Positive Thinking or Positive Belief
Claire Aslangul - Thursday, June 26, 2014
The past eight months have been some
of the most transformative of my adult life. I have grown in a myriad of ways.
Can you guess which self help book I read to make that happen?
Actually, I didn’t read a single one. It has been a journey of growth
through painful experience and awareness of my own negative belief systems that
have been holding me back from happiness for years. For a very long time I have
had a positive attitude and viewed the world with optimism, but when that
positive thinking clashed with some deep dark core beliefs, suffering ensued. I
couldn’t “think” my way out of the
pain of my marriage break up, nor could I visualise a happy ending to a
miscarriage. I had to stop, be vulnerable and feel the anger and grief and
recognise the core wounds and attachments that were behind all this suffering.
It was not enough to just think positively, I needed more. I needed to go
deeper.
Self help and is like every other industry, it has its good
points and it's not so good points. It has its gurus, its success stories, its
charlatans and its clueless imitators, but above all it has some major logic
gaps.
On average, a person who walks into a bookstore and buys a self
help book will be back in 18 months time to do it all again. Now things aren't
moving that fast in the evolution of an individual's psyche that the
information from the first book is no longer relevant, it is that the desired outcome
hasn't happened; to be rich, healthy, happy and/or in a passionate
relationship. Chances are very little has changed in that 18 month period. The
reader has probably not only read the book, but implemented some or all of the
strategies and yet still those goals have not been attained. So back to the
bookstore to pick up the newest self help book (which is probably yet another
rehash of "Think and Grow Rich") in the hope that this one will have
the missing ingredient. And the cycle begins again...
The irony is most of the time the only people getting rich out
of the self help industry are those selling books or expensive seminars to
people looking for answers. It is not a case of swindling the public though,
more a case of not realising that they are confusing "casual
relationship" with "causal relationship". Here you have a whole
group of self made people trying hard to share the secret of their success with
others, but being oblivious that their message lacks an essential piece to the
puzzle. Their positive thinking, visualisation and goal setting only has a
casual relationship to their achievements.
But why is it some people can walk out of an Anthony Robbins
seminar and blitz their goals within months and most others try like crazy, but
find themselves with exactly the same problem, just different a expression. The
answer is not that they weren't disciplined enough, nor is it that they didn't
listen. It all comes down to this little thing called belief.
Our belief systems are much more complicated than we once
thought. Unfortunately, we can't think our way out of a belief, no matter how
hard we try. Actually, when you look at the research, the opposite is true; the
harder you try to think your way out of a core belief, the more reasons your
brain comes up with as to why the belief is true. So in many situations when
your core beliefs and thoughts are incongruent, thinking positively actually makes things
worse. It cements further into your mind the underlying negative belief that
got you into the unhappy position you are in the first place. Every self
help book, every seminar you go to gives you a short term energy boost and
inspires you to work harder, but your amazing brain always comes back to create
a reality that lines up with your core beliefs. So, if you are one of these
people who truly believe you are going to be successful in a field that gives
you complete joy, every book you read on success and every event you attend
cements the idea further that you have unlimited potential. Unfortunately,
people like that are by far the minority.
So what are our core beliefs? Where do they come from? And
importantly, how do we fix them?
Our beliefs can be slippery little suckers, sometimes we think
we know what they are, but we don't. Identifying what beliefs you have is the
first step to fixing them and this is often the case of being unable to see the
forest for the trees. For myself, there have been two ways in which I have
recognised belief systems that are holding me back from my true potential. The
first is quiet contemplation, this could be in the form of meditation, going
for a walk/run/swim/bike ride on your own without earphones. In this time of
quiet contemplation, bring a stressful situation into your mind and look not at
what is going on, but the feelings you have about it. Anger? Injustice? Deep
sadness? Unworthiness? Ignored? Unlovable? Stupid? Judged? Shame? Fear? Out of
control? Sick? Pick out all the feelings that come up with this situation and
sit with them for a moment. From here think about the why behind the feeling,
what is the reasoning behind feeling this way?
For an example, you walk into the kitchen to find your 5 year
old has just thrown all their dinner on the floor because they didn't want it.
You feel angry, but beneath that anger is a feeling of rejection. You spent an
hour cooking a nice meal for the family, it was an act of love and that love
has been thrown back at you, rejected by someone you adore. The rejection is
really a feeling of being unlovable. Why you are angry is you believe you are
unlovable. You try so hard to be an attachment parent, but in situations like
these you lose it and send your child to their room. Then you spend the next
few days berating yourself for not being like Suzie who would have calmly asked
her kid to get down on the floor and help her clean it up and probably made a
fun game of it too. This self flagellation helps you to believe that you are
unlovable.
Little situations like this are huge clues into our belief
systems, but sometimes it is really hard to make the connections on our own.
The second way I have been able to recognise my negative beliefs has been
through talking with someone else, in my case Myra. There is a tool used in
psychology called a Johari window which describes the 4 selves we each have:
• The open self
which is the me I know and the me you know,
• The blind self
which is the me you know but I don't,
• The secret self
the one I know but you don't,
• The closed self
which none of us know.
Talking through a situation like this with someone who is going
to be more than just sympathetic can be incredibly enlightening, because it can
open up the blind self to you. Asking the right questions and pointing out
connections to the same reaction in other situations works a bit like an
emotional GPS. You can pin point the exact root feeling and core belief.
Now that you have recognised the belief, the next step is to
work out where it comes from. This can sometimes be a difficult thing to
discover because our beliefs can come from a number of places, they may be
something we have picked up as adults, as teenagers, as children, as babies or
they might not even belong to us. Some beliefs are passed down through our
DNA*. To work out where this belief comes from you need to think about
when else you have felt this way.
This can be done by going back to your very first memory of that
root feeling. It might be really easy, it could be a case of thinking, "Oh
yes, I will never forget the time when I left my shoes at the park and my dad
yelled at me and made me walk all the way back there in the dark, telling me I
wasn't allowed home until I found them. I spent hours looking for them, but
they weren't there. I sat on the letterbox and I cried until my brother came
out to get me. Dad didn't talk to me for a week. I felt like he could never
love me again". When it is something so obviously traumatic it can be a
simple task to recognise where the feeling came from, but sometimes it is much
more subtle. It could be that your belief comes from more than one event, but a
number of small incidences that you have tied together to create a picture. A
hurtful word here and there, being ignored by a busy, stressed parent or even
modelling your parent’s negative belief
systems. This is where hypnosis can really help put the pieces together.
Finally, once you have recognised the belief and found the
source you can begin the healing process. As I mentioned before you can't just
think your way out of it. If you try to just stick a positive thought over the
top it is like sticking a bandaid over a festering wound. You won't be able to
see it anymore, but you sure will be able to feel it and it will just get
worse. Healing the belief requires healing that initial wound and you are most
likely going to need help with that. Again, hypnosis is a brilliant tool for
this. It allows you you to be guided back to the time of the injury and give
yourself what you needed at that time to be ok rather than what you got.
Kinesiology can also be an amazing medium for this sort of healing, especially
in conjunction with some more active forms of emotional healing.
So before you go and buy your next self help book, have a look
at which core beliefs have been stopping you from achieving success and move
into that group of people guaranteed to win out of it.
*
http://themindunleashed.org/2014/01/scientists-found-memories-may-passed-generations-dna.html
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