is, once we’ve discarded the message from the first Keep Fit book, we’ll seek another miracle formula in other Keep Fit books and eventually start blaming the different authors for our lack of fitness. To stay fit and healthy, we have to ‘keep’ getting fit, and that’s the only way that Helmstetter’s ‘Self Talk’ can work.
The memory in a computer can be emptied in no time, but the memory in a human being is not so easily removed, especially when you consider that seventy-five percent of our programming is the wrong kind.
Imagine the amount of self-perpetuating viruses you’ll have to cancel out before any noticeable change is made. What about the fact that our success at anything is tied to the beliefs about ourselves that we’ve stored in our subconscious mind? We are the living result of our own thoughts, so what hope change?
Actually, there’s plenty of hope. If you start to tell yourself something different, your brain will simply start to believe it after a while. What you tell it depends on you, but the brain has no say in the matter. It does what you tell it to do.
That said, the longer we believe something, the harder it is to change that belief. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Some of you might think, ‘Oh, no. He wants me to self-brainwash. That’s his scam!’
Well, it’s up to you. I’m not selling anything. I’m just saying that I’d rather wash myself with clean water than bathe in sewage.
All this process of self-recovery requires is complete honesty, a diligent mindset and an earnest need to change.
After all, we are trying to get to the truth, that phenomenon that has eluded us all our lives.
My own truth is that I’m not racist. I’m an open, kind, caring, charitable person, but I do have certain opinions about Britain’s immigration policy that can cause me to become angry and resentful. These opinions, however, are subjectively linked to my own place in society (homeless, jobless, penniless), and therefore need to be changed if I am to become a calm, balanced and self-aware member of society (rather than the seething ball of rage and self-pity that I subconsciously fabricated).
Put in simple terms, I cannot afford to entertain racist thoughts because they make me angry, which takes me to a drink, which will kill me.
With so much false programming to erase, most of which wasn’t even done by us, it’s a process of elimination that requires time.
Imagine taking on the task of erasing 150,000 negative messages, doubts and destructive disbeliefs, all backed up by a brain that has trained itself to believe lies and discard truths.
Most of us live OK lives in which we do a little better than survive. There are ups and there are downs. That’s life. We get by.
Although we know that there’s something far greater out there for us, sometimes even calling us, we slog our guts out in order to get by, week in, week out.
This labour of self-love may seem way too much like hard work to us. And where would we find the time in our already hectic schedule? This is just part of our negative programming. It will work.
Our negative programming might tell us that we’ll never get to the bottom of it anyway and that, even if we do, it probably won’t be too different from our lives today.
In my own case, I needed to change.
Without it, I’d become even more ill through drink and drugs and I’d never stand a hope in hell of seeing my children again.
It was no-brainer. I needed help and I knew I couldn’t do it on my own.
Throughout life, even when I knew that I had everything going for me (beauty, intelligence, creativity, kindness, wonderment, ingenuity), the negative programming I experienced as a child always seemed to trip me up whenever things were looking up. I was tactless, rebellious, fearful, lazy, oblivious to reality and completely self-obsessed. ‘Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’ was my motto.
My acute self-consciousness was due to my lack of self-awareness, but my survival instincts put it down to being special and different.
Once I became an adult, I started to see that I was especially detached from reality and different to normal people. I looked for ways to detach myself from the reality of life. Drink and drugs was the answer to all my problems for a long while, but then my brain failed to respond and crashed after sixteen years of constant debauchery.
I am bound to a life of abstinence because, without it, I’m nothing.
If I don’t follow a path of spiritual growth, I’ll go back to the drink and die, causing yet more pain to my children, who’ll be left wondering who I was and why I chose to kill myself.
Compared to most people, I’ve got many more good reasons to want to change.
If I don’t have a complete psychic change, which can only come about by believing that a Power greater than myself can remove my shortcomings and character defects, I’m dead. It’s as simple as that.
For the drink and drugs, I attend meetings at fellowships where I can talk about myself without being judged and listen to the stories of others without judging. Everyone there has the same problem.
It’s true that the meetings take place in church halls and we sit on plastic chairs and drink copious amounts of tea and coffee, but the people there don’t lie, cheat, moan and gossip like they did in the pubs and clubs. I’ve met more celebrities and true heroes in the four months I’ve been going to these meetings than in my entire life, and they don’t look at me like I’m a weirdo. I’m their equal in all ways.
AA’s Big Book, the Twelve and Twelve and other AA literature keeps me clean and sober when I need it outside of the meetings.
To help change the negativity that has always chased after me (and bitten me on the bum every single time), I use a mix of Helmstetter’s Self Talk and prayer.
It’s so easy that even I can do it, and I’m Mr Self Will Run Riot.
I’ve run out of reasons to keep killing myself and I’m still alive, so why shouldn’t I give myself a pat on the back?
With the road to ruin well and truly flattened, I’m pounding the path to discovery with glee.
The gift of desperation has been offered to me and I can already smell the sweet scent of a life beyond my wildest dreams.
I enjoy telling myself I’m a good man because I’ve known all along that I am. Besides, I’m sick of telling myself I’m a worthless piece of shit! That’s so yesterday.
Helmstetter’s Self Talk gets into the causes, not the symptoms, and when I feel down, I’m reminded, ‘Don’t worry about what other people think about me. Just keep doing it. Half of them think I’m mad anyway, so what’s there to lose?’
I only use Silent Self Talk because it feels very strange actually talking to myself. Silent Self Talk includes anything and everything that I think about myself or anything else around me. The subtle shift in my attitude from ever again looking in a negative way to looking in a positive, productive way slowly changes my view of myself.
The most amazing passage in the book struck me like a bolt of lightning.
‘As long as you and I allow others to program us in a way that fits their choosing, we are, without a doubt, out of control, captive to the whims of some unknown destiny, not quite recognising that what hangs in the balance is the fulfilment of our own futures’.
This paragraph came to me at just the right time in life.
I’ve always known that governments and the wealthy run the planet to suit themselves, but how could I ever forgive my parents for making my childhood so weird and lonely? Surely they were supposed to have loved me.
Having used government and the rich as my greatest reasons to fuel and stoke my addictions, I made myself out to be a freedom fighter when everyone else saw me as an angry victim.
For all the troubles and sickness that the power elite weave into the minds of the masses to satisfy their own wants by cleverly ignoring the needs of the poor, I could never do anything about it until I did something for myself. Sober for only a few months, working the AA program with a strange sense that I may be growing up (at 45), I felt an overwhelming desire to forgive my parents. The time had come.
It was a selfish need (‘acceptance is the answer to all my problems’), but one that would give me a very good chance of being a good father to my children and making dreams come true.
Damage has been done, though, and I have serious problems to put right. I am homeless and I haven’t been able to see my two daughters for almost a year due to my addictions and a very unforgiving mother. I have no money and few friends, but I’m happier in my skin than ever before.
For almost three decades of active addiction, I angrily held onto the notion that not only had I been neglected by my parents but that I’d subconsciously inherited all of their personality disorders. This, I chose to believe, would allow no relief from my own emotional desertion and cause me to die a horrible, insignificant death.
In sobriety, with anger and resentment the two most powerful ways of going back to drink, I knew that I had to change the way I thought about my parents if I was to gain awareness of and bring peace to myself.
Like me, both of my parents were damaged as children.
My mother was put in a children’s home when she was two by her father. He was an ambitious man; a big cheese in the Admiralty. He had no time for family.
Mum’s first memory was of a huge room shrouded in white tablecloths at the age of four. Her grandfather had removed her from the home and placed her in the care of a fellow passenger to join her parents in India, where she stayed till she was ten. The tablecloths were on board the ship. She was free from the home, and so her conscious memory began.
My father’s house was blown up during the Blitz at about the same time and so he went to live in a churchyard with his illiterate parents for years.
His first memory was of newspaper blowing in the wind on the streets of East London. He learnt to read by chasing after the pieces of paper and memorising certain words that described photographs.
Both were only children.
Only now can I imagine how difficult life must have been for my parents, and how their own unconscious minds were shaped; Mum’s in a children’s home far away from her parents and Dad’s in a churchyard a few streets away from his blown-up home. I forgive them because I now understand that they too were damaged children.
How could I not forgive them? They knew no better.
By the time I was born, Dad had become a celebrated professor as well as an egomaniacal philanderer. Mum had started suffering from depression and was having operations caused by my birth.
My three older sisters learnt how to survive the hard way and, somehow, in amongst the madness of family life, I stayed alive.
I nearly died at the age of two when I fell into a pond. Luckily, I had reins on and my oldest sister managed to fish me out before my lungs were filled with water.
Dad was hardly ever around.
My oldest sister used to tidy the house when she knew he was coming back, otherwise he’d storm in and kick the mess all over the place. She’d step in between Mum and Dad like a referee when they had their slanging matches. All I can remember is sitting on the stairs with my fingers in my ears, laughing to myself to make light of the violent noise.
I can’t recall my first memory but perhaps that was it.
We walked on eggshells when he was around, scared to trigger a temper tantrum which would cause the house to fall silent. I don’t think he cared enough to hit me. He could only muster a blithe disregard for the family, as if we were getting in the way of his worldly inventions.
I don’t remember one conversation with Dad when I was young.
He divorced Mum when I was sixteen and remarried within a month to one of the family’s best friends.
I didn’t know about the divorce or the marriage until he picked me up on my last day at boarding school.
‘Oh, by the way, I got married,’ he said, as we eased my trunk into his boot, which seemed like a coffin going underground when I understood what he’d said.
As an adult, all I have known of him is disappointment. Even now, he never fails to disappoint us.
Only last summer, he married his secretary just a few years after promising Mum that he’d leave his worldly assets to us.
Being the only boy, Mum always saw me as her golden child. She’d almost died from a blood clot at the frontal lobe of her brain after giving birth to me.
Where Dad had failed me, Mum always tried to over-compensate by spoiling me.
I flunked out of college and chose a career in drug-taking, globetrotting and womanising. I didn’t know it, but I was turning into Dad.
The drugs took care of my anger as the girls took care of my desire. Once I’d messed up enough and could take no more, the travel took me away from the insanity.
Acid and speed were hard to find in Italy, so I went there a lot, then to France, India, America, Africa.
During the years when I organised raves in Paris, I used to close my eyes and place a finger onto an atlas. The place it fell would be my next destination.
I’d always tried to make a go of things but there was always be something in the back of my mind telling me that it would all go wrong in the end, and it always did, so off I’d go, back to Mum, who would pick up the pieces for me, just happy to see me alive.
Once I felt healthy enough, I’d start up the old regime.
By the time I first sought treatment thirteen years ago, I’d ‘borrowed’ thousands from Mum. I’d given her mini-strokes from the constant worry and was viewed by my sisters as a hopeless case. Slowly but surely, I’d extinguished all the self-worth that was left in me.
After nine months in treatment, I stayed clean for another six months but something inside me kept telling me I wasn’t an alcoholic or an addict.
Thinking I could drink and drug like a gentleman, I went to a friend’s house and got rat-arsed.
I met a beautiful but equally damaged woman who had two young children from a previous marriage, and we fell in love.
She gave birth to my first daughter and we moved to France, but there was no work so I found myself taking flights back to the UK to earn money as a decorator.
Just like my father, I shied away from my paternal role and my newfound family gradually lost faith in me.
I started drinking and smoking more and more when I was in the UK. When there was no work, Mum would loan me money to take back to France to keep the family afloat.
The hideous feelings of guilt for not being with my daughter failed to subside but I could do nothing about it so long as I drank and smoked dope. The longer I was away from her, the more I ploughed into the drink and dope to erase my guilt.
After we separated, my girlfriend fell pregnant with my second daughter. I took this as a sign that I should really try to be there for the children, but it just wasn’t in me. I no longer loved my girlfriend and I’d become used to doing as I pleased again.
As much as I truly wanted to be a family man, the drink and dope always won over, and I eventually returned to the UK and found myself a flat.
When they moved back to London, I again tried to patch things up, but my girlfriend had seen enough.
By then, giving all I could earn to keep them from homelessness, I left the flat became homeless.
Staying at Mum’s flat wasn’t an option. She’d changed the locks after I got drunk one night and accused her of fiddling with me as a child.
The sickness of my mind told me that the only possible reason why she had always dug me out of holes was to arrest my conscious recollection of what happened. That’s how far gone I was, and how my own guilt turned on me, imagining that Mum had done such a thing, waiting for the blocked memories to come flooding back.
I don’t think she ever got over that. I didn’t know, but at this same time she had fallen prey to foreign lottery scammers, who had scared her out of her wits and about £40,000 over two years. I now know why she kept telling me that ‘everything would be alright’.
All she’d ever wanted to do was help to keep my family together and provide for us while I was drinking and drugging.
When my oldest sister found out that Mum had tried to borrow twenty pounds from a neighbour to pay the scammers, she sought medical advice and Mum was sectioned. An early form of frontal lobe dementia had her seeing things and police were called almost daily. She was having paranoid delusions.
Believing that she could help me, she’d put all of her savings into the lottery scam hoping they would pay her millions of pounds and that her baby boy would set for life, only to be fleeced by the scammers and accused of molestation by her golden child.
She’s now in a care home where she has suffered dementia for the last three years.
I have wanted to apologise to Mum for all the pain I caused her and especially for accusing her of sexually abusing me, but could never pluck up the courage while I still drinking.
Yesterday, I went to see her and apologised.
‘I’ve been waiting for you to say that, Rick,’ she said without looking at me.
Suddenly, I felt enormous love and respect for her. Finally, all the madness of my own delusion was taken away. A huge weight was lifted from us both and I could look her in the eye again.
Deep down, I knew that she was waiting for me to apologise. I believe that she always knew how deeply sorry I was and how my judgement had been skewed by my own guilt and hopelessness.
For the last two years, the doctors and staff at the care home repeatedly told me that she couldn’t possibly recall any memories from the past. According to the clinical psychiatrist, those who suffered from her form of dementia had no memory at all.
Even at the time that I apologised, I noticed that she’d forgotten how to take a sweet from its wrapper.
Once I’d said what I desperately needed to say, though, her eyes lit up as if a light had been turned on. A tear immediately fell from her cheek.
That is the power of the mind. Even after three years of anti-psychotic pills to soften her senses with the onslaught of acute dementia, she had managed to hold onto the one hope that I may see the sickness of my own mind, retract my accusation and know her as the true shining light that has always been for me.
We are now the very best of friends. She is my biggest hero. I will never find a truer inspiration in all my life.
I don’t care what the doctors and the psychiatrists say. I’m taking her out to lunch tomorrow and we’re going to have fun!