What is it about clowns that scare some children? Yesterday I figured it out.

Their faces tell a different story than what is in their hearts. To a child's instincts they may seem to be hiding something.

A dear friend of mine suffered from serious child abuse. The abuser was her mother. To the world, her mother seemed to be a nurturing kind person, but behind closed doors she wore another face. My friend has nightmares about clowns and when the clown face is removed; it is her mother.

My mother was like that, too. Everyone loved her. They didn't see the screaming, rude, vicious side of her. She put on a different face for them.

Are you wearing a lot of different faces and your family can never tell who you are or who you are going to be? It is up to us to change this behavior and make our inside face match our outside face.

When we fall into the trap of seeking perfection, we feel the need to put on another mask.

We don't have to protect ourselves any longer. A wounded animal will pretend to be healthy so it will not draw attention to the wound. Aren't we all wounded in some way? We don't want anyone to see our pain or imperfections. We might get in trouble. My dear friend said something that was so profound that I have to share it with you:

"There are wounded caregivers that pass on those wounds to their children; what was done to them will in some way be used to be done to you. The first line of their strategy is to mold our self-concept to suit their wounded needs, but we don't know they are wounded. They are where we learn everything . . . we love them, we trust them even when they hurt us.

As children we can't afford to know that our very means of survival is wounded, so we internalize the blame and incorporate it into our self-concept. Without knowing it, we are using a survival mechanism. It's safer to think that there are things wrong with us, than things wrong with our means of survival without realizing it, these get formed into our self-concept.

Our inner dialogue parrots this back to us. We take our inner dialogue as the guidance it was created to be, but we were never taught that any of it was corrupted! We follow it like it is truth and God's word. Even when we get more worldly and learn that all that was done to us and taught to us isn't necessarily true. We were never taught how to "evaluate" the ongoing stream of inner dialogue to guide us. It never occurred to us that part of the maturing process is learning not only how to think for ourselves but how to edit our own thinking itself!"

When she wrote this my mouth just hung open in the shock of how simple yet how true her words were. We came up with a simple technique to help her realize when her clown-faced mother was talking from the grave. We would drown out her words with a honking clown horn like Harpo Marks used to honk instead of talking. All of a sudden we started to laugh so hard. We really didn't have a horn, just the Yahoo image with the clown face and a horn. She began to hear and see her mother as the clown-faced fake that filled her head with negativity. She was deleting her negativity with the laughter, and that made the fear go away.

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