The Fear and Anxiety Solution (29 page)

Struck with disbelief and confusion, the little girl felt her eyes widen and her body become tense and stiff. Immediately her mother’s behavior changed again. Once more she was sweet and loving—until Shirley smiled again, then her mother snapped back with angry words and threats until Shirley squirmed and cried. This bizarre and cruel behavior went on for quite some time, until finally Shirley’s adoptive father intervened. Looking back at this event from the place of learning, the adult Shirley finally understood that it must have been her mother’s fear of being powerless and out of control that made her want to control the one person she could—her daughter. It now made sense to her that when her mother faced her death, the ultimate loss of control, she still tightly held on to what had always given her a sense of power: control over Shirley.

Once she could release the patterns of anxiety and guilt from her subconscious, Shirley could accept that she was truly innocent and had taken on the self-hatred and limiting beliefs her mother had projected onto her. What
amazed me about Shirley was that despite these realizations, she didn’t turn toward hatred or resentment for her mother. Instead, she felt compassion for the suffering and pain her mother’s heart must have been tormented by for her to be so cruel to a little child.

Shirley’s story shows why limiting beliefs are so difficult to change and, at the same time, so important to change. One of the challenges with limiting core beliefs is that they’re accepted as reality rather than questioned for their validity. This is because these beliefs tend to turn into strong self-fulfilling prophecies.

To quote Henry Ford, “If you believe you can or cannot, you’re always right.” It’s a fact of life that what you believe and expect to take place is likely to occur just because you believe and expect it to. A study researching the likelihood of older people falling showed that those who’d stumbled in the past and believed they’d fall again actually fell more often than those who’d never stumbled and had no fear of falling. The study revealed that because of their limiting, fear-based belief, people changed the way they walked and held their bodies, which consequently increased their likelihood of tripping and falling again.
¹

Even if your negative expectations don’t turn out to be true, limiting beliefs still continuously reinforce themselves. You might be like Shirley—or know people like her—who continue to see themselves as flawed and undeserving despite all the successes, love, and admiration they receive in their lives. Let’s say you believe that you’re not good enough and that most people around you are more capable, more successful, more likeable—you name it. No matter what you’re planning to do, you assume, at least subconsciously, that the outcomes of your actions will only confirm that you’re not good enough. Not only will you pursue your plans with less energy, confidence, and focus, but your subconscious mind will also filter and interpret the results of your actions according to the limiting belief that you are, once again, inadequate. Consequently, you will feel even more insecure, anxious, and deflated, which further drives the “I’m not good enough” belief and so increases its validity and realness to you. Through this self-reinforcing cycle, a limiting belief becomes your identity.

Just like in Shirley’s case, limiting beliefs are fueled and kept alive by anxiety, guilt, shame, sadness, and anger. This is why trying to “program” a new belief into our minds—by only visualizing or repeating affirmations, for example—doesn’t work that well. For limiting beliefs to lose their hold on our
subconscious mind, we need to first release the associated negative emotions. You’ve already accomplished that part by working through the previous chapters, so now you’re ready to examine your limiting beliefs from a detached and more neutral vantage point—and thus pave the road to a new, empowered identity.

As I said in the second chapter, identifying limiting beliefs, especially those that have been driving fear and anxiety, can be challenging. These beliefs can become so engrained in the fabric of our identities that we don’t even recognize them as limiting beliefs. Instead, we accept as fact that we don’t measure up, that we can’t get what we want, or that we’re not safe. No matter how often in the past these beliefs proved to be true, when it comes to the future, they still remain nothing but generalizations and assumptions.

Imagine how you’d respond if your partner, your child, or your best friend saw themselves or their lives the way you see yours. Would you concur and encourage your loved ones to accept those limitations as their reality? Definitely not. Instead you would vehemently contradict him or her because you wouldn’t want this dear person to be stuck with such self-restricting presumptions.

The following process helps you examine carefully whether your views about yourself and your world confine you, disempower you, or provide fertile ground for further anxiety and insecurity.

Take a piece of paper, and answer the following questions.

What limiting beliefs were you surrounded with in your childhood?
Think about what your parents, teachers, or other important people surrounding you during your early years told you about money, work, health, others, or life in general. What do you recall they believed about you? How did they view and treat themselves? Did anything you heard or experienced in those relationships make you feel anxious, smaller, or unsafe?

Which of those limiting beliefs have you adopted and still hold on to?
There are different ways you may have assimilated anxiety-triggering beliefs from your childhood. The most obvious is that, at one point, you accepted what you were told as the truth, even though it might have hurt you. It might have been someone’s judgment that you were not smart enough, too sensitive, or fundamentally flawed.

Another way someone else’s limiting beliefs may have infiltrated your subconscious matrix is by example. Perhaps one of your parents was a worrier and
was also very critical of him- or herself. Because our parents or guardians are our role models, we subconsciously internalize their views and beliefs as our own. Several clients have told me that, looking back, they realized that they had so much empathy for their anxious and insecure mother or father that they became like them.

A third, more subtle way of incorporating limiting beliefs during childhood is through your interpretation of their meaning. Your parents may have told you that you have the potential to reach any goal you set your mind to. Sounds very encouraging, right? You, however, may have felt burdened by the pressure to succeed and ultimately become
deflated.
Because your parents’ expectations seemed to be so extraordinarily high, you started to believe you could never measure up to them and perceived yourself as a failure.

Which aspects of your life cause you to feel the most anxious, insecure, or trapped? Ask yourself, “why do i feel this way?” when you have an answer, ask yourself, “why?” or “why not?” when you receive the answer to the question of “why?” or “why not?” dig four to five levels deeper until you uncover the limiting core belief.
Don’t overthink—just go with the first answers you get. As I’ve said before, the subconscious mind processes information much more quickly than the conscious mind, and for this exercise you’re interested in the views of this deeper part of your mind.

Here’s an example of how your inner discussion might take place.

What are the common denominators and themes of your negative, anxiety-driven self-talk?
Notice how your daily thoughts may be connected by and revolve around common themes such as failure, judgment, lack, safety, and loneliness. The associated core beliefs might be any of the following: “I don’t have what it takes,” “I can’t have what I want,” “I am not safe,” “I don’t belong anywhere.”

Even beliefs that ostensibly seem to be about others or external circumstances—“People don’t like me,” “Nobody can be trusted,” “There isn’t enough money to go around”—are ultimately based upon limiting assumptions and perceptions of yourself. From the perspective of your subconscious, you may appear too weak and too vulnerable to deal with this dangerous world, too flawed and too unattractive for people to like you, or unable or not talented enough to create financial prosperity. Since we often can’t control or change our outer circumstances, externally focused limiting beliefs can
appear especially untouchable and defeating. However, just by asking yourself what you need to believe about yourself to have those beliefs and make those assumptions, you bring your awareness and your power back to what you have control over: yourself.

By the way, if your negative self-talk has improved to the point of being almost nonexistent, revisit your notes from
chapter 6
so that you can explore the limiting beliefs in which your negative thoughts used to be rooted.

A quick note to your inner perfectionist: there’s nothing you can do wrong in this process. Most likely you’ll find that you’ve subscribed to more than one limiting belief and then wonder on which one you should focus first or how you can let go of them all. Beliefs are stacked together and support each other like a house of cards. If you remove one of the deeper core beliefs, then the entire belief structure collapses. So no matter which core belief you choose to eliminate, it will inadvertently change and expand your inner identity.

To test whether or not you’ve found a core limiting belief, ask yourself what would potentially change if you stopped believing it.
Would your thoughts change? Would you break out of the constricting mold of your childhood? Would you find the motivation to take action, to move from being stuck to moving toward what you want? But most important, would you see yourself differently? You’ve clearly uncovered a limiting core belief if letting go of it would change your image of yourself—in other words, if it would change your inner identity. But exactly what does your limiting identity look like?

Whenever I think about my time in grammar school, I immediately picture my first-grade teacher. All I see is a dark beard (no face) and a knuckled fist swiftly whipping across the top of my head. This image is then directly linked to a rather painful cellular memory, one located at the exact spot where the knuckles landed on my skull. By the way, at that time, in our small rural school in the Black Forest, rapping on students’ heads was a common practice, a discipline applied for even small transgressions (at least I like to believe that I wasn’t
that
naughty). Other than this picture or internal interpretation, I have no other recollection or impression of that teacher in (or on!) my head.

Our subconscious has an internal interpretation for every facet and context of our lives. Similar to anxiety-triggering thoughts, some of those interpretations may float through our minds without us even consciously noticing them.
For example, let’s say every time you go to the dentist you feel the same inexplicable nervousness and sense of doom. It doesn’t make sense—your dentist is famous for her gentle touch, your experiences there have been nothing but positive (thank God for the men and women who developed local anesthetics). So what is this anxiety about? You’re probably unaware of how your subconscious interprets and anticipates the idea of dental appointments. When you think about your upcoming visit at the dentist, your subconscious may visualize you strapped down in a completely powerless position and your dentist towering over you with a menacing frown and a high-powered drill. It certainly looks like horror movie material. However, as soon as you’ve become aware of this subconscious interpretation, you’ve gained the leverage to change and adjust its intensity—and even its qualities—within just a few minutes. I will show you how later in this chapter.

When you mentally and emotionally identify yourself with a limiting belief, your subconscious crafts an inner picture of you embodying this belief. This subconscious interpretation of you in the context of that belief is your limiting inner identity.

Jane, an attractive and very talented forty-five-year-old woman, felt for a long time that her relationship with her husband was unfulfilling and that he was stifling her. All her efforts to motivate him to pursue couple’s counseling and to find ways they could connect with each other on a deeper and more intimate level came to nothing. After several years of frustration and disappointments, Jane realized that her husband’s willingness to change, improve, or even save the relationship was pretty much nonexistent. However, whenever she was close to deciding to leave the marriage and move on, Jane became very afraid of how her husband, who was known to have a temper, would react to that news. “Typical me,” she told me. “I’m just not strong enough to follow through with my decision.”