Cleaning out the Thought Closet

My current Online Bible Study focuses on the book by Jennifer Rothschild titled Me, Myself, and Lies.  Appropriate title, I think, for many of us who suffer with verbal baggage that we have heard through the years or who tend to attack ourselves with low self-esteem comments.

One thing that has struck me has been the idea of a thought closet, one in which we store those comments made to us by others along with many hundreds, no probably thousands, of thoughts that run through our minds on a daily basis.  If my thought closet is anything like the closet in our bedroom, it is full of items that are important and many that could be pitched.  In fact, even though I  cleaned out the closet a couple of months ago, I know there are still items that should make their way into a Goodwill donation bag soon.

Mom had a way of inserting negative comments into our lives.  That is an understatement.  Most of what she said was negative in some way about someone.  Rarely did she have anything good to say, and no one escaped.  Family.  Friends. Neighbors.  People she read about in the newspaper or in a magazine.  Everyone was subject to her negative comments.

Those are hard to pull out of the thought closet and discard.  They really are.  A couple have stayed with me through the years, including her comment that I liked to always be in control and control others, so much so that she had trouble controlling me.  The other was that I had no common sense.  The first time I heard that was when I tossed a pan of potato peelings into the yard for the chickens and she told me, in front of several cute teenage boys, that I had no common sense because anyone who did would not have put those peelings where I had.  The last time was when I was trying to convince her not to eat any of the applesauce in a jar which had dark brown spots of spoiled fruit in it.

However, I now have accepted this: I need to dig out the roots of those comments and toss them out of my thought closet so the fruit (the words and concepts) can no longer plague me.  Am I controlling?  I don't think so.  I like to be organized. I like to have a plan, especially since it takes an hour to go most of the places we visit and I need to know timetables and if I need to take extra clothes or not.  Do I have common sense?  I think so.  I know enough not to eat spoiled applesauce and i do discard food that has passed the expiration dates.

This will all take time and I can go into my thought closet and chop out all of the nasty roots in just one day.  It may take a few months to clean it up.  But I will do it.  And with that...this is the last time the words 'controlling' and 'no common sense' will be used by me, in reference to me and negative comments by my mother.  I am chopping them out.  Now.