CHAPTER 2
Seven Limiting Beliefs
Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?
—Chico Marx, in Duck Soup
WE WATCHED IN SHOCK and disbelief as the big man fell to his hands and knees and crawled. He kept crawling slowly for the next fifty feet or so, until we had reached the end of the little elevated corridor. At that point, he was able to get back up to his feet, albeit shakily, and walk with us normally.
We were at a conference with our friend Clay and had just passed from one wing of a conference center to another, our route taking us through an enclosed walkway suspended over a grassy area some twenty feet below. The windows along the passageway’s walls provided a lovely view of the peaceful surroundings, but the windows were firmly shut. It was literally impossible to fall or tumble from the walkway, and even if one could, the greatest danger would have been a twenty-foot drop to the soft, rolling lawn beneath.
But none of that mattered to Clay, whose fear of heights was so profound that he had practically pressed his body against the carpeted walkway while we walked with him.
Seeing him so fervently glued to the floor was odd enough. What made it even odder was that we knew what Clay did for a living. A retired fighter pilot and decorated veteran, Clay was now a professional pilot for a major airline.
During the week, he flew 747s back and forth across the Atlantic.
We asked Clay how it was that he could fly massive planes filled with hundreds of passengers 30,000 feet over the ocean and experience no anxiety whatsoever, yet the prospect of walking across an enclosed walkway twenty feet above a grassy slope reduced him to a terrified puddle.
“The plane is my office,” he said. “When I step into the cockpit, I know what to do. My training takes over, and I know I’m in control. I know it doesn’t make any sense,” he added. “But that’s the best I can explain it.”
At the controls of a 747, Clay could rely on his training and skills. Outside the cockpit, he was at the mercy of a different force. Making his way across that enclosed walkway, Clay told us, he knew logically that he was perfectly safe. His eyes told him he was safe. But neither his eyes nor his knowledge could change what he believed.
Clay grew up under the same roof with a terrifying father, a man who drank heavily, often flew into rages, and beat his son at the slightest provocation. The boy lived his young life literally on the edge, never knowing when in the next instant he might be pushed violently off. At the age of fourteen he ran away to strike out on his own. He never spoke to his father again.
As an adult, Clay grew to become one of the most generous, likeable, genuinely wonderful people we have ever met, and he carved out a very successful flying career. His highly developed skills served like a flood-light, chasing away the shadows of his childhood. But in circumstances where his skills did not apply, that old familiar darkness took hold again, crystallized around the core belief he had formed in his earliest days:
I am in danger.
The Threads That Run Our Lives
With advanced methods of brain imaging, and especially functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists in the past two decades have gained an astonishing ability to peer into the physical workings of the brain and watch these things unfold in real time.
Before the advent of real-time brain scans, scientists believed that the process of cell division that creates new brain cells, called neurogenesis, slowed early in life and stopped altogether by adolescence. Likewise, the process of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change the shape and structure of its pathways in response to our experiences, was until recently thought to be a phenomenon exclusive to infancy.
Not anymore. Dramatic findings of the past two decades show that neurogenesis and neuroplasticity continue throughout the human life span. No matter what your age, your brain is perfectly capable of creating entirely new neural pathways.
When an event happens, our perception of it occurs in the form of a distinct pattern of nerve firings through specific synapses (connections). In some cases, this involves not simply the firing of electrochemical impulses through existing networks, but the growth of new synapses and new neural networks. In other words, the brain can change its wiring in response to novel information. The more powerful and emotionally charged that information is, such as happens in traumatic experiences, the more rapid and significant the development of new neural connections will be. And the more this information is repeated, the more these new nerve pathways tend to form.
Picture what happens when it rains on a mountaintop. As the rain runs down the mountainside, rivulets forge pathways through the pebbles and pine needles scattered over the ground. Every time it rains, more water runs down the hill, carving that network of pathways a little deeper each time. Eventually these pathways become a stream, and then a river. If there is a powerful thunderstorm, the cascading torrents are far more likely to form deeper gulleys as they course down the mountain.
This is much like what happened with Clay’s neural network in response to the painful experiences he had with his father. Every time he had a similar emotional and psychological response to the erratic and overbearing behavior, the yelling and beatings, a distinct pattern of nerve firings was amplified, a pattern that corresponded to the belief I am in danger.
This phenomenon has given rise to an expression in neuroscience: “Synapses that fire together, wire together.”
And this is not just a saying; it is literally what happens. Through repetition, what started as a response to a singular event becomes progressively strengthened as our synapses grow new neural tissue, laying down an ever-thicker matrix of nerve fiber. Eventually that response pattern becomes a firmly embedded neural net that represents a fixed way of perceiving the world and events around us.
To use a different analogy: picture the way houseplants shift position and turn to grow in the direction of the sun. In the same way, our synaptic networks shift and grow in the direction of our most emotionally charged thoughts and experiences. This is how we form beliefs: we literally grow them, like a dynamic topiary of the mind.
The resulting beliefs are stronger than feelings, deeper than thoughts. Beliefs are patterns of thought so ingrained in our neural networks they have become automatic, like entrenched habits of thinking. They are the bedrock of our psychological architecture.
In the course of working with thousands of people in helping them to uncover their own self-limiting beliefs, we have found that most fall into one of seven patterns, which we have come to call the seven common self-limiting beliefs:
The Seven Self-Limiting Beliefs
- I am not safe.
- I am worthless.
- I am powerless.
- I am not lovable.
- I cannot trust anyone.
- I am bad.
- I am alone.
In this chapter, we’re going to examine each of these limiting beliefs in turn, to gain as full an understanding as possible of each one, what it looks like, and the kinds of experiences that can trigger it.
I Am Not Safe
Remember David, the journalist who was terrified of driving to unfamiliar locations? The next time we got together with David in person, we explored the matter a little further to see if we could help him pinpoint where this fear came from. We asked him if there were any events early in his life that might have caused any sort of trauma.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know if this is relevant” (there it was again: that telltale this is probably nothing, really), “but something pretty weird happened when I was five.”
Shortly after his fifth birthday, David traveled to Europe with his parents and older brother. They were in London at a theater, about to go inside for what would be David’s first movie. While the parents stepped to the ticket booth to purchase their tickets, David and his brother milled around, looking at the movie posters behind their glass displays.
Suddenly an old woman appeared, bent with age, and took David by the hand. “Lost, are ye?” she crooned. “Come, come, we’ll find yer parents.” And she began leading David away down the street—away from the theater. Bewildered but unsure of what he should do, young David felt himself walking away with her.
Within moments, two London bobbies appeared. One gently led the old woman away while the other brought David back to his parents’ side. The woman was well known to them, the second bobby explained to David’s parents. She had lost her own child many years earlier, and this was not the first time she had tried to make up for it by “borrowing” someone else’s.
The whole kidnap attempt took less than sixty seconds, from the moment the woman appeared until the bobby had reunited David safely with his parents.
“In fact,” David said, “I barely have any recollection of the event itself. I dimly remember the old lady’s voice, at least I think I do. But the only reason I even know what happened is from hearing my mother retell the story. If this had had some big traumatic impact, wouldn’t my memory of it be more vivid?”
Not necessarily. Often very early events, even dramatic ones such as this, are very difficult to recall clearly. But even though he does not remember it consciously in any detail, the memory is still recorded vividly in the fabric of David’s being—along with the belief that young David’s brain formed at the time and that he has carried with him ever since:
I’m not safe.
When we emerge from the womb to be born into this world of new sights and sounds, dangers and opportunities, one of our first priorities is to learn how to keep ourselves safe. Self-preservation, the urge to protect our own safety and survival, is the strongest of all instinctual drives. This impulse starts on the most basic physiological level and, as we grow, it extends to our emotional lives and sense of identity. Eventually, as we become adults and, for many of us, have children of our own, that impulse of preservation extends to our families.
But no matter how vigilant we are, both for ourselves and for those we love, it’s inevitable that this protective net will break down at some point. We have all experienced times, whether extended periods or mere moments, when we knew we were not safe, moments when our defenses were not enough, and we felt our own existence threatened.
Whether this threat to survival is literally true or only our perception makes no difference at all in terms of the impact the experience has on us. And in situations when that perceived threat serves as an asteroid strike on our emotional ecology, it can result in a persistent belief that keeps us in a permanent state of hypervigilance, unease, and anxiety for our safety, even when there is absolutely no rational threat in our surroundings.
Janice, a single woman in her late twenties, came to see us because she was having a difficult time sleeping. Not only was it hard to get to sleep, but once she was asleep, she was easily awakened again by the slightest sound. She often imagined noises and was beset by various irrational fears. She was so exhausted she was on the verge of a collapse.
In our first visit, we explored her history, but Janice could not think of any specific event that might have led her to feel this way. We gave her our “homework,” asking her to reflect back on her childhood during the week and jot down the two or three earliest memories that occurred to her.
Sure enough, when she came back the following week for a second visit, she told us about an event she had meanwhile recalled.
One summer, when she was a child, her family had gone on a vacation, and when they returned, her parents were convinced that someone had broken into their house while they were away. No valuables were missing, and there was never any clear, conclusive proof that the break-in had in fact occurred. But the event left a deep impression on Janice that she described as a sense of violation.
It took working with the elements of the Four-Step Process for about a week until Janice began to feel sufficiently at peace that she could sleep through the night.
The thing that’s remarkable to notice here is that not only did Janice herself not experience the precipitating event, but there was considerable doubt as to whether or not the event itself ever actually happened. Still, her parents believed that it had, and Janice’s vicarious experience of her parents’ sense of violation was enough to make a lasting impact.
It’s also interesting that at first Janice was not able to put her finger on any experience from her past that might have triggered her irrational fear. The memory of her parents’ break-in experience came only when she spent some time making a concerted effort to think back.
This is quite common, as we saw with the story of Brenda.
A woman in her sixties, Brenda came to see us because she had a fear of bridges. A healthy, capable, and fully self-sufficient person, Brenda nevertheless could not drive or walk over bridges and could ride in elevators only with extreme difficulty. Rationally, she knew the elevators and bridges were safe, but her rational sense could not even come close to overriding her deep sense of panic in these situations.
We began exploring her childhood and asked if there were any significant times in her early life when she did not feel safe. Like Janice, at first Brenda could not pinpoint anything specific. Finally, after she’d spent perhaps a half-hour talking about different events of her childhood, a stunned expression came over her face and she said, “Oh, yeah….”
Brenda’s mother died when she was nine; soon afterward, her father became abusive. She remembered one day when he had gotten very drunk. They got into an argument—and he started to choke her. She managed to scream loud enough so that a passing paperboy heard her and ran to get help from her neighbors, who came and stopped the man from seriously hurting her.
“If they hadn’t come,” she said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he would have killed me.”
When she turned thirteen, Brenda ran away from home to get away from her dad. After a few months of living on her own, she called a priest, just to have someone to talk to. He promised to keep her confidence, so she told him where she was staying. But the priest had lied to her: he immediately told the police, who came and forcibly took her back to her father.
No wonder Brenda felt unsafe! And yet, incredibly, she had brushed these memories out of her conscious mind. It’s not that she had literally forgotten them. She knew they had happened—but for years, she had simply avoided thinking about them. This is far more common than one might suspect.
As an adult, Brenda had learned how to take care of herself and keep herself safe—but emotionally the impact from those events was still in there, creating a wave of inescapable panic when faced with anything in her environment she could not control, even a little footbridge.
For some, this I’m not safe belief shows up in the form of very specific fears, such as David’s anxiety about unknown locations, Janice’s fear of nighttime noises, or Brenda’s fear of bridges. For others, it exists as a general sense of anxiety, nervousness, or insecurity. It can lead us to feel hopeless, afraid to try new things, afraid to make any efforts to change our lives for the better.
Here are some of the forms this belief can take:
I can’t protect myself.
I am in danger.
Everything around me is dangerous.
There is no place safe for me.
I’m vulnerable.
It’s not okay to show my emotions.
I’ve been abandoned.
Take a moment to reflect on whatever issues are happening in your life today, and see if any of these statements resonate with you.
I Am Worthless
Some years ago, we gave a public presentation on the methods of the Four-Step Process. When it came time to do a demonstration of some of the bioelectric clearing techniques (we’ll learn these in chapter 4), we asked for a volunteer from the audience. A woman came up from the third row and introduced herself: her name was Jeanne, and she was an attorney.
We asked Jeanne to choose an issue to work on but to keep it to herself. She didn’t have to think: without blinking an eye she said, “I’ve got it.” She did not say out loud what it was.
We demonstrated several elements of the Four-Step Process. Because we knew nothing about her past negative experiences or the particular self-limiting beliefs she was wrestling with presently, we obviously could not be at all specific in the identify step. We simply asked her to think about whatever it was she was dealing with and then went on with the rest of the process.
After the demonstration was over, Jeanne returned to her seat and we did not see her again—until she appeared at our office a year later, saying she wanted to tell us what had happened in the months since that event.
Even after she explained who she was, we almost did not recognize her.
She told us that she had grown up with a father who constantly criticized her, and (although she had never realized this before) this had created in her an unshakable sense that she was worthless and incapable. As an adult, she married a man who continued in a similar pattern, to the point where he was verbally abusive and eventually physically abusive as well.
“When you talked about the kinds of self-limiting beliefs we sometimes have,” she told us, “you mentioned that one of those beliefs was I’m not worthy. That clicked for me. My husband had been treating me horribly—and because of my own feelings of worthlessness, I had been just letting him do it.”
But all that had stopped the day Jeanne had been part of our demonstration.
“That day changed my life,” she said. “After that, I stopped taking it. In fact, I filed for divorce. Today, he is out of my life. I’ve realized that I’m worth something, and nobody is going to treat me like I’m not—not even myself.”
Which brings us to the issue Jeanne had been wrestling with: her weight.
Years earlier, as a way of shielding herself from the abuse her husband was dishing out, she had started taking on some extra weight. Quite a bit of extra weight. In the year since we’d met her, Jeanne had dropped nearly one hundred pounds. Which was why we almost didn’t recognize her at first.
In the months that followed, she went on to lose another fifty. Today Jeanne runs a business devoted to nutrition and personal health, through which she helps hundreds of women regain their own sense of self-worth.
Self-worth is a fragile thing. At birth, we have virtually no awareness of ourselves as autonomous individuals. Fully engaged in soaking up and learning from the world around us, we don’t even realize that there is such a thing as “me.” As our sense of identity emerges and develops, we begin establishing a healthy feel for our own worth as self-determining beings in the world. But in those early years, it doesn’t take much to deal that sense a significant blow.
We all have the experience of falling short in our efforts. But sometimes the experience of not measuring up to expectations (ours or others’), or of being told that we are not measuring up, has the impact of an asteroid strike on our consciousness. The belief we form out of that bitter experience is that we are inadequate; we are worthless; we are a failure.
Failing is a normal part of life. In the course of learning to walk, one of our earliest achievements, we fall down repeatedly, and the same holds true for pretty much every other accomplishment in our lives. We learn by trying, failing, correcting, and trying again. But there is a world of difference between knowing that I failed at a specific task and concluding that I am a failure.
People with this belief may go through life with an undercurrent of anxiety that completely contradicts their outward sense of self-assurance, a deep sense that, despite their apparent talents, skills, and accomplishments, they are secretly empty and hollow, that their supposed gifts are all somehow fake. “I’m an imposter,” they feel, “a fraud. If they really knew who I am, they’d fire me.”
A minister by profession, Richard was a genuinely inspirational speaker. Funny, engaging, and uplifting, he exuded the self-confidence of someone who is completely comfortable in front of a group.
“If his congregation only knew the truth!” his wife told us the day they came to see us together. The truth was that Richard worried incessantly all through the week leading up to every sermon, and by Sunday morning he would be a wreck.
“He sounds fine and looks fine,” his wife added, “and everyone loves the sermons. But inside, he’s miserable.”
If there were an Oscar for Best Performance by Clergy, Richard would have won it. Even worse than the anxiety was the gnawing sense that he was a fraud.
When Richard came to our offices, we helped him identify the self-limiting belief that was getting in his way. Once we began talking about his past and letting him reminisce on the events of his childhood, it did not take long.
One day, when Richard was just eight years old, a teacher called on him to stand up and give a brief report to the rest of the class about a chapter in a book they were all to have read over the week.
Richard rose, his stomach in knots, turned slowly to face the class, and froze. He was tongue-tied.
“To this day,” he told us, “I have no idea why I couldn’t describe that chapter. I’d read it, and enjoyed it. But all of a sudden, facing all those kids, I just went blank.”
As Richard recalls it, the teacher was quite compassionate, and after it became clear that Richard was not going to stand and deliver, she gently told him he could sit down again and called on another student. But Richard clearly remembered the feeling as he looked around the room, heard the snickers, and saw the faces making fun of him. He was mortified.
He had not put it into words, but the feeling he had in that moment was vivid: “What an idiot. What a jerk. I know the material—but I can’t even talk!”
This was the only time Richard could recall when he froze and was unable to speak. After that, he went out of his way to push himself to speak, every time he was called upon. He even rehearsed lines in his head beforehand and in time became quite eloquent. But even though he never let it show, that feeling of having been embarrassed in front of the whole class never went away. I am a failure, his internal voice kept telling him, even as he developed into an accomplished speaker.
Sitting with Richard as he told us his story, we took him through the Four-Step Process.
A week later his wife called us to tell us how dramatically he had changed. After clearing this negative belief and installing a positive belief in its place, she said, Richard had become a different person. He was giving his sermons as flawlessly as ever, only now his joy was genuine.
“You’re the only ones I can really tell,” she added. “Nobody else knew what he was going through. No one else saw the torment, week after week, for years on end. I just wanted to thank you and tell you that this isn’t just an improvement—it’s an utter transformation.”
This I am worthless belief often stems from growing up in an environment of being criticized or evaluated negatively, as was the case with Jeanne, or from incidents where we were put on the spot and embarrassed, as was the case with Richard. Whatever the particulars of the event or original circumstances, we begin with a singular situation and then generalize that to become a blanket statement about ourselves, our abilities, or our value as a human being.
At its extreme, this conviction of one’s own worthlessness can lead to self-destructive or hopeless thoughts, including suicide, the ultimate expression of a lack of self-worth. More commonly, it manifests as a nagging sense of inadequacy. People with the I am worthless belief often have difficulty asserting themselves in any situation, whether that means asking for a raise or asking for a date.
Another common expression of this belief is “I’m no good at…”—and you can fill in the blank with practically anything. I’m no good at math. I’m no good at mechanical things. I’m not very good at social situations. I don’t know how to talk to the opposite sex. I can’t dance. I can’t sing.
The self-limiting variations are endless. In most cases they are not based on anything factual at all: most people who assert that “I’m no good at math” are in fact no worse in their basic mathematical capabilities than their peers, and the same goes for the rest of the common self-condemnation assertions.
Unfortunately, while this may often be so, it does not necessarily remain so. Like all self-limiting beliefs, the I’m no good at…belief can over time become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The person who is convinced he cannot carry a tune will not try, and the more he doesn’t sing, the less chance he has of developing that ability. Keep telling yourself that you’re no good in social situations, and in time it will become the truth.
The I am a failure version of this belief involves the fear of success as well as the fear of failure. These are two sides of the same coin. After all, if I believe I am a failure, then what would happen if I succeeded at something? Then I would be expected to succeed again in that area—and then it would be even more painful when I eventually failed, which I’d be certain to do, right? So better not to succeed in the first place: don’t do anything that would make me stand out or get noticed.
The attitude is: Don’t hold your head too far above the crowd. Don’t stand out, don’t excel, don’t draw undue attention to yourself. Don’t rock the boat.
Here are just some of the infinite variations on the theme of this belief:
I am not worthy (of success, happiness, and so forth).
I am a fraud.
I will never be successful.
I cannot succeed, no matter what.
I have to be perfect.
I am inadequate.
I am unimportant.
I am insignificant.
I am incompetent.
I am not good enough.
I am not smart enough.
I am not attractive enough.
I am no good at math (at sports, at parties, at fixing things, at cooking, at sex, and so forth).
I am useless.
I am a disappointment.
Take a moment and see if any of these statements resonate with you.
I Am Powerless
When Carmen came to see us, she was wrestling with a difficult and urgent issue. She had negotiated a divorce settlement, and it was now time to either sign the agreement or else go to court—but she couldn’t do either one.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she told us. “I just…I just can’t make a decision. What if it’s the wrong one?”
Carmen was so paralyzed with fear that she was now on the verge of completely losing the settlement she had so painstakingly worked out and being forced to go back to square one, which would have been a disaster.
As we helped her explore her history, she soon discovered what this paralyzing fear was and where it came from.
When she was a young girl, Carmen and her brother lived with their mother. Although the brother was a year younger than Carmen, he was bigger and stronger. Often, without provocation or warning, he would punch her or even beat her up. Struggling to keep the household afloat, her mother had a heavy work schedule and was seldom around to protect her.
Not surprisingly, Carmen formed a limiting belief that said, “I am not strong enough to take care of myself.”
Fast-forward to present times. Despite a college education and the conscious awareness that she was a grown-up now and strong enough to take care of herself and fight for her rights, that voice from deep inside continued whispering its constant message:
I am powerless.
As a result, she could not muster the inner strength to see this divorce through to its conclusion.
We all seek to maintain a basic level of control over what happens in our lives. This is part of growing up, part of becoming an adult. When we feel powerful, we believe that we can accomplish anything we set our minds to, and the fact that we believe this galvanizes our minds and our bodies to help us do just that.
Unfortunately, the same is true of our self-limiting beliefs. To the extent that we come to believe we have no control over events, we tend to give up that control. When we believe we are powerless, we give away our power.
This belief is similar in a way to the belief that I am worthless. The difference is that people with the I am powerless belief do not see themselves as worthless—they just don’t see themselves as having the ability to assert or exercise their worthiness in a way that will have any impact.
Almost as far back as he could remember, Michael had always been reserved and shy. In grade school, he was the last one chosen for the team, and he seldom raised his hand in class, even when he knew the answer to the teacher’s question.
This pattern persisted even after Michael reached adulthood. He never asked for a raise at work, or applied for promotions, or in any way took initiative to be recognized, even though he consistently received good evaluations. Michael never had the experience of self-confidence, of feeling deserving of praise, promotion, or success. He had resigned himself to a life of mediocrity.
No one was more amazed and delighted than Michael when Janet, a bright and lovely woman he met in his community, fell in love with him. They dated for several years and then married. Within a year, his delight turned to despair as he realized that their young marriage was starting to fail. They sought help and were referred to us.
“When we were first dating,” Janet told us, “Michael was not only charming and funny, he was also confident, even decisive. But once we tied the knot, he started to change, and a whole different Michael emerged, one with no ambition and no sense of self. I hate to sound blunt or unfeeling, but the man I married has turned into a wimp!”
It was clear that she loved him, and that she wanted their marriage to work as much as he did. But she could feel herself losing her sense of respect for Michael and, horror of horrors, the love she had felt for him as well.
When Michael was eight years old, his parents moved from Arkansas to California. At school, Michael was teased because he “dressed funny” and spoke with a “funny accent.” Of the various nicknames the other kids had for him, eventually the name “Okie” stuck. When Michael protested and told them he was from Arkansas, not Oklahoma, it persisted. Even after months had passed and he was no longer the new kid in school, he was still mocked and made the butt of jokes.
Unfortunately, Michael’s parents had their hands full—way too full to pay much attention to Michael’s complaints about teasing. The oldest brother, Tommie, was getting into serious trouble at school, including several acts of vandalism that got him suspended twice in the first six months they were there. And as bad luck would have it, Michael’s youngest sibling, a sister named Lizzie, fell ill and was in and out of the hospital throughout that fall and winter. Although Michael didn’t realize how serious it was at the time, many years later he learned that Lizzie had nearly died that winter, and that it was touch and go for weeks. On top of that, both parents also worked and had the added challenge of adjusting to their new jobs in California.
Within this series of minor and major disasters, Michael’s dilemma completely fell off the family’s radar screen. He knew his parents loved him, and they were never mean to him, or yelled at him, or treated him badly—they just didn’t seem to see him.
“I remember sitting around the dinner table,” he told us, “and I would ask my mom or dad to pass the potatoes, and nothing would happen. It was like I wasn’t even there—like I was invisible.”
At the age of eight, Michael had not yet formed the ability to step outside his own perspective and grasp how things looked and felt from his parents’ point of view. He had no idea how serious Lizzie’s illness was, no clear sense of how badly Tommie was acting out, and no concept at all of the adult pressures of adapting to a new job in a different state. And he had no one he could talk to about any of this, even if he had been able to articulate it. All he could do was come to his own conclusions, based on his experience.
Michael concluded that he just didn’t matter—that he had no real ability to affect his circumstances or make a difference. That he was powerless. These beliefs were never verbalized or clearly thought out—but they were felt, and those emotional impressions inscribed that negative belief onto his being.
No wonder he never volunteered in class. Why bother? Either he would be laughed at because he gave the wrong answer, or he would give the right answer and still be laughed at. And nobody would do anything about it. And he carried this belief into adulthood, deeply fearing that his superiors would ridicule him for asking for a raise or a promotion.
When he first met Janet, the excitement of a new relationship stirred up so much positive emotion that it was able to quell that old negative program—at least for a while. But once they were married, now Janet was family, and there was a deep-seated belief that said, “My family doesn’t see me, I am invisible around them.” Sure enough, he soon reverted to his habitual I am powerless mode of operation.
Both Michael and Janet were fascinated as we explained this to them, and they both immediately grasped what had happened. Janet, as it turned out, had some issues and negative beliefs of her own that had also fed the problem (no surprise there—these situations rarely involve self-limiting beliefs on only one side of the equation!), and we worked with both of them for several sessions over the next few weeks.
However, Michael’s demeanor transformed in that very first session. When they stood up to leave that day, he seemed to have gained several inches in stature and a distinctly firmer handshake. Looking us right in the eye, he said, “Thanks for seeing me.” The moment the words left his lips, he heard his own unintended double meaning and grinned. The look Janet gave him in that moment was worth the price of admission. It was a look of adoring love together with an expression that said, “Oh, there you are!”
Those of us who have this belief in our own powerlessness often become withdrawn and learn to avoid social situations. To the degree that we act this way, the people around us can pick up our subtle cues and start treating us the way we expect to be treated. People start ignoring your opinions and thoughts, treating you as if you don’t exist. It’s not that they don’t like you; they just don’t think about you. Like Michael, you start to become invisible.
Here are just a few of the many ways this belief can express itself:
I am not in control.
I am helpless.
I am weak.
I don’t matter.
I am invisible.
I cannot stand up for myself.
I am trapped.
Take a moment and see if any of these statements resonate with you.
I Am Not Lovable
“We’re worried about Heather. It’s been three weeks now—is there any way you can fit her into your schedule right away?”
Heather’s parents were at their wits’ end. Twenty-three years old, Heather was an intelligent, ambitious college graduate with a bright future. One day, without any warning or prior signs of trouble, her boyfriend of four years called to tell her he didn’t want to see her anymore and that he had been secretly seeing someone else for a few weeks already—and he broke up with her right then and there, over the telephone.
Heather did not simply get upset—she completely fell apart. Day after day, she called the young man’s phone in a desperate effort to rehabilitate the relationship. After he stopped taking her calls, she became despondent. Her parents became so concerned by her deepening desperation that they brought Heather in to our office.
With Heather, the immediate cause of her distress seemed quite obvious. But was it? Of course, when you discover your boyfriend or girlfriend has been unfaithful, it’s normal to be upset, hurt, and angry. But her response was extreme. She wasn’t simply upset, hurt, or angry. She was utterly shattered. Why? Because the event resonated with something deeper, something that was already present in Heather beforehand. It wasn’t simply the boyfriend’s cheating that paralyzed Heather. The betrayal stirred up feelings surrounding a belief about herself that Heather had already formed many years earlier.
When we first spoke with Heather and her parents, none of them could imagine what traumatic events might have happened to have so shaken her belief in her own self-worth and lovability. By all their accounts, she had led a distinctly happy childhood. Both parents loved her very much and did not hesitate to express it.
However, as we talked about her early years, two interesting facts emerged. First, when Heather was very young both her parents worked, and her father especially worked an extremely brutal schedule. As a result, while she certainly felt loved by him, she rarely saw him.
And then there was the second biographical fact: when Heather was five years old, her grandfather died.
Heather had been utterly devoted to her granddad, had loved him like a second father. It might be more accurate to say she had loved him like a father, period—since she hardly ever saw her actual father. And when her grandfather passed away, the one person who consistently made Heather feel that there was someone always there who loved her suddenly vanished.
After one session, Heather realized that the phone call from her boyfriend had awakened a deep sense she had had all her life but had learned to bury. It wasn’t just that she no longer felt loved; she felt she was unlovable. Her boyfriend’s rejection had confirmed a deeply held belief that, for her, love would inevitably end in disappearance.
In the same way that I am safe gives us a secure foundation for growing and exploring our world, I am loved provides an emotional bedrock for our growth as people. Humans have an innate craving to be loved, first by our parents, and then by our friends and significant others. When this foundation is shaken, it can have a devastating impact, and this can show up in surprising ways.
When Ruby came to see us with her husband, Joe, they were both in their eighties and had been married for more than a half century. However, a few years before this, Ruby had learned that many years earlier, Joe had carried on an affair with another woman that had lasted the better part of a decade.
The affair had now been over for a long time; in fact, Ruby only learned about the affair after the woman had died. Joe had admitted the truth and apologized to her repeatedly. He could not explain why he had done what he did, except to say he always loved Ruby and never intended to divorce or leave her.
As much as she wanted to, Ruby could not find her way to forgive and let go. She experienced bouts of anger and viciousness that, while they never got physical, nevertheless were frightening to Joe, who had become weak and unable to care for himself and physically depended on Ruby. He was beginning to genuinely fear for his safety.
“I want to let go,” Ruby told us, “but I can’t. It’s almost like I am possessed. Anything that even vaguely reminds me of Joe’s betrayal—even the mention of harmless words like beauty, attraction, or secret—will set me off.”
After a year of watching her struggle unsuccessfully to let go and forgive her husband, Ruby’s children encouraged her to come to our office.
Outwardly, Ruby was angry—but underneath that fury there lay a very different emotional conflict.
Ruby grew up with a mother who was harsh and critical, frequently disapproving of Ruby’s choices in clothes, in friends, in anything and everything she did. She could not recall even once being praised for making a good decision. This had resulted in a deep belief that she was not lovable.
One of Ruby’s strongest memories was of something that happened with her father when she was in eighth grade. A boy from her class walked her home from school one day—and when she got home, her father exploded at her.
“Boys only want one thing!” he said, and he told her she was never to walk home with that boy or any other boy.
For Ruby, this only reinforced her belief that she was not lovable: not only did her mother dislike every choice she made, but now her father had made it clear that no boy would ever love her for who she was.
As an adult, Ruby had gotten past that belief and had lived with Joe happily for decades. But when she learned of his past affair, it triggered that old, smoldering belief. It had never really gone away, only lain in waiting for the right evidence to come along and confirm its toxic message.
The emotional logic went something like this: The fact that Joe was cheating on me behind my back confirms that I am not lovable, and never was. For a while there, I thought I was, but I was wrong—and if he persists in saying he loves me now, then he must be lying.
The I am not lovable belief most often goes back to our parents or primary caretakers. It can stem from having had the sense that one or both parents loved one sibling more than the other. It may be that one or both parents was particularly cold, aloof, or undemonstrative, or simply not available.
Such situations and experiences may have nothing to do with the reality of the parents’ love for the child. Even if your parents were wonderful, loving, encouraging, and supportive, there may easily have been incidents when you perceived as them withdrawing or withholding their love and support for you. They may have been burdened by a heavy work schedule or distracted by a health issue. Sometimes the most innocent circumstances can be misperceived by a child as abandonment—as we learned from Jack’s story.
“I’ve pushed away every woman I’ve ever gotten close to,” Jack told us in his first visit, “and if I can’t figure out how to change, I’m about to lose my relationship with Greta—and she’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Jack seemed completely calm and self-assured on the outside but, as we soon learned, inside he was a seething mass of anxiety.
As much as he loved Greta, and as much as she loved him, he felt she was not attentive enough. The constant demands he put on her to demonstrate her affection for him was starting to drive her crazy.
“I know it’s extreme,” he said, “and I know I’m obsessive about it. It’s like I need her to be always telling me and showing me she cares about me. I know I’m just pushing her away, but I don’t know how to stop.”
As Jack described his childhood, a fascinating detail emerged.
When Jack was six, his mother had been hospitalized for several months. This was in the fall and happened to coincide with Jack’s going to first grade, his first time in school. Although he had no conscious memory of this event, his teacher reported to his father that he was badly teased on his first day and that she had found him crying in the schoolyard.
All in all, Jack had very fond memories of his childhood and reported that it had been a generally happy home environment. But for that brief time, at a juncture in his young life when he sorely needed his mother’s love, she wasn’t there—and his young brain interpreted that experience as having somehow been his fault.
Although Jack never put it in these words, the emotional essence of the fog of distress that clouded his life was clear: I am not lovable.
In a later session, Jack recalled another memory that shed even more light on his situation.
One day, during the summer before first grade, Jack and his dad had secretly agreed to slip out of the house that Saturday to go buy his mother a birthday present, as her birthday was coming up that August. When that Saturday arrived, his dad absent-mindedly left the house alone.
Jack heard the car pulling out of the driveway and ran to the front door, screaming, “Wait! Wait!”—but his dad didn’t hear him and drove off, not realizing his son was calling after him.
“I distinctly remember him driving off,” Jack told us, “and me bursting into tears. My mom wanted to know what was wrong—but I couldn’t tell her, because it was about getting a present for her.”
Jack said it was one of his strongest early childhood memories. And this event occurred just weeks before his mother went into the hospital, depriving Jack of the love he needed as he “left home” for the first time to brave first grade.
As an adult, Jack could not shake the feeling that he was unloved and unlovable—and no matter how much validation and affection he got from the woman he was with, it was never enough to gainsay that deep belief.
With the help of the Four-Step Process, Heather, Ruby, and Jack were all able to surmount their difficulties.
Heather transformed her belief in herself as a lovable, capable person who was deserving of a truly healthy and loving relationship. When Heather’s boyfriend (now ex-) eventually called to apologize and make up, Heather remained resolute and declined to get back together. She realized that he was not ready for the kind of relationship she wanted. She was able to set a clear boundary and move on with her life in a healthy way, feeling strong, competent, and confident about herself and her future.
For Ruby, it took longer, but the same thing happened. After nearly a month of gradual improvement, she reached the point where she could say the word affair herself without getting angry or crying.
For Jack, things were a little tougher. By the time he came to see us, Greta had just about had all she could take of his demanding pattern, and he was not able to salvage that relationship. However, once he was out from under that oppressive sense of his own unlovability, he was eventually able to enter a new relationship in a far healthier, more relaxed way, and he and his new girlfriend have been quite happy together.
The key point is that Heather knew she was pining beyond the point of reason; Ruby knew that she should forgive Joe and move on; Jack knew he was suffocating Greta with his incessant demands. But simply knowing these things was not enough to change them.
Variations of this belief include:
I don’t deserve love.
I have no identity.
I do not deserve to have a loving relationship.
I should expect to be betrayed.
Take a moment and see if any of these statements resonate with you.
I Cannot Trust Anyone
“I don’t see what I can really do to change this,” said Tom. “I’m under a lot of stress at work.” He and his wife Claire were in our office because they were at an impasse in their marriage. Claire felt he had grown distant; he felt she was not understanding enough about the stress he was under.
The tension was visible the moment they entered the office. It was clear that they cared for each other, but Tom’s body language was guarded, and there was a sense that his warmth was forced and artificial.
They got right to the point. Claire wanted to have children, and Tom was not sure they were ready for that step. As a consequence, Claire did not want to use birth control—and this had made Tom leery about sexual intimacy. Even beyond the issue of sex per se, Claire felt he was withholding affection and attention, that he was withdrawing from her in general—and she was starting to feel resentful.
“I don’t know what to say,” Tom countered. “When I get home at the end of the day, I feel tense and wiped out. I’m trying my best to relax, but it’s got me stressed out.”
We began exploring both their childhoods, and within minutes the conversation gravitated specifically to Tom’s history. He explained that he grew up in an emotionally cold environment, with a father who was especially aloof. When he was quite young, his parents divorced and his father moved away.
In a sense, Tom was traumatized by this separation, and his feeling of being abandoned by his father imprinted on him a fear of getting close. As an adult, he feared intimacy because he was afraid that he would lose it. After all, he had lost his father.
The truth was, his issues had nothing to do with stress at work; they stemmed from his fear of getting close to those he loved. His logical mind was using their differing views over whether to have more children as the reason for the growing distance between them—but it had nothing to do with children, and nothing to do with sex. What it had to do with was the fact that Tom was afraid that if he got close to Claire, he would lose her.
Tom’s belief was “The people I love will leave.” Ironically, he was well on his way to creating that very outcome. As so often happens, Tom’s self-limiting belief was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fortunately, Tom and Claire genuinely cared for each other and wanted to work this out. And with the help of the Four-Step Process, they did. Once Tom’s anxiety and fear of intimacy lifted, the two were able to reestablish their strong connection.
As we are first growing and learning our way through life, trust is the glue that holds our world together. We learn to walk, talk, and interact with our environment and with other people within a framework that depends on trust. If we could not trust our senses, our own judgment, our environment, and the people around us, then we would have no solid foundation to build upon, and life would be completely unpredictable and terrifying.
It’s no surprise, then, that when our sense of trust is violated or shaken, it can threaten the basis of our very existence—or feel like it does.
People with the belief I cannot trust anyone often feel they are always on guard, suspicious, or ill at ease. Because of the sense that they cannot trust anyone, it’s very difficult for them to feel comfortable handing over the controls to others. They may be backseat drivers, micromanagers, or control freaks who drive those around them nuts. Or, they may have an equally hard time trusting themselves, and as a consequence, never let themselves fully participate in the fun unfolding around them. They may feel anxious about anything unpredictable or spontaneous, or seem not quite present in their own bodies, keeping themselves at a remove, like Tom.
There are two typical sources for this belief. First, experience with the key authority figures in our early lives, especially our parents. And second, the small, incremental disappointments that can happen in life. For those who have a more solid, healthier foundation, these disappointments slide off and do no lasting damage. For others who are more vulnerable, they can stick and create an ongoing problem, adding to the neural network that says, I cannot trust.
The betrayal doesn’t have to be big. Of course, huge and obviously traumatic betrayals—being molested at the hands of a parent or trusted relative, a friend who spreads lies about you to gain status among schoolmates—clearly have an enormous impact. But even small disappointments and perceived betrayals can create a lingering sense of violated trust. The missed recital, ball game, or birthday party, the forgotten Christmas present.
Screenwriter Nora Ephron captures this beautifully in the film My Blue Heaven, in a scene where gangster-turned-federal-witness Vinnie Antonelli (played by Steve Martin) talks about what it’s like for a kid to experience disappointment.
I know how it feels to be disappointed. When I was seven years old—no! eight—all I wanted for Christmas was a new, red bicycle. My favorite uncle, Uncle Alfresco, swore to me that he would buy me that bicycle. I counted the days till Christmas. Five o’clock, Christmas morning: I run downstairs and look under the tree. What do I find? Uncle Alfresco: dead. On the floor. Shot through the back of the head. Plus: no bicycle. It was a disappointing Christmas on many levels.
In reality, there may have been very good reasons behind what we perceived as the betrayal or abandonment. Dad may have been unable to get to our recital or ball game because the car broke down, or because he was working hard to provide for the family and had to stay late at the office. Mom may have found they just didn’t have the money to buy the promised toy. Hey, Uncle Alfresco couldn’t get Vinnie the bike: he’d been shot in the head.
But whatever the external reality or mitigating circumstances, our own perception is that someone we trusted has let us down—and that has set up a protective interference pattern in our belief system that says the world is not a place to be trusted.
This is similar in some ways to the belief, I am not safe. The main difference between these two is that the issue of safety involves more one’s sense of physical and emotional security, while trust has more to do with issues around our sense of connection with human beings, both others and ourselves. Safety, in other words, pertains to our sense of the world around us, while trust pertains more to our sense of the people of the world—in technical terms, external locus of control versus internal locus of control.
Here are a few variations of this belief; take a moment and see if any of these resonate with you:
I can’t believe what anyone tells me.
I don’t trust anyone in authority.
I am not a trusting person.
I am not a trustworthy person.
I can’t be trusted.
I can’t trust myself.
I never make good choices.
I’m bad luck.
I can’t trust my judgment.
I Am Bad
Claudia’s life was a puzzle. An extremely bright, talented person with a keen command of language and razor sense of humor, she had established quite a reputation as a web designer. Unfortunately, she couldn’t seem to keep her best clients long enough to build profitable, long-term professional relationships.
“I don’t know why I do it,” she told us. “I don’t even know how I do it! Apparently, I am a black belt master martial artist when it comes to self-sabotage.”
She told us about her last three big clients and how, despite the fact that she got along fabulously well with them and they were all very happy with her work, she had somehow managed to alienate them or lose their trust to the point where, one by one, they had all dropped her and sought out other designers.
“Honestly, I’m good at what I do,” she said. “And I could be making a very decent living at it. If I would just stop getting in my own way.”
When we asked Claudia about her childhood, we got an earful.
Claudia and her younger sister grew up with their divorced mother and saw their father (who lived some distance away) only quite rarely. We soon understood how it was that Claudia had developed such a sharp wit and gift with language: she had grown up sparring with a mother who was intensely critical and quite harsh, even brutal, in the way she expressed it. Claudia had learned early on how to think on her feet.
However, no matter how good she had become at verbally deflecting them, the criticisms still stung. Jean, as Claudia called her (she could not bring herself to call the woman “my mother,” even after all these years), routinely told Claudia she was a slut, a bad influence on her little sister, a wise-ass, self-centered, and lazy.
The truly whopping, dinosaur-killing asteroid came when Claudia was fourteen.
“One day,” she told us, “I came home from school, and the apartment was empty. I mean, empty. Jean wasn’t there, and neither was my sister Chloe. But that’s not all. All our stuff was gone. Even the furniture.”
While Claudia had been at school, her mother had literally moved out, taking Chloe with her.
Fortunately Claudia had a relative who lived nearby and was able to move in with her for a few weeks while they managed to track Jean down.
“She could run,” Claudia quipped to us, “but she couldn’t hide. I moved back in with her—but only until the day I turned sixteen. I’ve been out of there ever since.”
It was no mystery why Claudia kept losing clients. Logically, she knew she was a good designer and a valuable, reliable resource to her clients. But deep inside, she had bought hook, line, and sinker into the charge that she was a bad person, lazy, slothful, selfish, and of no use to anyone. There was a part of Claudia that kept expecting her clients to pull up and move away suddenly—and when they didn’t, she unconsciously sabotaged the relationship until they did.
There’s hardly a child alive who hasn’t been told that he or she has been “bad” by someone he or she trusts and respects. For a young child, still struggling to carve a sense of identity out of the welter of everyday experiences, simply being told “No!” or “Don’t do that!” can be received as the message, You are wrong! You are bad! That’s normal; it happens to all of us. For some, though, the accusation sticks.
Like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, the person with this self-limiting belief wears a badge of condemnation that colors every experience she has.
The desire for our parents’ and others’ approval is innate in every one of us. Children naturally want to please their parents, and virtually every parent, at least at times, uses this vulnerability as a way to control the child’s behavior. To an extent, this is normal and productive, both in keeping the child safe from harm and in helping her learn to make crucial distinctions in life. There is a tendency in some families, though, to overdo this, taking it past the point of instruction and into the realm of condemnation.
For example, there is a difference between embarrassment and shame. Embarrassment is about a specific action of ours that has brought us unwanted attention. Shame is unwanted attention brought to us for who we are as a person, not just for something we’ve done.
The child spills a glass of milk at the table and we say, “What’s the matter with you?! How many times have I told you to be careful?” These are questions, of course, that have no answers, and the child is left with no way to respond—that is, unless we provide one.
In that same scenario, imagine the parent comes out with the same scolding, but then says, “Okay…look, go get some paper towels from the kitchen and just wipe it up, and it’ll be okay.”
The scolding still hurts, but now it’s more embarrassment than genuine shame, and now the child has some capacity to atone, to redress the error through positive action. In other words, he is given a pathway to separate the clumsy deed from himself: he may have done something wrong, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong.
Young children are especially prone to drawing this kind of self-indicting conclusion. As parents, one way to ensure that we don’t contribute to this belief in our kids is to take care not to level accusations that broadly generalize. Statements that start out “Why do you always…,” or “Every time you…,” or “Why can’t you ever…” create blanket statements of condemnation that are nearly impossible to defend against.
This unfortunate power to condemn is not exclusive to parents. In any relationship where one person trusts or cares about the opinions of the other, this dynamic can hold sway. Those same sweeping statements can just as easily be aimed from teacher to student, older sibling to younger, or spouse to spouse.
Guilt seeks punishment, and those with this self-limiting belief tend—typically without consciously realizing it—to do things that are not good for them or that are contrary to their intended goals and consciously held beliefs. In other words, as Claudia so accurately put it, to become self-sabotaging.
The story of Stefanie, the successful executive whom we met in the introduction and again in chapter 1, is a good example of this belief. When her parents scolded her for taking a quarter from her aunt, without consciously realizing it or putting it into words, the seven-year-old Stefanie had formed a belief about herself that went something like this:
I am shameful and bad.
As an adult, that lingering fog of self-recrimination had expressed itself this way:
I am not deserving nor capable of having success.
And sure enough, she had made choices and taken actions that, over time, aligned perfectly with that belief.
Here are just a few of the many variations of this belief:
I am wrong.
I am no good.
I am selfish and think only of myself.
I am guilty.
I should be ashamed of myself.
There is something wrong with me.
I have disappointed myself, let myself down.
I’m terrible.
I’m shameful.
I’m sinful.
I cause misfortune.
I deserve only bad things.
I should have known better.
I Am Alone
One day a man in his forties showed up in our office and asked for an appointment. He did not want to fill out any intake forms, and he gave his name only as “Gabe X.” He insisted on paying for the appointment in cash.
Gabe made a striking impression. Tanned and obviously quite fit, he moved like an Olympic athlete. He spoke with precision but in a near monotone, and his face betrayed a nearly total lack of expression. The clinical term is that he was without affect: more like a robot than a man.
Right away, he told us he’d been to see a number of therapists and (like Stefanie) had done quite a bit of reading on mood issues. Nothing had helped.
Gabe’s life story was shocking. He never knew his father; his mother was a drug addict and abandoned him early on. He grew up with a distant relative who dealt drugs and was part of a gang. There were always guns lying around the house. One day, when Gabe was nine, he picked up a gun out of curiosity and it accidentally went off, killing another kid who happened to be there.
As an adult, Gabe had landed in the military in Special Forces and had shipped off to the hottest war zones, where he had served the country for some years as a sniper. Now he was retired from the service, trying to carve out a career in business and a life of sanity for himself.
And then he told us the problem he was wresting with.
“I feel like I have no soul,” he said.
Gabe’s problem went beyond common clinical terms such as depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress. The phrase existential despair perhaps comes closest. In the simplest terms, Gabe felt cut off from life.
To look at Gabe’s dilemma from a slightly different angle, consider the story of Nathan.
Nathan came to us because his marriage of fifty years was in trouble. He loved his wife, Judith, but was too depressed to relate to her. She was quite outgoing and social, while he was more introverted, and he was irritated at her efforts to pull him out into her social scenes. For this and many other little things, he’d get angry at her, yell at her, and then feel terrible afterward.
Before even going to Nathan’s history, we began talking about his present life. A retired engineer, he no longer needed to work. What did he do with his time?
“I don’t know,” he said with a sigh. “I’ve got a few hobbies and things I do. I guess you’d say, things I distract myself with. Honestly, I’m not really sure what to do with my life.” He seemed a bit depressed and moody.
Once we started talking about his history, we found out why.
Twenty years earlier, Nathan had been out on an errand with his teenage daughter, Janie, who had recently gotten her driver’s license. Janie was behind the wheel. As they passed through a quiet intersection just blocks from their home, a drunk driver careened through the light and rammed into their car broadside at sixty miles per hour. Janie’s rib cage was crushed and she couldn’t breathe, but they were both trapped so tightly in the wreckage that neither of them could move. Waiting helplessly for assistance to arrive, Nathan could do nothing but sit and watch his daughter slowly asphyxiate to death.
Was it any wonder he was depressed?
But here’s the thing: as horrible and tragic as the loss of his daughter was, that wasn’t what was eating Nathan up. Yes, her death was incredibly painful, but over the years, Nathan and Judith had both gradually come to terms with their loss. That wasn’t what had such a stranglehold over his life. It was the lingering experience of futility—that he had been unable to do anything to stop the tragedy from unfolding.
She had died, while he sat there and did nothing.
Of course, there was absolutely nothing he could have done otherwise: he was held physically immobile by the same wreck that held his daughter. But that was exactly what had left such a terrible wound. It was not so much that he blamed himself as a pervading sense of abandonment and futility. How could life be so unfair? If such a thing could happen, what was the point of anything?
What had made this so difficult to see was that he had, as much as one can, “gotten over” the tragedy. It was now years behind them. And Nathan was not suicidal or walking around grief-stricken. There were no overt, dramatic symptoms. Just a dark, dense fog over his life. He was simply living his life in a state of disconnection.
When he would get angry at Judith, which was happening frequently, it was not Judith he was really angry at. He was simply turning his hostility outward in her direction.
Who he was really angry at was God.
We’ve seen so many people who have lost someone close to them, especially in devastating circumstances such as terrible accidents, violent crimes, or lingering illnesses, who have come out of the situation angry at God, even if they don’t know it. Often people will deny this consciously, saying, “No, I believe in God, God works in mysterious ways, God must have a bigger plan,” and so forth—but that can be the logical self talking. Meanwhile, the emotional self is profoundly cut off, so that we have a huge hole in us and don’t even realize it.
We see this especially with the death of children, which seems so profoundly unjust. But we also see it in cases where a child has lost a parent early on, or a grandparent, or someone else he or she cared about.
We often see this in the grieving process: “Why would God let this happen?” is a very common question that comes up in grief support groups. Why would God allow a child to suffer? Why take a teenager in a car crash? In an event such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or cataclysmic natural disasters such as the 2004 tsunami that killed nearly a quarter-million people, the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, or the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that hit Japan in 2011, the experience of trauma and resulting sense of futility and loss of faith can be profoundly widespread.
In many cases, this anger is directed not at God but at oneself.
Another client, Deborah, had a son who died in a car crash in which he had been drinking. She was angry at herself because she felt she should have somehow done something to stop him from drinking and driving—even though she was not there at the time, and thus there was nothing she could have done.
It is not only situations involving tragic death that can evoke this angry-at-self sense. People often get angry at themselves for a breakup or divorce and feel guilty over its effect on their children or over problems their children have as adults. Severe financial loss or profound career setback, theft, a bitter divorce between one’s parents…there are many circumstances when the turn of events can seem so profoundly unfair that our sense of justice in the world feels broken beyond repair.
This is also not exclusively about God. It is about our sense of connection, and about the loss of that sense.
Even people who subscribe to no specific faith or spiritual belief typically live with some sense of connection to a larger reality. Many people who do not necessarily claim to believe in God nevertheless have a sense of spirit, that there is a larger intelligence or order to the universe. To some, this is most strongly felt as a connection to nature, to the mountains and trees, sunset and foliage. Some feel this larger spiritual sense most strongly in their immersion in music or another art. Some feel it most clearly as a sense of connection to the larger human family.
At its simplest, it is our sense of connection to life itself.
When we feel that connection, then we are never truly alone. Conversely, when we do not feel that sense of connection—to God, to nature, to the larger family of humanity, to life itself—then when we are alone, we are alone. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,” wrote the seventeenth-century scientist Blaise Pascal—whose mother died when young Blaise was just three.
When people have no sense of connection outside themselves, it not only changes their outlook on life, it also changes their health. Their sense of hope diminishes and with it a healthy immune system function. The body can respond by a gradual cessation of that mysterious force that every medical professional knows as “the will to live.”
Gabe’s progress was remarkable. In the very first session, after we took him through the simple clearing steps we’ll look at later in this book, his demeanor changed dramatically. The best way we can describe it is this: it was as if he had walked into the office in a black-and-white film—and had filled out in color by the time he left.
By his third session, he was genuinely smiling, even laughing.
For Nathan, it took some time to uncover his self-limiting belief and work through this process. It did not happen in a single session, but in a series of sessions over some months. But it worked. In time, that fog of hopelessness, alienation, and anger lifted to the point where his connection with his wife Judith reawakened. Since that time, he has become more engaged and directed in his activities, and the couple’s relationship has improved enormously.
Not long ago they went on a cruise together. We received a letter from him, postmarked from Italy: “We haven’t fought once! I have to tell you, it’s so nice to be able to be with my wife and not feel that old familiar hostility.”
Here are some examples of how this self-limiting belief can express itself:
I am alone.
Life is empty.
There is no point in going on.
There is no point in anything.
I am disconnected from the world.
I am disconnected from God.
I am angry at God.
I am angry at myself.
Your Own Personal Belief Assessment
As you’ve read through this chapter, you have probably felt one or more of these beliefs resonating with you. Your goal now is to identify which holds the greatest sway in your life.
To help you zero in on this, here are seven sets of statements that exemplify these seven beliefs. As you read through each set, check those statements that feel like they fit for you and your everyday experiences, even if only somewhat so.
As you do this, also refer back to the significant experiences from the past that you identified in chapter 1, and consider those in relation to these beliefs. Do you see any correlations?
“I Am Not Safe.”
I cannot shake the sense that I am in danger of imminent harm, fatal illness, or other threat to my being.
I often avoid or am uncomfortable in social situations where there are a lot of people I don’t know well.
I worry constantly about my health and always seem to have something going on that’s wrong with me.
My family says I am overprotective, but I can’t seem to stop hovering over them and worrying about them.
I tend to feel anxious in enclosed spaces/open spaces/heights.
It’s difficult for me to show my emotions, even with those I love.
When conflicts happen, I do everything I can to avoid them rather than face them.
I often feel paralyzed when making important decisions.
“I Am Worthless.”
I don’t allow myself to pursue a certain skill, career, sport, hobby, or other activity, even though I know I’m capable of it and would enjoy doing it.
I am uncomfortable speaking in front of groups.
I feel I am a fake, I don’t deserve the respect I have from others, or I am not as good or worthy as I might appear to be.
I often don’t ask for what I believe is a fair or reasonable request out of fear that I’ll be rejected.
I have a hard time sticking up for myself when people criticize me or treat me poorly.
I seem to often get into relationships in which the other person doesn’t treat me well or with respect.
Others have told me I don’t pay enough attention to the way I look or dress.
Whenever I do something new, I have a hard time shaking the expectation that I will fail.
In my relationships/in my career, I have the feeling that I have “settled.”
I often feel like the people I spend time with are smarter, funnier, more talented, and so forth than I am.
I feel like a burden to my family/the people around me.
I often worry about disappointing others.
“I Am Powerless.”
In a group, even a small one, I often feel invisible.
I sometimes feel like a stranger, even among people who know me.
I sometimes feel trapped in my job/in my relationship/in my career/in my life.
I find myself wondering, if I suddenly disappeared, would anyone really notice or care?
I keep getting passed over for recognition, promotions, or other acknowledgment.
My life feels like a merry-go-round or carnival ride that I have no control over.
I have a problem with alcohol/cigarettes/overeating/other addictive substances or compulsive behaviors, and even though I realize these behaviors are harming me, I don’t feel I can stop.
I worry constantly about the state of the world and feel that nothing I would do would make any difference.
“I Am Not Lovable.”
I often worry that the person I’m in a love relationship with will stop loving me or find someone they love more.
I don’t deeply believe that I am capable of having a truly fulfilling, satisfying love relationship.
I have a pattern of getting into relationships with people who reject me or leave me.
I sometimes push away the people I love most, and I can’t figure out why.
I sometimes smother the people I love most, and I can’t figure out why.
Even though I know my spouse is faithful to me, I can’t help having strong feelings of jealousy.
I am afraid to commit to a relationship, even with someone I know I love, because I can’t shake the fear that they will eventually betray me or leave me.
I feel like I have been too damaged by my past for anyone to truly love me.
“I Cannot Trust Anyone.”
I am afraid or unwilling to trust men/women/anyone in authority/my colleagues or partners/and so forth.
I am afraid or unwilling to trust people in general.
People I am close with tell me I am overly controlling, that I have to do everything myself to feel like it’s done correctly.
My kids/spouse are starting to resent me because they say I always tell them what to do/don’t trust them.
I tend to have a hard time having fun, letting down, or relaxing among friends.
My wife/husband says I am not spontaneous.
I feel like I have an “opposite Midas touch”—everything I touch turns to muck.
I am afraid to get close to anyone or really show them my feelings.
I have a hard time trusting my own judgment.
“I Am Bad.”
I feel like a terrible person.
I am always expecting the worst.
Whenever something good happens, I can’t enjoy it because I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I feel guilty about things I’ve done in the past.
I feel guilty, even though I don’t know exactly what I have to feel guilty about.
I feel like the people around me would be better off without me here.
I have a hard time expecting anything to turn out well.
I have a long pattern of self-sabotage in my work/my relationships/my health/my life.
I feel like other people are better than I am.
I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something fundamentally wrong with me, that I’m a bad person.
“I Am Alone.”
Even when I’m surrounded by others, I feel alone.
I have the sense that nobody could possibly understand me or how I feel.
I have a hard time believing there is such a thing as a soul, or that if there is, that I have one.
I have this feeling that I don’t belong here.
Sometimes it just doesn’t feel like life is worth living.
Life feels to me sometimes like one big joke, or one big tragedy.
Life feels meaningless to me.
I am angry at God/angry at myself.
“What if I’m not sure which belief most fits me?” people sometimes ask.
There is no wrong answer here. Again, the Four-Step Process is a very forgiving system. Even if you select a belief that doesn’t coincide perfectly with what you actually believe, you’re going to get improvement anyway. It isn’t like taking the wrong medicine: it’s all the right medicine. One or two beliefs will more accurately describe your own situation than others and will give you a more direct line to the core issues you’re dealing with.
But any of them will get you there.
No matter which belief you select to start the process with, you are going to activate the same parts of the brain and move in a general way from “There’s something wrong with me” to “There’s something right with me.” Irrespective of the details and particular slant of your own version of self-limiting belief, it’s going to create results.
So…that should be that, right? Once you have identified the false, self-limiting belief structures that have been affecting your perceptions, now that you know where they may have come from and that they are not the way reality truly is, now that you know what’s going on in there, you can just say to yourself, “Okay, that was then—and this is now. I’m over it!”
Right?
Not quite.
Of course, it’s not so simple. If that were all there was to it, then Stefanie would never have come to see us. If that were all there was to it, then you would not be reading this book, and we would have had no reason for writing it.
Just because you identify a false, self-limiting belief doesn’t mean you don’t still feel it. As we said before, simply knowing it isn’t enough: that fog of distress resists logic. Talking it through is no more effective than trying to change the channel of a television set by shouting at it.
Exactly why is that true? Why do these beliefs persist and hold such a powerful sway over our lives?
That’s what the next chapter is all about.