“You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.” ~ H. G. Wells“It struck me like thunder,” Cammie said. “I was sitting in class hearing about rigid people, and I recognized my father. Could it be true
things he’d taught me weren’t right? All time I thought he was authority on everything. It was like I was sitting there taking notes. He sounded a lot like “Type A” personality teacher was talking about. I began to sort out things I’d learned from him and to see how they were holding me back. It was one of hardest things to face I’ve ever been through. He taught me to take his word for gospel. But I could see how it had driven my boyfriend away. The fact that I always thought I had to be right.”
Most of self-talk that goes on in our heads, we got from our parents. Maybe from one of them more than other. In Cammie’s case, it was from her dad.
Thomas got a lot of messages from his mother, because his parents were divorced when he was 6.
“I realized,” says Thomas, “how little I thought of myself and how much it had to do with what my mother was always telling me. I think she really hated men because me dad left her. It was like I kept trying to prove things to myself about myself that weren’t even true. One day I made a list of things I remember her telling me … men are no good … men don’t know how to love … things like that. It took a while to get rid of all that.”
As I cover in my book, “Changing Beliefs, Self-limiting Thoughts and What to Accept,” one of hardest things to do is change your beliefs. Many of us just go on operating under same beliefs even though they don’t work. Usually we don’t know it’s beliefs that aren’t working, we blame it on other things. So we try harder, redoubling out efforts hoping to bring about different results.
It doesn’t work that way! Doing more of same is only going to bring your more of same.
We may not even know they’re beliefs. We think of them as absolutes, and when we find someone who doesn’t think same thing, we avoid them. Therefore we never learn anything new.
When we do give up a long-held belief, it feels like something is missing, that’s for sure. We feel like we’ve lost something big, a large part of ourselves. You wonder what else you might be believing and operating on that’s false or non-productive. Therefore it takes courage.
When I’m coaching, I listen carefully to hear client’s self-talk. I hear all sorts of awful things. Some people are more mindful of these things than others, but they do slip out. Under stress, we tend to revert to old messages … I could never succeed … no on would ever love me … I’m such a fool … things like that.
Whenever you hear someone say, “I can’t believe…” it’s because a belief of theirs has been assaulted, and they aren’t willing to face that fact. It happens, for instance, if you think everyone’s going to treat you right. Some people stay too long in relationships because their underlying belief, their assumption. Is that they’ll always be treated right. Their husband abuses them and they say, “He didn’t mean to” or “But he really loves me.” That’s an underlying belief that’s flying in face of reality. Someone who loves someone doesn’t abuse them.
These underlying beliefs tend to be self-fulfilling, too. I remember reading in a graduate text book that “life is hard.” I’ve had my ups and downs, but on whole I hadn’t found life to be hard. I wondered where that statement had come from. Over years, I’ve found people who felt that way did indeed have hard lives, and I wondered which came first – cart of horse. If you believe life is hard, surely, I think, you will go about proving that, because we’re very clever about that sort of thing. What if you changed that belief to “life is easy”? What would you lose? What would you gain?
