Dear Raisin:

When you were a child, your brain was different from what it is now. Imagine yourself as a baby, what went on in that baby brain? Everything was new: colors, shapes, every thing was fascinating, so was touch and the warmth of a mother holding you gently in her hands. There weren’t any words going through your brain when you were a baby because you didn’t yet have a vocabulary. Everything was about how it felt. And because you didn’t have words to think with, you didn’t and couldn’t attach a moral judgement to what you felt: there were no good feelings and no bad feelings, and in your baby and young child brain, you were not good or bad for feeling what you were feeling, or for what you were doing.

Fast forward, as an older child, a teenager and an adult, you have all the words in the world available for your brain to think with and form moral judgements about what you feel and do. Next, you retroactively apply your current vocabulary and your current ability to form moral judgements, to you at early times when you were unable to form such judgements (earlier childhood) and to a time when such ability was in its beginning development, not yet baked, so to speak.

This retroactive judgment is unfair to you because there is an expectation in it that what you know now, with your developed brain, you should have known then when your brain didn’t even have words to think with. Or when your brain had too few words, and too few experiences to be able to form solid moral judgments about what you felt and what you did.

At the time, and still, sexual sensations felt good. There is no valid moral judgment on it then or now. You don’t choose what nature chose for you, and nature chose that you will feel good when sexually stimulated.

In your earlier childhood, your ability to thoughtfully and morally choose your behaviors was compromised: a child has to be taught what behaviors are responsible/ moral behaviors  by a responsible/ moral adult before being expected to behave responsibly and morally.

I will stop here for now. Please take the time you need to thoroughly read and consider what I wrote to you here and get back to me when you are ready.

anita

Dear Raisin:

You are very welcome. Quality professional psychotherapy will be best for you.

“My truth” is the title of your thread. It took me a long time to learn my truth. My learning started in my first quality, professional psychotherapy experience nine years ago (over two years of therapy). One of the things my therapist at the time taught me was the concept of Core Beliefs. Core beliefs are what we believe to be true about who we are. Core Beliefs consist of words (ex.: I am a bad person), and strong emotions attached to the words (ex: shame and guilt). It is possible to challenge core beliefs, evaluate them and come up with accurate core beliefs.

Just because we feel that something is true (or we partly feel that something is true), doesn’t mean that it is true.

Post here again anytime and I will be glad to reply to you every time you post.

anita