We are who we are – the blend of innate personality traits plus our life experiences.
We do what we do – even though we’d like to be doing it differently.
We believe that what we believe is true – because a belief is a filter that permanently colours our world view.
We may not like who we are.
We may not be doing what we want to be doing.
What we believe may be causing us unnecessary emotional pain.
But we are either unaware of this, or have no idea how to change it, because it feels normal and we think it is us.
Early life experiences, plus our innate nature, train us to respond to certain situations in specific ways. The basic premise is avoid pain, seek pleasure. Sometimes, the sensitives among us, feel the pain of others as if it were their own. So what they do is take on the responsibility of making sure that others are ok – even it means they do without.
Children with an angry, or a frequently drunk, parent may discover very quickly that being quiet and keeping out of the way is the way to avoid pain. In adulthood you have a quiet person who never voices their opinion – especially if it is different from the prevailing view. It doesn’t matter if the majority are wrong (frequently the case), this individual will remain silent. The echo of the violence from the past is forever present.
An overbearing disciplinarian father, or school teacher, may impress a fear of authority that remains throughout adulthood. This may not even seem like a fear. It may just seem like doing the right thing and being a stickler for the rules. The only problem is that the rules are never questioned, because when the rules were questioned as a child the response was ‘don’t give cheek’ or ‘don’t answer back’.
Any little thing that happened in childhood that caused even momentary emotional discomfort is stored away in the back of the mind and, in adulthood, anything that reminds us of that, or feels a bit like that, or looks a bit like that, is avoided. At the extreme this can become an apparently irrational phobia.
But because these are just things we do and ways we respond and it all seems to happen so naturally we think it is normal for us and so it is only ever questioned when it interferes with earning a living or doing things that cannot be avoided forever.
A phobia of needles, induced, say, by a painful experience with an insensitive doctor at about 18 months of age has to be dealt with when pregnancy occurs – because the medics just love sticking needles in pregnant ladies. At this point a solution will be sought. But while avoidance works – avoidance will be the norm.
If you believe the sun moves across the sky, because your experience tells you that this is true and you have the evidence of your very own eyes then you may resist very strongly the idea that the sun is stationary and that the very solid and stable earth that you are standing on is whizzing along at around 1000 miles an hour. It’s a totally crazy idea that goes against everything you can sense. Your senses are the only way you can make sense of your world. If your senses are lying to you then you have no idea what is going on anywhere. Can you imagine how destabilising that would be? If you cannot trust your senses you cannot trust anything.
In the same way you will have discovered many things that you believe to be true. All of these things will be based on limited evidence, and because you have limited evidence you will draw the wrong conclusions.
You may believe that when you enter a room everyone is immediately, in their own thoughts, criticising the clothes you have chosen to wear today, or have nothing better to do than fill their minds with thoughts about how fat you are.
Our minds crucify us incessantly.
And it all seems perfectly normal.
It isn’t.
You can change it – if you feel that you deserve to live a peaceful, happy, fulfilled, life.
Here’s how… Check out Change Your Life with Self Hypnosis
But first of all check out this story of how Nathan T. Had his life turned around and his limiting beliefs neutralised by a couple of hypnosis sessions.
