Steps to Change a Belief

I think it is safe to say that if you are reading this blog you are looking for transformation. For a change. This course began by looking at some of our beliefs and we are coming full circle, as we wrap up the last 11 weeks of classes to work on figuring out how to pull them all together.

Why do beliefs impact us so much? Because what we believe drives us. This is a session on seven keys to transformation, which I will have to split into several posts because I am going to insert how I process one of my beliefs using these keys. I am assuming the seven keys must be seven potent ones, although they did say there are others.

It makes sense then that the first key mentioned as one way to change our lives is to change our beliefs. Thankfully we were given steps to learn how exactly to go about this, because it certainly sounds easy to say, but how and where to start? Following are several recommended steps to walk this through. If you have been reading the previous posts from the beginning, you will recognize some of these things have been mentioned before.

Change your beliefs by identifying belief systems.

The first thing obviously is to get self-aware enough to figure out what my belief is. If I don’t know what I believe, I can’t know how to change it, if change is desirable. I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that one of my beliefs had to do with relationships. I am picking this one up again here and will do my best to apply all the steps to it.

If you have done the exercises in the operating system post, you will have identified some beliefs. Feel free to pick one of those beliefs and walk yourself through the following steps to make it personal also.

Over the course of this 12 week class it has become clear to me firstly through the prover, by looking at what my life shows or reflects to me, some of what I hold true about relationships. I have struggled for as long as I can remember with relationships. My prover would appear to be saying something like, “maintaining mutually beneficial and healthy relationships is not possible.” A few other beliefs I could deduct from looking at my prover could be that relationships aren’t worth the effort and pain. I also think it possible that I believe I am not a person people desire to have meaningful relationship with. I want to make clear that I haven’t actually said these things out loud to myself, nor even thought them consciously. They may not be verbalized exactly, but I am trying to sum up what I see as I observe. I don’t know that it is super important to nail it perfectly. The right neighborhood will get the ball rolling.

If you are digging for beliefs and you aren’t coming up with much, you may want to do the hand over your heart method and ask your heart what it believes about your area of focus.

Another way to identify beliefs, is to investigate what areas you have been feeling stuck in no matter what you have done. See if you can ask some probing questions about the issue and what you learned about it in your childhood. It may give you some insight. Asking questions is my new best friend. I don’t always come up with the most helpful questions, but it gets me going on the journey and I end up asking in prayer and my heart also.

I wonder if you remember the post about interpreting the heart language? As you look at where you are stuck, or what your prover says, maybe you can find out more by asking, “What is my heart saying, what does what it seems to want represent?” As you discover what need it might represent it might also give you clues about what your beliefs are that keep you stuck.

Next, if possible, investigate or acknowledge where the belief came from. 

You may remember I shared how I did this in my investigation to try to figure out why I feel like I have to do everything perfectly and it took me back to my test experience in fourth grade.

Sometimes it is hard to figure out the origin, and I would not allow that to stop me from walking through the other steps. But I do think knowing where it started can be helpful if it’s possible to find out. Figuring out where it came from in my case regarding relationships seems rather easy. Relationships in my own family were usually causing pain. Not knowing what to do with pain, I withdrew – my choice of coping mechanism. Watching the people in my life in their relationships just confirmed the belief that was forming in my pre-logic mind, that relationships are always messy and hurtful, and they don’t typically give anything worth all the pain.

After that it’s good to take account. 

This was explained in detail in the forgiveness session, except here we don’t look at the person who wronged us but at the belief we have embraced to run our own lives. How did having this belief affect my life? What did believing these lies rob me of? How did believing these lies damage me? How did believing these lies impact my choices and my thoughts?

My views on relationships have caused so much struggle. Countless efforts to try, because my conscious belief and my natural need was for connection and relationship. So many efforts ended in more pain, or disappointment, of feeling taken advantage of, in feeling like I must be really weird for me to not be able to maintain close relationships. Then also the exhaustion from how long it takes to really get to know someone well enough to find out if they are friend material, trustworthy and reliable, focused not just on what they can get out of the relationship but also interested in me. Loneliness, feeling unwanted, rejected, outside looking in.

An important next question to ask is how will this belief affect my life if I don’t change it?

The purpose for this step is to get a sense of leverage. It will take effort, time, and commitment to change my belief. If I don’t see that the long-term cost of not dealing with it is by far larger than dealing with the pain and the effort right now to change it in order for the story going forward to be a positive and fulfilling one, then I will likely opt not to deal with it, or will give up long before I reach the promised land.

I don’t think I can envision the completeness of the long-term cost for my relationship belief, but here are a few I can see happening. I will continue to be at war with myself because I will keep craving good relationships and because of my undealt with belief in the subconscious, my prover will likely continue leading me to people who will contribute to confirm and solidify that belief. There will be continued frustration, resentment, eventually capitulation and more loneliness. Missing out on the beauty of relationships God’s way. Missing out on getting to contribute to others and receiving from others. I imagine there is more.

It would be easy to look at how these beliefs were formed and look for a villain, blaming people in my life for not modeling relationships to me in a healthy way. But if you remember from the victim mentality session, that will only result in keeping me stuck, no matter how true it is. The mess has been made, never mind how much I originally had to do with it or not, and I have to own it. It has become my mess whether I like it or not, and if I want to get out of it, I need to take ownership of it.

Ownership

The idea is to get to a place where I accept that while I may not have been the one that introduced this belief, I am the one who took it and ran with it long after the situation that started it has gone. It is so hard. It brings us to the realization that we are still responsible for what we do with what comes at us. You may recognize this idea from the posts that dealt with the victim mentality and the ones that spoke of how to take our power back. If any of these steps are unclear, you may want to go back to the posts that deal with the topic in detail.

I have run with those beliefs that I can’t maintain healthy relationship, that I don’t seem to be wanted for close relationships, that relationships cost more than they are worth, and all those lies, I have let them go on this long. I have not stopped them or challenged them much. True, I didn’t have the tools to identify and become aware of them, but now that I see them, I have to accept that I am responsible if I want anything to change. I have not known how to deal with them properly, but I am still responsible for being the one to have embraced the belief subconsciously. I brought this into my adult life, into my marriage and my family. I held on to these beliefs and they have caused problems.

Compassion

Before we start beating ourselves up over having failed to do better, the step that needs to come hand in hand with ownership is compassion. We need to give ourselves compassion for why it’s there and how it has affected us.

It would be easy to reprimand myself for allowing it to have taken so long for me to figure this out. But if I don’t have compassion for it, I will continue in the shame cycle. Remembering little me and what little me went through to come to this conclusion and survival mechanism, will help me to have the compassion it takes to validate the pain, the loss the striving, etc. The posts on validation and the relationship with myself may be a good refresher to walk this step out.

I say to my heart, “I am so sorry that you were in so much pain, that these beliefs were the only truth you saw in the pain and didn’t know or understand how to heal from it. I am so sorry for the pain the consequences of you believing this has caused you. I am sorry for all the energy and effort you lost pouring into this issue. So sorry for how much fun you missed out on and how it has affected your every day. I understand why you have these beliefs. Some really painful things messed with you. I understand that it has messed up your view of yourself and not being given any tools, how it has continued to damage you and rob you. This is not how it has to stay. We can be powerful and find our way to health from here.”

Self-Forgiveness

As we figure out how we have caused ourselves pain, self-forgiveness is another necessary step.

This step involves both forgiveness of the people involved in the original event that led to me forming the belief, but also how I treated myself based on that belief.

“Self, I forgive you for believing that there is something wrong with you, for believing that you are not destined for good relationships, for making you withdraw from connection and intimacy in order to protect you from pain and so causing more pain. For isolating you, for projecting your beliefs and therefore sabotaging all your efforts at good and healthy and deep relationships. I forgive you for not knowing how to be your ally and how to find ways to meet your needs in healthy ways. I forgive you for not understanding that there were needs at all. I am sorry for all the things that happened to you as a result of these beliefs. I forgive you, for the isolation, the self-judgment, the endless striving. I forgive you for neglecting emotional and relational needs. I forgive you for believing the lies for so long and for wiping me out. I know you didn’t mean to. I forgive you.”

This heart talk back and forth is still very awkward to me…I really need to read up more on that concept…

I am doing the forgiving of the others privately to protect other’s privacy, but make sure you take care of forgiving not just yourself but also everyone who played a part in the issue you are dealing with.

I admit, seeing Abi and Justin having done so much work when they were so much younger than me, when I had no idea such work was even possible, it makes me feel like it’s going to take forever, and it will be too late for some areas in my life to see the benefits of the work. That is why this next step, to embrace the truth that there is hope is so important.

Embrace Hope

One of the big hindrances in making change is if I don’t think it is actually possible. Before I can really go after any of the issues further, I must get it straightened out in my head and heart, that even though life has proved to me the lie to be true over and over for decades, that it is a lie and that the truth is that with God and his redemptive nature, anything is possible. There is no reason to be hopeless. Firstly, hopelessness is a lie, because Jesus died to redeem this issue too, secondly, hopelessness keeps me stuck.

“Self, I am telling you to take heart. You have never been given so many tools to get well. Just because you haven’t had success with relationships, doesn’t mean you can’t succeed. You are powerful, you have choices, and Jesus wants to help you to walk in the freedom he has died to give you. Look for the paths that will lead you to the freedom he gave you. Refuse to give in to hopelessness, it’s another lie. I am prepared to put all my focus on this one topic and just walk this out for healing until we see breakthrough. There is so much we can try now with all these tools we have been given. Take heart, there is hope, there is redemption, there is healing and victory.”

What else could be true?

Since we have already established that we have had a belief that does not serve us and is based on lies, it is important now to start looking at our circumstances, our lives and find what other stories could be true, if the one we believed was a lie.

When we form a subconscious belief, our prover conditions us to look for confirming circumstances in our lives and we don’t notice or forget all the times that belief was actually contradicted through events or people in our lives. In my case, I can look back and mention a few times where someone has reached out, and I quite possibly did not respond because of my belief that it’s not worth it, or that it is not sincere. I am not going to take the time to list all those opportunities that went untried now, but enough to say, I see several of them. There were opportunities and it was my choices that kept those from going anywhere, though looking at them now, I believe they could very well have been redemptive.

A big realization also has to be, that while I feel like everyone is busy living good relationships with others and doesn’t want it with me, the thing closer to the truth is that people in general only have so much time, and it takes a lot for relationships to be prioritized.

I also saw some statistics that speak to the general loneliness of people in our society which shows me it’s not something I alone experience and it can’t simply be a reflection of my worth, if it seems to be a common phenomenon among the masses.

What does God say about it?

Partnering with truth speaks of actually actively agreeing with what God says even if it does not feel true. With any belief change I need to ask, “What was the lie and what is the truth according to  God?” That is the most important. It can also help, though to get truth from others. In my case, I could ask others, how they see relationships, what they believe about them and how they navigate them. This is particularly important for me to do in order to find out tools of how to manage relationships when there are challenges, rather than default to isolation.

Hearing God’s truth is as simple as finding Bible verses that contradict the false belief I have.

It is a lie that I am too messed up to be desired for meaningful relationships. The Bible tells me I have so much worth that Jesus died for me. I am fearfully and wonderfully made and dearly loved and given all the blessings, including freedom to have abundant life. What I have now is not abundant life because the lies have robbed me of that.

It is a lie that all relationships are not worth the pain it costs to maintain them. We are made for community. If God made us to be one body, then paying the price it takes to be one is worth it.

It is a lie that good relationships are only for others. God knows every hair on my head, he is concerned about my troubles enough he instructs me to come to him with my burdens. That is a template for me to see how he wants us to love each other.

I can walk through each lie this way and quit agreeing with it by replacing the lie with truth.