Dear ninibee:

Glad you started this new thread!

1. “How do you know what the reality is?”- let’s take an example of reality: gravity. You know it is reality because when you jump, you don’t float in the air, but instead you come down to the ground.  You observe other people, animals, objects and you see that gravity is reality for them too and that nothing in reality puts gravity into question. Gravity is congruent with all that is observable.

Hard science is very good at determining reality. Always look for science and the scientific method of thinking, researching and experimenting in your efforts to determine what is real and what is not.

I will now jump to one of your core beliefs and that is that you rejected your mother from the beginning, from the time you were a young child and onward: science shows that young animals don’t reject their mothers. Science shows that young animals depend on their mothers to survive and that animals are very unlikely to do anything that endangers their survival. Therefore, I say, it is impossible that as a young child you rejected your mother.

2. “How do you change core beliefs?… I can only really think to ‘challenge’ them”- you have to challenge your core beliefs first. After all, maybe this or that core belief is true to reality (we have those too). So challenge first. You can’t and shouldn’t change a core belief unless you can see that it is indeed not true to reality.

It is easy to do with gravity, isn’t it. Regarding your core belief that you rejected your mother as a young child, challenge it: look for examples in nature of young mammals who reject their mothers, that would be a start of challenging.

3. “How would changing them make healing possible?”- the easy gravity example: if you change a core belief that gravity doesn’t exist, into the core belief that gravity does exist, then you’d stop jumping from rocks trying to float in the air and hurting yourself that way. The more difficult example that applies to you: if you change your core belief that you rejected a loving mother, to the belief that your mother rejected you, you will no longer feel like a bad person. People who believe they are bad people live bad lives- they suffer a whole lot.

4. “what keeps me ‘in’ my core beliefs, since many of them feel so bad”- a child is not capable to endure the belief that her mother doesn’t love her, that her mother is rejecting her. So she closes her eyes to that reality and believes something else that is not true. Now, the something-else doesn’t feel good, but the original (true) belief feels worse. Many false core beliefs feel bad, but not as bad (for the child) as the true core beliefs that we close our eyes to.

I typed all the above before I read your last sentence: “I feel like a bad person, a problematic person, and I just can’t stop being bad and problematic”- this is your false core belief. You believe it to be true to you ever since you were a young child. Maybe you believe that you were born that way,  bad, problematic. But I can see that it is not true as clearly as I can see .. anything.

Now that you started this thread and I replied, let’s keep the conversation going, okay?

anita