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coming into contact with my "core beliefs"

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  • #338628
    ninibee
    Participant

    So in another thread, anita said to me “Back to your core beliefs and thoughts: change them so that they are true to reality, and your healing will be made possible.” and suggested I start a new thread based on this topic and so that is what I am doing.

    my first question is: How do you know what the reality is?

    my second question is: How do you change core beliefs?… I can only really think to “challenge” them.

    and my third question is: How would changing them make healing possible?… I am thinking I may need to just trust in this for now.

    I am also curious about what keeps me “in” my core beliefs, since many of them feel so bad. My guess is that they feel “safe” to me, but that is just what I have heard others say before and have never explored it within myself.

    I certainly can see where in my life my core beliefs come relevant. I see that they make my life difficult. A few people have told me that what I think about myself is “out of touch with reality”.

    I feel like a bad person, a problematic person, and I just can’t stop being bad and problematic.

    #338712
    Anonymous
    Guest

    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

    #338864
    ninibee
    Participant

    hello anita,

    When you put things the way you did, I understand them better. Thank you. Especially “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.”

    You also said about my belief that I am bad/problematic: “But I can see that it is not true as clearly as I can see .. anything.” I am confused on this one because many people do see me this way. Many people tell me I have lots of problems and that I am difficult.

    I will respond more later.

    #338880
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear ninibee:

    It is better to respond in small amounts, like you did in your recent post. This kind of work, emotional learning, is different from intellectual learning, such as we do in school, tackling a large amounts of information at one time. Emotional learning is about tackling a small amount of information at a time, and repeatedly over a long period of time, returning to the same topic  already understood, because there is more and more to understand about it.

    This means that if your thread is to work for you, it will need to extend over a number of pages and over a longer period of time.

    “You also said about my belief that I am bad/ problematic: ‘But I can see that it is not true..’ I am confused on this one because many people do see me this way. Many people tell me I have lots of problems and that I am difficult”.

    I will explain this point further: you believed that you were bad and problematic from an early age while you were good and not at all problematic. You believed this as a child because your mother treated you as if you were bad and problematic. In other words, the core belief was formed before you displayed any abnormal or problematic behaviors.

    Later on, as you grew up, you did/ do act in problematic ways: dysfunctional, ineffective ways, because dysfunction is the consequence of childhood mistreatment.

    Healing is a combination of correcting current dysfunctional behaviors, and going back in time, so to speak, so to understand what kind of child you were (not different from any other, not abnormal, not problematic, and definitely not bad).

    Understanding your beginning in life will make it possible for you to catch up to the child that you were, and know that you are still good and that there is nothing wrong with  you.

    anita

     

    #339244
    ninibee
    Participant

    hi again anita,

    I am again curious how I could’ve been good as a child when it seems there are very concrete things that made me difficult and problematic.

    For one, I was a VERY picky and anxious about food. I had extreme food aversion and OCD like behaviors. This was difficult for my family and made things socially difficult for me (not eating food at birthday parties or that other parents mare for me)

    Also, other kids’ parents complained about me and often did not want me being friends with their children. I am not exactly sure why, but it seems like I likely was just difficult to be friends with..

    I also cried a lot, would go to the school nurse for made-up reasons, find ways and excuses to get out of normal school activities.

    In some resemblance, these things are still present in my life as an adult.

    But something I was thinking recently was that maybe I was not shown or did not experience things that would help me feel more comfortable and confident.

    For example, I am always very nervous about eating leftovers from restaurants. Recently I went out to eat with a friend and had leftovers with them, and I was too hesitant to eat any, so I asked my friend if I could be there when they ate the same leftovers so I could see that it was an okay thing to do and likely nothing bad would happen (nothing bad happened). I did this because I thought it would help me get over my nervousness about eating left overs in the future.

    #339246
    ninibee
    Participant

    (continued)

    Maybe that seems irreverent, but is the example I thought of. I do not know if it even will make sense to anyone else.. or if it could apply to other things.

    Let me know your thoughts

    #339336
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear ninibee:

    1. “For one, I was a VERY picky and anxious about food. I had extreme food aversion and OCD like behaviors. This was difficult for my family”-

    -at whatever age you displayed anxiety regarding food, before that age, you were emotionally injured in context of food and eating. I will give you an example from my own life: when my mother was pregnant with me she was anorexic/ bulimic, so her pregnancy hardly showed. As a (smaller size) baby she tried to breastfeed me with large amounts of breast milk, way more food than I was used to in her womb, so as a baby, I kept my mouth shut. She later told me that as a result of me refusing breastfeeding, her milk stayed in her breasts and she suffered a painful infection. Question: was I a problematic baby for refusing too much breast milk; In other words, what came first: her underfeeding me before birth or my instinct to reject excess milk?

    Something happened to you that resulted in you having anxiety regarding food and being picky. It was difficult for your family in a similar way that it was difficult for my mother to not have her breastmilk used. But what came first?

    If I was not underfed as an unborn baby, I would have consumed more breastmilk after birth. If you were not VERY traumatized somehow in the context of food, you would have turned out to be “VERY picky and anxious about food”.

    2. “Also, other kids’ parents complained about me and often did not want me being friends with their children. I am not exactly sure why”-

    -did you hear those parents complain about you, or did you hear your mother telling you that other parents complained about you? If the only parent you heard with your own ears complaining about you is your mother, then I am suspecting she was .. the only parent who complained about you. I suspect this because it is not a loving act of a mother to relay others’ complaints to her daughter without telling her why they complained (“I am not exactly sure why”), and therefore without guiding her daughter to change specific behaviors. So I figure she told you what she told you so to hurt your feelings.

    3. “I also cried a lot, would go to the school nurse for made-up reasons, find ways and excuses to get out of normal school activities”-

    – you cried a lot because you suffered a lot, made to suffer and/ or not helped when you suffered. I don’t know if it is true that you made up reasons to go to the nurse. You probably didn’t have the correct words and diagnoses to label the misery that you experienced, so you didn’t ask to go to the nurse with the correct terminology.

    4. “I am always very nervous about eating leftovers… so I could see that it was an okay thing to do and likely nothing bad would happen”-

    – when you were a child, someone (your mother?) scared you regarding eating leftovers. Let’s say you ate leftovers one day and she screamed at you hysterically, saying something like:  are you crazy eating this leftover? It was out of the frig for hours, probably has lots of germs in it, why did you do that? Now I have to take you to the hospital and my day is ruined!

    Again, from my personal experience: my mother scared me about not eating all  that’s on my plate, saying that if I leave anything behind, it will spoil (even if the leftover is in the frig for a day!), and that would be a terrible thing because she works so hard for the food she buys. Decades later, when I see leftover in the frig, I get scared and feel the urgent need to eat it before it gets spoiled. I assure you that if my mother didn’t scare me this way, I would have no problems with leftover in the frig.

    anita

    #339524
    ninibee
    Participant

    did you hear those parents complain about you, or did you hear your mother telling you that other parents complained about you?

    Well, I know that sometimes I would act independently from my mother, like going to the neighbors house to ask to play and other kids would say “My parents say I am not allowed to play with you”, yet they were allowed to play with my brother. This was a big problem for me amongst neighborhood kids, and even at school after we moved neighborhoods. I distinctly remember my best friend’s mom in middle school calling me a “bad influence”.

    #339526
    ninibee
    Participant

    About leftovers and my food issues… I have emetophobia (intense phobia of vomit) that makes me stress about anything that could possibly make me sick. My mom is a bit of a germaphobe, but does not have the same phobia as far as I know.

    #339528
    ninibee
    Participant

    About leftovers and my food issues… I have emetophobia (intense phobia of vomit) that makes me stress about anything that could possibly make me sick. My mom is a bit of a germaphobe, but does not have the same phobia as far as I know.

    #339538
    ninibee
    Participant

    anita, I want to apologize for the gaps in my responses. I find it hard to engage because of the shame I feel. I am also worried because it seems like nobody else is interested in this thread and it is all on you.

    #339622
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear ninibee

    Regarding your first post: you do have direct evidence that a parent or a few parents of your peers didn’t want their children to play with you. I figure that you carried the distress of your home life to outside your home: other children’s homes, the playground, school. I don’t know if there is a case where a misbehaving physically healthy child is not reacting to the distress in his home and/ or the complete lack of parental guidance at home.

    A child is a “bad influence” on other children when at home he is ..  badly influenced by a parent!

    Regarding your second post: I wonder if your intense fear of vomiting has to do  with you having been forced fed as a baby- maybe your mother forced food into your mouth and you gagged, feeling like vomiting. I don’t know if you have or can possibly get this kind of information.

    Regarding your third post: please don’t worry about this thread being all on me- I want to read from you. When I read from you and answer you, I learn more about myself, about people, about life, and I enjoy learning these things. So you are helping me learn. You mentioned feeling shame- I can’t take away your shame, of course, but I assure you: I don’t think of you in any way that will validate the shame you feel when you do. I don’t think of you in a bad or a lesser way for anything at all that you share honestly, as you do.

    anita

    #340156
    ninibee
    Participant

    Regarding your second post: I wonder if your intense fear of vomiting has to do  with you having been forced fed as a baby- maybe your mother forced food into your mouth and you gagged, feeling like vomiting. I don’t know if you have or can possibly get this kind of information.

    I have wondered about this myself. I only know of one traumatic incident with vomiting when I was a baby and that was when I was strapped into a car seat on my first plane ride and I threw up all over myself and the car seat and was stuck in for the whole plane ride. It fits into my fear a little bit because my fear of vomit is proximity-based. I will only feel a little startled if someone throws up outside passing them by on the sidewalk or something. If I am in the same house or room with someone throwing up is when it is the worst I have experienced. My absolute worst fear is being trapped in an enclosed space with vomit.

    #340158
    ninibee
    Participant

    I don’t know if there is any way for me to find out if I was force fed or overfed as a baby. I don’t think my parents would admit to that type of thing happening if it did. I know my mom blames my pickiness as a child on her and others “giving in” to my food preferences too much as a baby and not forcing me to eat vegetables and meat, as they should’ve

    #340170
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear ninibee:

    Here is an illogical, senseless explanation to your fear of vomiting: that your mother and other people gave in to your food preferences when you were a baby.

    By suggesting the above, your mother suggests that you were a strong-willed, powerful and dominating baby with unreasonable demands for particular foods-

    – while she and others, were weak-willed, helpless and submissive adults who gave in to the demands of the.. powerful baby.

    Her explanation will fit well with some kind of a sci-fi movie with the theme of a powerful, evil baby- it does not fit reality.

    On the other hand, your suggested explanation is reasonable: as a baby you were strapped to  a seat in an airplane, threw up on yourself and the seat and were stuck there for the whole plane ride. It must have seemed forever for the baby that you were. (Why you were not cleaned, I don’t know. I would imagine that either your mother and/ or plane crew would offer to clean the mess. Maybe your mother wanted to punish you, leaving you in the mess..?)

    I withdraw my suggestion that maybe you were forced fed because your explanation is satisfactory in explaining your intense fear of vomit, and  why your “absolute worst fear is being trapped in an enclosed space with vomit”.

    I am wondering how many more unreasonable thoughts and explanations your mother expressed to you on a variety of topics!

    anita

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