{"id":1704,"date":"2009-02-11T07:31:20","date_gmt":"2009-02-11T12:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/horizonsmagazine.com\/blog\/?p=1704"},"modified":"2026-03-27T10:40:36","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T15:40:36","slug":"how-were-you-programmed-by-language-as-a-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/horizonsmagazine.com\/blog\/how-were-you-programmed-by-language-as-a-child\/","title":{"rendered":"How were you programmed by language as a child? My brother and I had very different experiences with our Dad"},"content":{"rendered":"

My brother lives just outside Greenville, SC in the town he grew up in.\u00a0 He mentioned to me one day he had recently seen someone in town he\u2019d known as a child.\u00a0 His memory was of an extremely impoverished family, with the kids going through neighbors’ trash and eating scrap food.\u00a0 That is something I never saw as a child.\u00a0 It makes me realize all over again that Jerry and I had such different childhoods.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The basic story is that our dad was married to Jerry\u2019s mom.\u00a0 A couple of years later, he meets my mom, who doesn\u2019t know he\u2019s married.\u00a0 Daddy simply skips town, deserts Jerry and his mom, and begins to live happily ever after with a new wife, starting a new family.\u00a0\u00a0 I am the first girl, so I am the golden child.\u00a0 We know nothing of his other family.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course, in the meantime, here is Jerry\u2019s mom suddenly raising two small children herself.\u00a0 Jerry by default becomes the man of the house, working to help pay bills and feed the family.\u00a0 He unfortunately looks just like our dad, so he hears a lot of \u00a0\u201cYou\u2019re just like your father.\u201d\u00a0 And not in a good way.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jerry is a trooper and he just knew it was his work to do and he didn\u2019t mind that he never got credit for it.\u00a0 We\u2019re talking young adolescent 10 year old kid here, not a 16 year old teenager working to help support the family.\u00a0 We\u2019re talking a kid who was lucky to be so tall and to look older than he was, so he could get work. That’s also how our Dad joined the army at 16.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

So it took a few years but Jerry\u2019s mom finally tracked her husband\/our father down and the families begin to merge.\u00a0 It sounds like the perfect setting for fireworks, but I don\u2019t remember there being dramatic scenes.\u00a0 Maybe they worked it all out over the phone before we all got in person.\u00a0 Or maybe it was so horrible I\u2019ve blocked it out *smile*\u00a0\u00a0 Whatever it was, my lasting perception was that it was a fairly uneventful transition.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Then it was like the Clash of the Titans<\/em>, literally since dad and Jerry were both well over 6\u2019.\u00a0 Daddy who was used to not having his authority questioned.\u00a0 And Jerry, who\u2019d been abandoned by an uneducated and insecure father, making him have to grow up at an early age on his own. I\u2019m sure Daddy felt tons of guilt, as well he should.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure Jerry felt some resentment, which was justified.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

By the time Jerry was 18, the clash became so great and our father felt so threatened, that he banished Jerry from family contact.\u00a0 When I asked about him, Dad told me he went to Vietnam.\u00a0 Shortly after, he told me Jerry died in Vietnam.\u00a0 So when I didn\u2019t hear from Jerry after 1967, I assumed that was why.\u00a0\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if my mother knew the real story, but Mom was smart enough to keep her mouth shut for the peace of the family, and we never discussed Jerry.\u00a0 Mom left her body on April 8, 1996, two days before my birthday.\u00a0 Jerry sent me an email on December 26, 2002, the day after Christmas. Just a week before, I’d had some deep reflections about our family’s dynamics and came to great understanding of the karmic ties and implications.\u00a0 I beleive when we come to an understanding of something from the past, we clear the karma of it.\u00a0 Clearing karma means some people fall from your life and some people come in.\u00a0 A week later, he contacted me. <\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

What??\u00a0 Why did he wait so long?\u00a0 I think our Dad so programmed him into thinking he needed to be away from us that he wanted to do the right thing for everyone as he saw it.\u00a0 Our father was a troubled man.\u00a0 He\u2019d had a hard life, working by 10, going into the Army at 14 – he was so tall that he looked much older.\u00a0 He had only a 6th grade education, yet was savvy enough to use language as a weapon and a lure.\u00a0 We grew up with that, every day and got really programmed by it.\u00a0 So I don\u2018t fault Jerry for being hesitant about breaching the banishment order<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 He didn\u2019t know we\u2019d been told he died in Vietnam and never expected to hear from him again.\u00a0 Until he read where I\u2019d written that on my website at<\/span> horizonsmagazine.com<\/a> and he emailed, asking \u201cremember me?<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 Needless to say, I was floored.\u00a0 Yet I almost immediately thought I knew why he\u2019d waited so long.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Synchronistically, a journal entry from\u00a0 two months before said: \u201dI\u2019m rereading a book from 1975 called The Structure of Magic<\/em>. It’s about the therapeutic effects of language and what is currently called neurolinguistic programming<\/em> – how we get programmed by the language we use and how our perception is programmed and distorted by what we’re taught is “the norm.”\u00a0 It’s one reason I try to be mindful about the written and spoken word – I’ve learned the power of it.\u00a0 A good example is someone who is a really neat and valuable person, like my friend Tom, but has been programmed to believe they’re a loser, so they act like they’re a loser and all their talk about being a loser finally gets to you and you have to cut them off.\u00a0 They can’t get past apologizing for imagined deficiencies and pretty soon you’re tired of hearing it because they’ve convinced you to start seeing them through their own filter, which isn’t a pretty picture.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The book asks:\u00a0 “How is it possible for different human beings faced with the same world to have such different experiences?\u00a0 Our understanding is that this difference follows primarily from differences in (the model they grew up with.)\u00a0 Thus, the question becomes:\u00a0 How is it possible for human beings to maintain an impoverished model which causes them pain in the face of a multi-valued, rich and complex world? <\/em> The difficulty is not that they are making the wrong choice, but that they do not have enough choices – because they don’t have a wide and richly focused image of the world<\/em>.\u00a0 One mechanism which we can use either to cope effectively or to defeat ourselves is Deletion.\u00a0 Deletion is a process by which we selectively pay attention to certain dimensions of our experience and exclude others.\u00a0 Deletion reduces the world to proportions which we feel capable of handling.\u00a0 The reduction may be useful in some contexts and yet be the source of pain for us in others.”<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

My friend Tom distorted and deleted so much from his range of opportunities that he thought he didn\u2019t have access to anything other than his miserable world and his miserable life.\u00a0 What was available for others was not available to him, so he didn\u2019t even dare dream it or consider it.\u00a0 Easier just to go to work every day to feed your family, keep one foot in front of another and don\u2019t expect too much else.\u00a0 I think my brother had reached that point as well, and I think it was synchronistic that I\u2019d just had the experience with Tom and had just been reading about how we get programmed by language.\u00a0 So when Jerry and I resumed contact, I shared with him what I\u2019d been reading since it so applied to us.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019d been raised in different environments:\u00a0 I was the golden child who didn\u2019t know Dad had another family.\u00a0 I got braces, I got dancing lessons, we had a good life.\u00a0 Jerry was the eldest, left to fend for self and family that had been abandoned by our father, with no financial support from him.\u00a0 I got things handed to me.\u00a0 Jerry had to work doubly hard to get the basics for he and his family.\u00a0 So naturally, we grew up having different perspectives on what kind of place the world is.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

We found we\u2019d read a lot of the same books and had a lot of the same interests, philosophy, theology, hypnosis, psychic\/paranormal, meditation. \u00a0 We’d done a good amount of parallel study and simultaneous research and it was fun to have someone to discuss it all with.\u00a0 So it was easy to bring up and talk about the effect on our lives that our father\u2019s verbal abuse caused.\u00a0 I had been lucky.\u00a0 My mother was very wise and told me about my dad, \u201cHe\u2019s not always like this.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t even like himself when he\u2019s like this. \u00a0But he feels he can\u2019t help it.\u00a0 He\u2019s sorry afterwards and that causes him pain.\u00a0 So just get through it as best you can and don\u2019t bait him.\u00a0 When you\u2019re 18 you will be free, it\u2019s only x more years<\/em>.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

She was smart.\u00a0 She took my focus off what was happening in the times of trouble, and gave me the age of 18 as a goal to focus toward.\u00a0 She gave me something to look forward to when I was going through tough times at home.\u00a0 It turned out to have been an excellent coping tool that has served me well my whole life.\u00a0 I mistakenly thought everyone\u2019s mom told them things like that.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jerry didn\u2019t have that a cheerleader like that, so he lacked that particular coping tool.\u00a0 I turned him on to the Abraham-Hicks<\/a> work and while he\u2019s not on board with all of it, he immediately saw that he\u2019d been often focusing on the bad things that had happened, and not on the good.\u00a0 That was expected considering the mindsets he was faced with at home and growing up. He immediately and intuitively knew that appreciation was a big key and a great tool for changing focus.\u00a0 We had many long hours of philosophical conversation and catching up with what our future hopes and dreams are.\u00a0 We don\u2019t feel the need to delve into the whys and hows of the past, we just move forward with what we currently think and do and plan for our futures.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve got several projects we do together and it\u2019s fun to work on these things together.\u00a0 Since we\u2019re both workaholics, it gives us time to spend together while we\u2019re at the computer doing other work as well.\u00a0 As my friends and family knows, unless you have email, we don\u2019t stay in touch.\u00a0 I even email my cousin roommate just because it\u2019s easier.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

So I enjoy the email interaction Jerry and I have every day.\u00a0 Sometimes we might exchange 40+ emails and as many IM\u2019s if we\u2019re working on something.\u00a0\u00a0 While we seldom have any differences of opinion, we sometimes have misunderstandings, and one or the other of us will raise our voice to get our point across.\u00a0 It\u2019s out of character for each of us, so it\u2019s a good mirror when it happens, and we like having a joint project like that to work on – what are we each mirroring to the other<\/em>?\u00a0 We know that our parental programming had a hand in determining our automatic responses to each other.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

One thing I do is not appreciate Jerry enough for what he does, and the effort he continually makes on my behalf.\u00a0 His flaw is in making a suggestion to me in a very light way, so that I think it is something very easy for him to do.\u00a0 Then it may be a project that consumes him night and day for weeks, unbeknown to me.\u00a0 I may not realize just how complex it is for him.\u00a0 In the meantime, I\u2019m bugging him with nonsense questions about items of far less priority, not knowing how much work I am really creating for him.\u00a0 And he\u2019s trained to be the dutiful provider, so he quietly takes it all in without complaint.<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

So it\u2019s a reminder to me to be more conscious of what I am doing and what ripples I may be setting into motion in the lives of those around me.\u00a0 It\u2019s a reminder to be more conscious in what effect the words I say to someone will have on them.\u00a0 Do I know what programming they grew up with?\u00a0 Do I know what simple word or phrase might trigger an unexpected response in them?\u00a0 It is a reminder to be more clear in what I ask for, while still being precise in asking for it.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes I re-read emails I have quickly sent to friends or clients who\u2019ve asked me some questions, and they read to me as very short and abrupt sounding.\u00a0 That is never my intention, and I will hereinafter endeavor to be more mindful of what I\u2019m sending out.\u00a0 Short and abrupt some of you ask, laughing.\u00a0 Wordy me short and abrupt?\u00a0 It happens.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Expect a miracle!<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Don\u2019t you love it when friends remind you what they think they are instead of what you see?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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