The Mind-Body Diabetes Revolution by Richard S. Surwit Ph.D. & Alisa Bauman

Author:Richard S. Surwit, Ph.D. & Alisa Bauman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

Week 4: Pinpointing Your Beliefs

Thoughts are the verbal and visual messages that run through your mind; your assumptions and beliefs run much deeper. Now that you’re in better touch with your moods and thoughts, it’s time to uncover the deeply held beliefs that lead to your negative automatic thoughts and moods. Examining and challenging these beliefs is the key to stopping self-defeating thoughts.

In many cases, these beliefs revolve around “if-then” and “should” assumptions. For instance, you may assume that you should be nice to your children all of the time or that you must work twelve hours a day to be successful. Core beliefs run even deeper than your assumptions. These are how you generally see yourself, others, and the rest of the world. For example, a core belief about yourself might be, “I am worthless”; one about others might be, “She’s not dependable”; and one about the world, “People can’t be trusted.” Core beliefs are absolute. They have no qualifiers.

Getting at these assumptions and beliefs will help slow the flow of negative thoughts into your head. Because you formed many of your assumptions and beliefs during childhood and early adulthood, they will be harder to confront and replace than your everyday thoughts. Often your beliefs stem from information you received about the world from an early age. For example, if you grew up in a dysfunctional home with abusive parents, you may never have felt safe or had someone you could trust early in life. As a result, you may have grown up believing, “I must protect myself from others” or, “The only person who watches out for me is me.”

We learn beliefs from the behavior and verbal messages that were modeled for us early in life. Just as you may share many of your political beliefs with your parents, you may also discover that your deep internal beliefs that lead you to anger, depression, or anxiety came from comments your parents made over and over again when you were young.

No matter where these beliefs came from, it’s time to face them, sift out the negative and inaccurate ones, and replace them with more realistic and positive beliefs. It’s like switching over from something that you’re comfortable with to something new that you’re not. For example, when you switched from a VCR to a DVD player, the switch may at first have seemed frustrating. You may have felt attached to your old video collection. The DVD player may have seemed too complicated to operate. But after some time, you broke in the DVD and you trained yourself and your mind to understand it. Now you probably wouldn’t want to switch back because the quality on the DVD is so much better.

It’s the same with developing new beliefs. At first you will feel uncomfortable and may not even fully believe in the process. Over time, however, as your thinking changes, you’ll see that the new way is better and you won’t be able to understand how you could have stuck with your old beliefs for so long.

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