Practical guide - How to find your negative beliefs

How To Find Your Negative Beliefs...

and what to do with them when you have found them!

Why this post. One of the most common requests I have in my work as a health kinesiologist is to help people find ways to act differently in difficult situations or to simply feel better about themselves. Negative beliefs are literally behind every disturbing feeling or situation in our lives. They create inner disturbances which hugely effect how we get on in life and how good and confident we feel about ourselves.

What we usually do (me too:) Many of us invest real energy in trying to stay out of trouble by avoiding the parts of our mind that can get us into trouble. As children, we do this to achieve a degree of self control. When we grow up we continue to do it by more sophisticated methods – we distract ourselves from things that disturb us - we fidget or pretend to be busy etc... It helps for a while.

However, one of the most effective and quickest ways to really quieten our inner turmoil is to seek out the negative beliefs which lie behind our feelings or disturbing situations. More importantly - we can disempower the negative beliefs by activating them. This is exactly what we do in Health Kinesiology sessions where we narrow down the stressor and clear it via the acupuncture points.

So, back to business – how can you find and neutralize negative beliefs that hold you in a tight grip – repeating damaging situations, patterns or habits, feeling bad about yourself etc.?

1. First of all, before you even start, it is necessary to recognise that you have a problem. There might be a situation or experience which isn't good. The quicker you notice that you are in distress in your daily life, the better it is – you can only start responding once you notice the problem.

2. Look out for your beliefs behind a situation or a feeling. 

When you notice that you are having a problem in your life then:

• either your negative beliefs will come easily to mind. And you can take what comes to mind and do the Belief System Elimination technique (watch link below for the technique)
• Or your negative beliefs will not come easily to mind and you must locate them yourself. Not all thoughts, though, are conscious verbalizations. You may look inside of yourself and find nothing much except a sense of anxiety or of compulsion – that you must do something...
  So what now? Well, there is a way.
  You can often find the negative beliefs by simply reversing your thinking.
  E.g. If your basic thought is “I should stick to my guns” then reversed it becomes something like “If I do not stick to my guns then I ____” . In this blank spot put all the various negative self statements to try them out. Which is really disturbing?
  Or “I have to keep my true feelings to myself” reversed will look like: “If I show my true feelings then_____.” Then what? Replace the blank with the statements that seem right to you. The most potent negative beliefs are ones about ourselves. Find out what you really “think” about yourself.

3. Categorize your thoughts. You may come up with more than just one thought about yourself or other people or the world. So once you have found one or more beliefs that drive your actions and feelings, the next step is to categorize them – see if you can combine statements which seem to be merely different ways of saying the same thing.

The most common beliefs are:

• about oneself. The most potent ones. For example, beliefs about your personal place in the world: “I am nobody” “I am not there”, “I don't exist”; Beliefs about personal safety – I cannot trust anyone, I feel threatened, in danger etc; Beliefs about personal power and control: It's not ok to show my feelings, I can't stand up for myself. About self worth: I am bad, worthless.... I deserve to be punished... About self blame: I should have known better, it's all my fault etc.
• about other people like “People are evil”
• about the world.

4. And now is the time to clear these beliefs. 

It is best to begin by eliminating the belief that most disturbs you. After one is done, move to the next most disturbing and so on.

How do you do this? The procedure is demonstrated in Health Kinesiology Self Help video “Belief system elimination” Watch here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxXtfz47sZs

5. And finally, notice the changes. 

Once the work is done – and doing it can be rather effortless – you will experience that the negative self-beliefs simply don't activate in situations where they used to have a considerable power over you.

A few other things will happen:

• it will be difficult to be sabotaged by what you see clearly and what is in your conscious awareness
• a brief focus on negative beliefs will actually reduce or eliminate their power over you.

After doing this procedure you may wish to check the power of you negative self-beliefs in about one week, just to see if the change you have achieved is permanent. Simply focus on each belief that you worked on and notice how it affects you. Ideally, there will be no effect at all. And when beliefs don't activate themselves in real life situations, you will see how life changes around you.