Part 1Our Beliefs Aren’t Completely Ours
Did you know that the beliefs you hold about yourself were never really chosen by you? Rather, they were forced upon you during your childhood. The relationships that you find yourself in today, as an adult, help you to work through what you subconsciously believe about yourself.
From age two through seven, you are in a very imaginative brain wave state called theta. The theta state occurs in childhood and is also known as the programming years. It is a hypnotic, imaginative state in which children blend their physical world with the fantastical world. In addition, these are the years in which we take on beliefs about ourselves and about our life. Most of these ideas and beliefs will remain with us for the remainder of our lives and we won’t even be aware of this. These ideas and beliefs will show up in choices we make in relationship partners, friends, goals, career choices and in our behaviors.
Simply put, most of our beliefs were forced upon us, either through suggestion or command, by someone else. Is this a scary thought to you? It shouldn’t be, really, once you realize that you have the power to change your life.
Escaping Negative Relationships
It takes courage to admit that you are not really happy in a friendship or a relationship. However, many times you will stay in these negative relationships because they fill a void.
As you are in a toxic relationship, you filter and factor out emotional and verbal abuse, but the consequences of this abuse remain astronomically damaging to you. It continues to eat away at you and slowly breaks down the sense of self that you possessed at one time in your life.
If you continue to accept cruel and manipulative treatment from other people in your life, you are sending yourself the message that you are not enough. The truth is, you are more than enough.
What you perceive and experience in the world is a mirror of your subconscious. It is the shadow self, the self that each of us hides away like a dirty secret that we don’t want the world to see. Your shadow self is insecure, jealous, trusts no one, blames others, is possessive, is aggressive, is hypercritical of others, of self and is verbally abusive.
Your relationships reflect your shadow self. This is why you will notice behaviors such as gaslighting and avoidant behavior proliferating in your relationships. Gaslighting is when the other person in the relationship denies things that clearly took place. Avoidant behavior occurs when the other person in the relationship avoids conversations with you as well as your point of view. They are not willing to listen or try to understand. They deny your feelings and your viewpoint.
These relationship behaviors focus on your insecurities, which breaks down your self-esteem. You are being undermined behind your back by the person you love. This person may try to isolate you from your friends and family. They may set expectations for you that are completely out of your reach, thus setting you up to fail. They will make you feel that you are never good enough. Then they will say they are sorry, make up, feel remorse, until the next time when these behaviors repeat their vicious cycle.
Negative relationship behaviors can cause mental, emotional and physical repercussions. So many people who are in relationships in which they do not feel loved, accepted and free to be themselves end up with eating disorders, alcohol and drug addictions, sex addictions, and/or hurting themselves.
How Does It Make You Feel? What Does It Make You Feel?
This is where self-awareness and courage come into play. Think about how this makes you feel, and what it makes you feel? Write this down and don’t stop writing until you have released all of your feelings on paper. When you release them, you are also becoming aware of the beliefs, patterns, thoughts, words and feelings that you have acquired during your lifetime, many of which originally formed in the theta state when you were a child. These force-fed ideas and feelings hardened into habits.
Even worse, events in your past that were emotionally charged with fear and shame caused your subconscious mind to learn these habits even faster. Whenever the element of emotion is added to an event, the subconscious mind plays it over and over again, supercharging the event. Subconscious exists below your consciousness. You perform the same habits and patterns subconsciously, but can’t quite understand why you choose the same things over and over again. This is why you check your feelings.
The good news is, you can change your patterns, routines and habits to instead have what you want—to have things that make you feel happy and good. In Part 2 of this blog, we will examine the ways in which you can accomplish this.
