On Dreamshaping: The Wrong Idea

Mark McNease

If you spend much time watching television or browsing the Internet, you’ll quickly realize what advertisers have been telling us all our lives: that there is something wrong with us. Vast fortunes are made by people convincing us we’re naturally defective and the best way to repair our damaged selves, if they can be repaired at all, is by using whatever product they’re selling. Hair loss? They’ve got the cure. Overweight? Try one of dozens of programs, apps and plans guaranteed to slim us down and give us a fighting chance of at least liking ourselves, if love is too much to hope for.

We’re told so often, for so long, that something is wrong with us that we internalize it early in life. Good, supportive parenting is to be admired and encouraged, but it’s often the exception to the rule. Too many parents discourage their children’s curiosity and self-expression, choosing to limit them instead, often because they’d been limited themselves. We grow up being much more familiar with don’t, can’t, won’t, than we are with do, can, will, or try. Too many parents see their children as extensions of themselves, including their own disappointments and unmet expectations. They want sons to play sports, girls to keep flower-covered diaries. They seek to create only slightly altered versions of themselves in the adults their children grow up to be.

And all along the way, the children we were learned that there was something wrong with us. We failed to please the adults in our lives. We wanted to play piano instead of football. We wanted to climb trees instead of making cupcakes. We were too fat, too skinny, too smart, too challenged, too not what we were supposed to be, for our own good.

Those children, with their years of conditioning to believe there was something wrong with them, grew into adults who can’t seem to unlearn it. So we have hair growth commercials, and diets, and sexual function remedies, and lifestyle guides, and religious beliefs, and … it never ends. But something keeps attempting to tell us—a small voice that tried to speak up before it was drowned out by the negative messaging—that there is nothing wrong with us and never has been. We’ve just been given the wrong ideas, for the wrong reasons, our entire lives. And slowly, with effort and courage, we can begin to get the right ideas. Ideas that heal, and encourage, and comfort, and strengthen. Listen closely. You can hear the voice of wholeness calling.