I sat down with sweet Silverbelle to talk about this pretty heavy topic for In My Feels Friday. Being a counseling intern and seeing clients for the first time this past semester really pushed me to be the best version of myself and practice everyday the gaps in what I have learned and what I have applied to my life. One of the big things was working through core beliefs I have about myself.
Core beliefs are something that psychologist Aaron Beck theorized about. He thought people developed deeply ingrained beliefs about themselves that are a lens to their reality. It’s a lens to their perceptions and it affects almost all the areas of their life. Most of the time core beliefs develop during childhood, but a core belief can happen any time it’s just very deeply ingrained.
So my core beliefs? It’s that there’s something inherently wrong with me or that I am inherently bad. Whenever a life stressor comes up or I get anxious about something or I start overthinking I would go down the various rabbit holes in my mind. All of them, if I go down there deep enough, eventually funnels to this core question of “what all is wrong with me? how all can i figure out the ways that I am bad?” Often, without realizing it I am trying to figure it out. And my brain will chew and chew and chew on it when I get triggered in this way. If left unattended, my brain will think about it endlessly.
You might say “Kate! You have researched self-compassion and you’ve dedicated your life to healing and loving yourself and helping others do the same. How can you say that your core belief is that there’s something wrong with you?” and to that I would respond… we all have versions of us that are in a “trance,” as well as versions that are more rational, in the moment. We think we control our thoughts but in reality a lot of the time they control us. Through our development and experiences our brains form a template of who we are and how we respond to things, and the farther it is away from the version of ourselves that we intellectually want to be, the more pain we experience. Think of it as having factory settings. You didn’t control so much of how you were made and what environment you were made into. To break it down before I continue:
Core beliefs= factory settings/autopilot/uncontrollable thoughts
True beliefs= our intellectual version of ourselves/using awareness to spot patterns
So, I have known for a very long time that these core beliefs are not true. And that my true belief is that there’s nothing “wrong” with me, that I am a human. But you have to understand that core beliefs are slippery little suckers. They are overwhelmingly automatic thought processes. Not only are the thoughts automatic, they are convincing as heck, too. They are your natural way of seeing things, and how they perceive reality seems real. A lot of people with core beliefs just don’t know a different way to think and the skill set needed is a very difficult to describe internal process. Of course a good therapist can help you identify your thoughts, and this is what Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is about.
I want to talk about what the internal process has been like for me to give you an example that it’s possible. Because core beliefs are so convincing and there’s not really a way to disprove the core belief, I had to start with my new belief: I am trying my best and I am a human. Then, I have to recognize when the old beliefs come up. This is very hard and sometimes it is a fight. But still, instead of going down those rabbit holes, I would look around me and say “I have decided there’s nothing wrong with me, so why am I having these thoughts?” Inquiring why I was going down the hurtful rabbit holes and looking into it with with caring has absolutely changed my life. So now I say to work back UP to my true beliefs instead of going down to figure anything out.
You might be holding tight to the fact that you need to keep thinking about all the things that are wrong with you. But what I know so deeply is that operating from a painful core belief actually does perpetuate unintentional, unaware, reactive, try-to-cover-up-my-flaws behavior. This mechanism that’s trying to protect you from being “bad” is actually making things worse. It’s such a mess. My head is proverbially in my hands just thinking about how it all works.
I want to say for those of you who may struggle with core beliefs of goodness or badness or unlovability, or not smart enough or too weird to be accepted by others or too damaged to be happy or this and that– I had to recognized that it served me at some point to continually look inward and try to find every tiny thing that might be wrong with me and all the ways I might be bad, to actually see myself as bad. Though I was hurting myself by doing this, it put up a wall so that when other people who were close to me and supposed to take care of me were mean to me or didn’t accept me in some way, I had already done a mental perimeter scan of those things. Being mean to myself gave me more control of myself in an uncontrollable environment. By degrading myself and my needs my behavior became quiet, compliant, shy, sweet. It was the only acceptable way to be and that’s not my fault. I cannot be mad at myself now for struggling with these core beliefs because I made it to adulthood where I can try to take care of myself better.
We’re gonna forgive ourselves. We’re gonna make our hearts bigger than the pain. We’re gonna be aware and not use our awareness to further punish ourselves. We’re gonna recognize our goodness. We’re gonna stop breaking our own hearts. We’re gonna love ourselves better than anyone else has before. We’re gonna know that we have to continue to take care of ourselves every day, and that this kind of stuff doesn’t just heal overnight. That’s what we’re doing.
Thanks for reading, sweet friends.