Lately, I’ve had many people ask me what exactly are core beliefs and what do they have to do with mental health? Well, in short, core beliefs are the most important and tightly held beliefs we have around who we are, who others are and the world in general.[1] Obviously, now that I’ve said this, you can likely see how core beliefs matter to us and our lives – they shape everything, from our own identity to our world views and the way we interact with other people.[2]
Everyone has core beliefs. Some are held by a vast majority of people – such as the belief that you shouldn’t murder someone else – while others are unique just to us.[3] They can also be positive or negative. For example, holding the belief that you shouldn’t murder anyone will not only make you a better human, it will also allow you to live the life you want to live (as murderers go to jail). However, just as you can see the huge impact that believing murdering people is wrong can have on a person’s life – there is a vast difference in the life of a murderer and the life or someone who doesn’t go around killing people – negative beliefs can also have a huge impact on our lives.
So how then do we form core beliefs? Well, in short, core beliefs come from our experiences and interactions with the world.[4] We begin developing them as children and continue developing core beliefs into adulthood.[5] Adverse childhood experiences, things such as abuse, neglect, attachment issues etc., can often create a host of negative core beliefs that then negatively impact our lives going forward.[6]
While all of our experiences within the world have the potential to create core beliefs - whether negative or positive - trauma in childhood, adolescence or even adulthood can wreak havoc on our core beliefs, causing us to develop many negative and ultimately untrue core beliefs about ourselves, others and the world.[7] Core beliefs that stem from trauma, while they can be anything, tend to follow similar patterns. People who have been through trauma tend to develop core beliefs around their responsibility for the traumatic event[8]; for example, things like “I should’ve done something,” or “I did something wrong” or “I shouldn’t have done this” or “I should’ve known better.” They also tend to develop a host of core beliefs about who they are as a person; for example things like “I am bad,” “I am unlovable,” “I am damaged,” or “there is something wrong with me.”[9]They also can develop core beliefs around what they believe they ‘deserve’ in life; for example, “I deserve to be unhappy,” or “I deserve to be punished.”[10]
Survivors and victims of trauma also often develop negative core beliefs around the world such as “I cannot protect myself,” “I am in danger,” “I am helpless,” or “I am not in control.”[11] Furthermore, they also develop core beliefs around other people, such as “other people can’t be trusted” or “all men are bad.”[12]
If you know anything about trauma or have been through trauma yourself, then these beliefs probably seem familiar to you. You might even hold some of these beliefs yourself. This was obviously not an exhaustive list, the truth is that anything can be a core belief if the person holds the belief tightly enough and it is a central enough belief to influence their behavior, thoughts, actions etc.[13] Our core beliefs can have a profound impact on us and the way we choose to live our lives. Negative core beliefs in particular, can cause disruption in our lives, stop us from going after what we want and ultimately, they can change the trajectory of our life altogether.[14]
I know this sounds dramatic but think about it for a minute. Say someone wants to be a doctor and has dreamt about becoming a doctor all their life. Then they go through a traumatic event and from that event they develop the core beliefs that they “don’t deserve to be happy,” “are a failure,” “can’t do anything right” and are “unlovable and even unlikeable.” Now, they may not go to med school because becoming a doctor would make them happy and they believe they don’t deserve to be happy. They may not go to med school because they believe they are a failure and so will flunk out of school. They may not go to med school because they believe they will be hated by everyone, and no one will ever want them to be their doctor.
This is a relatively straightforward example, but core beliefs can have much more insidious effects on our lives as well. Take someone who holds the core beliefs that they are unlovable, undeserving of happiness or love and a burden. This person may struggle to find a happy, healthy relationship because they unconsciously sabotage every potential relationship that comes along. They may bounce in and out of unhealthy or even abusive relationships because they believe that it is what they deserve. In both of these scenarios, the person is not doing this on purpose. Consciously they may desperately want to be in a healthy, loving relationship, however the core beliefs they hold won’t allow them to find that because what they believe is in complete opposition to what they want.
The good news is that no matter how central they are to you or how tightly you hold onto these core beliefs, they can be changed. However, the first step in this is identifying what core beliefs you hold and how they are impacting your life.[15] Until you are aware of your core beliefs and how they are affecting your life, you can’t possibly begin to change them. But just because I say this, doesn’t mean that it is easy to do. While you might be able to identify some core beliefs, it will likely take some work on your part to identify all of them. But even if you are able to identify them, changing your core beliefs isn’t as simple as telling yourself they are not true. Core beliefs are rarely logical, instead they stem from experiences, often profound and painful experiences, and, as such, are ingrained in you by these experiences.[16] What makes it even harder is that once we hold a core belief, we tend to look for evidence that supports that belief and ignore evidence that contradicts it, a phenomenon known as “confirmation bias.”[17] This makes core beliefs extremely hard to challenge because usually the person has all this evidence that supports their belief and no evidence to contradict it, not because that evidence doesn’t exist but rather because they have likely spent a long time collecting only evidence to support their belief.
The good news is that, even with confirmation bias working against you, you can still change your core beliefs – it’s just going to take a lot of work and soul searching on your part. One way of doing this is to replace each of your core beliefs with an alternate, positive belief.[18] It doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not, not yet anyhow. For example, if one of your core beliefs was that you were not good enough, then you would replace that belief with “I am good enough.” Now this is likely going to feel insane and untrue to you at first and that’s ok. I don’t expect that you will magically believe the alternate belief just because you said it. Instead, once you have that alternate belief, you then use confirmation bias to collect evidence that supports that belief.[19] In other words, you would go searching for evidence that you were good enough. The problem with this is that confirmation bias is not something you can just turn on and off and since you likely still hold the belief that you aren’t good enough very strongly, even if you do identify evidence that you are good enough, subconsciously you might immediately cancel it out by finding evidence that you are not good enough.
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