How do you clear self-sabotaging beliefs? The underwater part of the iceberg that undermines your perception. Ensure objective reasoning and the freedom to choose a response.
Accumulating self-sabotaging beliefs
Since birth, your mind has been building your virtual reality. The model of everything. Each sensory experience, like sight or smell, was integrated using your beliefs at the time.
In turn, each such subjective experience influenced the development of your beliefs. This feedback loop created a change-resistant model that is now so hard to unlearn.
If we are mindless, we continue accumulating these erroneous beliefs. Reinforce objectifying a human being as a source of benefits in a relationship, or treating money as an absolute good.
Changing beliefs – from theory to function
We usually start with conceptual knowledge. Remind ourselves about objective perspective. In theory.
But destructive emotions continue arising. Self-sabotaging beliefs are still managing our responses. Until we make new beliefs functional.
Discerning obsolete beliefs
Beliefs we have ingrained for decades are not easy to recognize.
Secondary markers may help here – our destructive emotions and thoughts. They conveniently highlight dysfunctional beliefs and rigid templates of thinking. If we have a “sore spot,” the misconception, it gets triggered by all kinds of situations. So we follow the merry-go-round of emotional symptoms to reveal the causes.
Clearing the causes
We gradually remove self-sabotaging beliefs as they get revealed by our daily reactions. Mindfulness helps identify the signals produced by them. We can then investigate the causes and reframe them.
We practice and integrate the objective perspective. Clear obsolete beliefs, layer by layer, up to the misperception of “I,” our virtually imposed identity.