Recently I heard someone talking about \u201cimagine waking up in the morning full of enthusiasm!\u201d\u00a0 and something about \u201cletting go of those negative beliefs,\u201d and I found myself angry.\u00a0 It\u2019s just not as easy as that.<\/p>\n
My own experience has been that there are levels of how deeply a belief is set in.\u00a0 More recent ones are easier to drop.\u00a0 Very early beliefs are harder.\u00a0 They depend on how strongly you\u2019ve been conditioned, how many times you had the experience that gave rise to the belief, or whether the belief was set in by a traumatic experience.<\/p>\n
More recent beliefs I\u2019ve been able to change just by recognizing them.\u00a0 I had decided to go back to school and get a PhD in geology, but I was not able to go to the local college and register.\u00a0 At that time I was in a therapy group, and someone asked what was keeping me from going back to school.\u00a0 This sentence came out of my mouth: \u201cIf I get a PhD, I will be so threatening that no man will ever marry me, and my life will be wasted.\u201d\u00a0 I listened to myself say this, looked at what it really said \u201cIf I get a PhD … my life will be wasted,\u201d and saw how ridiculous that was.\u00a0 I went out the next morning to register for a class.\u00a0 So much for that belief.<\/p>\n
Another belief that I changed, that I think went back to childhood, and wrote in a number of journals, is \u201cNobody ever loved me and nobody ever will.\u201d\u00a0 I was thirty before I ever said that out loud in the hearing of a friend, a gay man.\u00a0 Ron said \u201cWhat about me?\u00a0 I love you.\u201d\u00a0 Shortly later I said it to my best woman friend, and she too said \u201cWhat about me?\u00a0 I love you.\u201d\u00a0 So the next time I said that sentence in my mind, a little voice popped up and said \u201cThat\u2019s not true.\u00a0 Ron loves me, and Trudi loves me.\u201d\u00a0 Gradually I added people to my list which grew to nearly twenty.\u00a0 I was at a workshop, and I told my roommate about my project, and she said \u201cYou can add me to that list.\u201d\u00a0 I was astonished, she hardly knew me.\u00a0 I worked on that belief for a number of years, and the sentence \u201cNobody ever loved me and nobody ever will\u201d dropped out of my repertoire.\u00a0 The belief that I was unloveable has been harder to erase, but at this point in my life I have a few people who I know love me, beyond a doubt.<\/p>\n
One belief I changed, after a short struggle, was about the formation of the solar system.\u00a0 As a child I had read a book that said that the planets were formed when another star passed close to the sun, and pulled out a great swath of solar material, and that became the planets.\u00a0 Later, in college, in my first astronomy class, Miss Hill described the formation of the solar system out of a sphere of gas that condensed in the center to the sun, but because it was spinning, there was also a flat disk of material around the sun, something like Saturn\u2019s rings.\u00a0 It was out of this disk that the planets formed.\u00a0 I had a hard time accepting this at first, but it obviously made more sense to accept this newer view.\u00a0 It was a useful experience, because it gave me a visceral understanding of how hard it can be to change a belief.\u00a0 I also learned something very valuable in Astronomy that has been helpful in the rest of my life.\u00a0 This is that if you have a hypothesis\u2014 all scientific theories are hypotheses, in fact all of our ideas are hypotheses \u2014 and if new facts are found that contradict your hypothesis, then you have to give up your hypothesis and come up with a new one that makes sense of the data.\u00a0 This is actually what I did with my hypothesis that nobody ever loved me; I contradicted it with data.\u00a0 (By the way, a hypothesis is a hypothetical thesis, an idea someone made up to make sense of something.)<\/p>\n
Another belief emerged as I was talking to my ex-husband about the book I was trying to create from journal entries.\u00a0 This was a perennial project, the current working title was \u201cWritten in Blood.\u201d\u00a0 Knowing that the perceived goal may not be the real goal, but a strategy to get to the real goal, my ex asked me \u201cIf you published that book, what would you have?\u201d\u00a0 Again a sentence came out of my mouth: \u201cIf I published a book, it would prove that I deserve to live, even though my parents were disappointed in me.\u201d\u00a0 I was horrified.\u00a0 This had been the motivation for writing and typing my journals.\u00a0 I felt as though a block of my life had fallen into the sea.\u00a0 I thought I might even stop writing my journal \u2014I didn\u2019t though, it was too much a part of my life.\u00a0 I did stop typing up what I had written.\u00a0 I think the quality of my writing changed, it became less \u201cliterary\u201d and more relaxed, even sloppy.\u00a0 But the belief that I didn\u2019t deserve to live didn\u2019t change.\u00a0 It was just that I saw that publishing a book wouldn\u2019t prove that I deserved to live.<\/p>\n
The belief that I \u201cdon\u2019t deserve to live\u201d is probably the deepest, and I\u2019m still struggling with changing it.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a verbal belief that I can counteract with words.\u00a0 It comes from having been neglected far too much as a baby, which left me with the feeling that I didn\u2019t deserve to be taken care of, to have any attention spent on me.\u00a0 It is also true that an infant can\u2019t survive alone, so when left alone too long, the organism understands that it will cease to exist.\u00a0 An infant is pre-verbal, so any attempt to describe in words is an attempt to give a \u201cfelt sense\u201d<\/a> a verbal description.\u00a0 Another verbal expression of the felt sense of a baby left alone is \u201cworthless-and-rotten-and-should-be-dead.\u201d\u00a0 This has happened to me more than once.\u00a0 I remember one time when a relative had sent me a letter basically criticizing the way I lived my life.\u00a0 \u201cYou should stop being so self-involved.\u00a0 You should get a job,\u201d etc.\u00a0 I took the letter with me to my studio which was separate from the house, and thought \u201cI should kill myself.\u201d\u00a0 I didn\u2019t go through any thought process to get there, it just seemed obvious.\u00a0 That\u2019s why the sentence is hyphenated.\u00a0 One can\u2019t \u201clet go\u201d of this kind of belief, it\u2019s lodged is the cells of the body and nervous system.\u00a0 The only antidote is NOT \u201cI deserve to live\u201d but something along the lines of Father Greg<\/a>\u2019s: \u201cwe seek to tell each person this truth: they are exactly what God had in mind when God made them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently I heard someone talking about \u201cimagine waking up in the morning full of enthusiasm!\u201d\u00a0 and something about \u201cletting go of those negative beliefs,\u201d and I found myself angry.\u00a0 It\u2019s just not as easy as that. My own experience has … Continue reading