How Negative Beliefs Keep Us Stuck

Post author:admin
Post published:March 19, 2019
Post category:Rewriting Basics

How Negative Beliefs Keep Us Stuck

Have you ever felt stuck in life, unable to move past something or do the things you desire to do? In this post, we’re going to explore how negative beliefs keep us stuck. Maybe like me, you either don’t try things because you’re afraid to fail, or when you do have success you sabotage yourself right back to where you were before that success. Sound familiar?

Negative beliefs can keep us from living our dreams, or worse, keep us living our nightmares.

Ways Negative Beliefs Can Keep Us Stuck

Negative beliefs can keep us stuck in many negative life patterns and ways of living. Here are some of the more common but this list is certainly not exhaustive:

Living in fear, anxiety, or excessive worry and concern
Living in depression
Self-harming to cope with pain
Wanting to commit suicide
Repeatedly trying and failing such as with diet, exercise, and healthy habits
Unable to receive love and good things
Unable to have functional relationships by continually recreating the kind of relationships we had growing up, even if they were abusive, unsafe, and detrimental
Living in codependence
Sabotaging our successes
Constantly afraid to try new things and go outside our comfort zone
Living in anger, resentment, and rage
Enabling others
Giving away our power
Living in addiction to cope with pain, such as overeating, gambling, alcoholism, drugs, sex addiction, shopping addiction, and the like
Controlling others or everything around us

Our Internal Beliefs Determine What We Do and Who We Are

Negative beliefs keep us stuck because they are what we believe about ourselves deep down. One negative belief can affect multiple areas of our lives from health, to wealth, to relationships. For example:

If you have a belief that you are unlovable, you will be unable to receive love and you may fill your life with people who can’t or don’t love you. You will not treat yourself with love and take care of yourself as you should. You may harm yourself through cutting or addictions to numb the pain of feeling unlovable.

If you believe you have to always be perfect you will react very strongly when you don’t do things perfectly, react defensively when you are corrected or given constructive criticism, and often refuse to do things or procrastinate indefinitely when you know you won’t be able to do something perfectly. You may also have very negative self-talk, berating yourself for your lack of perfection.

If you believe you don’t deserve to be heard, you will reject when people hear you, you will not speak your truth, or you will feel very guilty when you do. You may become a doormat, letting people walk all over you. And at the same time you may constantly feel like a victim.

These are just three examples of how negative beliefs can keep us stuck. There are hundreds of negative beliefs we may have about ourselves. I’ll post a page soon specifically about examples of negative beliefs.

How Negative Beliefs Cause Us to Self-Sabotage

Boy am I intimately related with this topic! Ever since my husband handed me a copy of The Message of You by Judy Carter, I’ve been on a path of stepping outside my comfort zone again and again. And it’s been utterly painful! That’s because I was filled with negative beliefs about myself, even after 8 or 9 years of therapy. At that same time, I came across the book, Your Power to Heal by Dr. Henry Grayson and learned how to clear negative beliefs with TFT and EFTA. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing ever since.

Here’s a very recent example of how negative beliefs can cause us to self-sabotage. A few days ago a podcast was released where I was interviewed by Kristin Walker from Mental Health News Radio. Awesome, right? Yes, it should have been, but that night I couldn’t fall asleep until after 1 a.m. and I woke up with such neck and upper back pain it was crazy.

I started self-muscle testing (here’s a great video on 7 ways to self-muscle test) asking if the pain was related to this or that. Not surprisingly, it was related to the podcast release. Let me share with you what my day looked like and see if anything like this ever happens to you when you’ve had success that doesn’t line up with your internal beliefs.

I was crabby.
I was sad.
I was in pain. A lot of pain.
I wanted sugar. Lots of sugar. And more sugar.
I couldn’t think straight or decide what to do next. Should I take a shower or start the laundry? Should I clean the kitchen? What should I put in the kids lunches?
I decided I couldn’t go work out because I was so tired and out of sorts. (That probably would have done me good!)
Everything was overwhelming.
I was late to pick up my son from school.
I wanted to stop at Target but missed the turn, and at that point I decided I just needed to be home in my bed!

Throughout the day I had gotten very little done. I wasted about 2 hours on a video I’m not even going to put up. But … I did clear five negative beliefs by the time I went to bed. Here they were:

I am bad because I aired our dirty laundry to the world.
I’m never going to be a good enough speaker.
I don’t deserve to have this success.
I’m not worthy of having this success (deserve and worthy have two different meanings when it comes to negative beliefs at least.)
I should be ashamed of myself for speaking against my mother.

People, four of the five weren’t even mine! They were ancestral and parental downloads!

Then last night I went to bed early. I woke up at 3:30 a.m. unable to sleep any longer. I had serious pain in the same area. You know what I was thinking don’t you? I won’t say it. I just won’t say it.

So I self-muscle tested again. I cleared two more sets of beliefs that were parallel, but slightly different:

I don’t deserve to be heard, understood, or validated.
I am not worthy of being heard, understood, or validated.

When I got to the end of the second EFTA protocol the image came to my mind of myself hunched down into a little ball on the sand in my special place. Completely round almost with my hands around me. Slowly I started to open up. I not only pictured myself doing this but I did it in real life. I used micro movements to release that energy and finally was standing with my arms wide in the air as open as my body could be.

This is using your imagination to rewrite your life. Instead of letting these things drag me right back down to a place of being hidden and ashamed, I cleared what needed to be cleared. After resting in bed for about an hour and a half because that’s what I knew I needed at that point, I got up, showered, and went about my day.

Instead of being overwhelmed and confused I took one thing at a time. I started singing songs I like and smiling. Now my internal beliefs agree with what’s happening outwardly instead of what’s happening outwardly needing to agree with the crap I believed about myself. Isn’t that empowering?

How Have Negative Beliefs Kept You Stuck?

I’d love it if you’d write to me on the contact page, or post in the comments below how you see negative beliefs holding you back. If you’ve found a way to rewrite them, please share it! We can all help each other recover. You might be the key to unlock someone else’s stuck place.

Have a great day!