I am stupid, worthless, shameful, unlovable, undeserving, bad, not enough, damaged, powerless, inadequate, < insert belief >. If any of those “I am…” statements resonate with you, then: 1) you are fostering some false truths, and 2) you spend more time in pain, or in denial of pain, than you need to. If you say “yeah, but it IS the truth about me”, then ah-ha! There it is…the trickiest blindfold of all, one that could set you free if removed. Let me explain.
The House
If you’re building a house and need to calculate the area of a rectangular room, you will multiply the width of the space by the length of the space to obtain the area. You will then never question that result. That is because you know the formula to be true. You were taught that area = width * length and you had no reason not to believe it. When building your house, you won’t revise the theorem behind the formula, or review the proofs. Someone has done that work long ago and has provided you with the truth. You trust that basic truth and build (literally, in this case) from there.
If something goes wrong along the way, and the house falls apart, you will question everything you did, every decision you made, to figure out what caused the problem. However, you will never question the formula you used to compute the area of that rectangle. That assumption is a truth you simply built on unquestioningly. And that’s ok, we would accomplish very little if we reinvented the wheel each time we encountered a new problem.
How Does This Compare to Our Beliefs?
Just like the assumption that the formula used to calculate the area of the rectangle is foundational to what the house becomes, your personal truths are the baseline to who you become. But what if, just what if, unlike the formula for the area of the rectangle, you are building the empire that is your life, on false assumptions. If I believe “I am damaged”, the choices I will make every day (the building blocks to the house that is my life), will look very different than the choices I will make if I believe “I am a creative force to be reckoned with”! And what is our current situation if not an amalgamation of all the choices, big and small, we have made up to now?
Your beliefs are, in the most literal sense, your limitations. If I use the wrong formula to calculate the area of the rectangle that is to become my living room (I rely on a false truth), then inevitably, the floor I try to lay will not fit, it will require additional energy to “make it fit”, then the walls will meet the same fate, and the ceiling, and the roof. I will be making constant adjustments and constant course corrections. And that’s exhausting. And that’s not to mention the parts that I will simply build according to my calculations, which clearly don’t fit (but I don’t notice) and do not correct. At the end of the day, when it’s all said and done, I’ll be left with two choices: 1) endless amounts of energy to hold up, patch up, repair, chicken-wire-rig the structure in place with fingers crossed, or 2) colossal collapse.
If any of the “I am…” statements from the beginning resonate with you, then you’ve got yourself some foundation weakening negative self-beliefs. And those beliefs become your truth. Not in some kind of mythical, cosmic way, but rather by definition of what we do with the truth (or what we think of as being the truth). If we believe something to be true, we don’t try to change it…just like the area of the rectangle. We don’t allow ourselves to question it. Why would we?
What if you dared, just for a minute, to step out of that? What if maybe, just maybe, those “I am…” statements are NOT the truth about you, and your entire perception of your existence is based on false and impressively limiting assumptions you made about yourself? Can you take the leap of faith, and dare to entertain the possibility that your theorem may be flawed? That your truth may not actually be THE truth?
But why? Why Would I Tell Myself Lies?
I hear you. Why would I create false stuff about myself to make my own life miserable? It makes no sense at all!
To make a long story short, our negative false beliefs about ourselves come from a place of protection, and in a strange way, a place of love. Our bodies love us so much that they want us to survive, and to thrive. So essentially, when we were young, vulnerable, and dependent upon adults for our very survival, we learned to please those who could ensure our survival, and to avoid those who could harm us. Unfortunately, sometimes, those were the same people. What does that have to do with beliefs? Well, everything.
When we think of parents for example, it is possible that the same people who feed us, house us, and clothes us also insult us, harm us, ignore us, and belittle us. If that’s the case, I need to choose between my survival and my self-worth. Nobody should need to make that choice. But if you’ve had to make that choice, when you were harmed, your body, the one that loves you very much, helped you learn how to act to prevent that harm from happening again, to avoid further pain. Whether that meant to make yourself invisible, small, powerless, or otherwise, it worked. At the time. But as a side effect, those beliefs that once saved your life, are now running the show. Your show.
And you don’t need to have had a life of abuse and neglect to have acquired negative self-beliefs.
Just think of what you may have “learned” about yourself from the girl in your grade 3 class who decided you were weird and made it her personal duty to see that nobody played with you, or that group in grade 7 that made it a point to exclude you, and made it their mission that you knew about everything you were missing out on? Fundamentally, to be accepted by a group ensures your survival, and evolutionarily speaking, your body knows that, and it does what it needs to do help you survive. It wants you to fit in and rings alarm bells if you don’t! Not so many years ago, without your literal tribe, you could not survive.
Ok, maybe I didn’t make the long story so short. But in conclusion, we have learned to believe things about ourselves as children to help us survive. You can find a bit more on that in this article.
Regardless, those beliefs have become your truth. You see all of life through the lenses of those beliefs. So the whole idea of “Change Your Beliefs, Change Your Life” might not be so philosophical after all. It’s a very tangible possibility that exists in your very life. An invitation to a new, authentic, free, energetic, and alive YOU!
So, if you keep running into the same problems, hitting the same walls, maybe it’s time you check whether some false truths have weakened your foundation. Is it time to perhaps revise the validity of those truths?
How Do I Do That?
How do I release the negative self-beliefs that keep me stuck, and in pain?
Well first, you need to be gentle with yourself and give yourself permission to have been wrong about yourself. As we know, those beliefs, the negative self-beliefs running the show that is your life, worked for you at one point in time. They may have even saved your life. They sprouted from a place of love. Your body loved you so much it wanted to protect you. And you needed protection. Back then!
But your body didn’t get the memo. Those days are over, you are an adult, you no longer depend on your parents, the school bully is gone, that teacher that put you down is retired, your perpetrator was WRONG all along…
So now you can safely, open-mindedly explore the beliefs you hold true about yourself. Here is one of many recipes you can use:
Admit that you have the beliefs, full on, 100% own them. You don’t even need to admit it to someone else (although that in itself could be quite cathartic), just own it to yourself. Say: YES A PART OF ME STILL BELIEVES “I am powerless” or “I am unworthy” or “I am unlovable” or “I am a burden”, or “I am invisible” etc. False negative self-beliefs are so common (yet so destructive), there are actual lists of negative self-beliefs out there that exist to help us find the ones that resonate for us!! (If you want such a list, let me know, I will gladly send you one!!) And the beliefs are often so engrained we don’t even realize we have them until we mindfully ask ourselves the question!
Once you find the beliefs that truly resonate, write them down. The first step to releasing anything at all is to admit to its existence. Accept that it is there.
For each belief you’ve identified, write down a statement that to you, is the exact, polar opposite to your negative one. If you have the belief “I am invisible”, maybe to you, the opposite of that is simply “I am visible”. If that resonates for you, it’s yours, keep that statement. Maybe for you the opposite of “I am invisible” is “I am present”. If it resonates, it’s for you. Whatever that statement ends up being for you will likely coincide exactly with the part of your pure nature you were forced to ignore as a result of your trauma, to protect yourself from further harm. This is your truth. The part of you you left behind and that is waiting to be reclaimed, celebrated, and honoured.
Thank your body for helping you do what needed to be done to stay safe way back when. You can phrase it like this: “Thank you body for teaching me that being < insert positive belief identified in Step 3 > was not safe back then. Thank you for teaching me to believe I was < insert negative self-belief identified in Step 1 >.” For example, “Thank you body for teaching me that my joyful and exuberant presence was not safe back then. Thank you for teaching me to remain invisible.”
Acknowledge the passage of time. “That was then. The danger is long gone, and it is time I reclaim my truth. I choose to remember to believe that am < insert positive belief identified in Step 3 > and that part of me is in fact a gift to myself and all those I meet”.
And there you have it. A budding transformation. The exercise above allows you to acknowledge where you are (what false truths you believe), and where you are going (what truths you are reclaiming). It lays the groundwork for that transformation to begin to take place energetically.
From there, your remaining task is to fill the gap. And there are as many ways to do that as there are people. Ask people for evidence that point to your beliefs NOT being the truth, ask for evidence to the opposite, look for loopholes, ask those close to you about it, journal, meditate, do yoga, get therapy, any kind you like – there is more than one path to the same destination of freedom! This is an invitation to embark. Embark on the journey back to the true you.
Disclaimer: Be careful, this might just change your entire life.
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