How Limiting Beliefs Are Born
Our subconscious mind is a library of our beliefs.
Hypnotherapy is one technique that has been developed with the intention of accessing this library and finding the beliefs that are bringing us unnecessary harm. Once we find the belief, the magic of transformation can begin.
One helpful thing to understand about beliefs is that they tend to dwell in the subconscious mind, or the mind that we have limited access to in our day-to-day lives. The subconscious mind is a part of a system that is responsible for your human body’s capacity to survive—AKA the nervous system. My nervous system makes me nervous around a predator, and when I am nervous I am more watchful for signs of someone trying to eat me. My breathing will be more shallow to prepare me for a fight or flight, or if it’s a really hopeless situation I might freeze and hope for the best.
It isn’t required to understand the source of every limiting belief, but it can be valuable to understand how they are formed.
You may have heard the words “shadow work,” a term accredited to Carl Jung that categorizes the process of inner inquiry that has been critical to human self-actualization since the dawn of self-actualization.
There are parts of myself that I am terrified to look at. I’m so terrified because I feel shame, and that shame makes me want to bury my heart in deep soil and let it be consumed by nature. If I bring a friendliness to that shame and ask how I can help it move on, I can heal.
This shame has sprouted in me from many seeds, some of them from childhood. A fixation on the past events isn’t necessary for childhood shame to take a hold on my present life.
There are some commonly labelled sources of subconscious beliefs in integrative hypnotherapy. Primary examples:
Repetition
Intensity
Early childhood
Altered states
When we repeat a thought, it creates an impression upon the subconscious mind. More repetitions will create conditioning in most circumstances.
Emotional intensity can come from what we perceieve to be the stakes in any given situation from a nervous system’s perspective. If I am humiliated in front of an authority figure, especially one who can directly impact my livelihood (caregiver, teacher, employer), this will have significant importance to my subconscious mind as a source of information that my nervous system can use to keep me safe. If I am sexually assaulted, this will violate me and generate an enormous amount of emotional intensity, even if it happens after my childhood.
In childhood, we are vulnerable to the whims of a world that we cannot not survive independently. We learn that our ability to form safe connections is tantamount to our survival.
In survival, I am experiencing the world from the lens of fear, distrust, and self-sufficiency (in shadow, separation). Those qualities will protect me from
I can use each of these sources of subconscious information to my advantage when I become present and have a strong fountain of love flowing through my life and being. If I have a friend to share stories with, or an animal to bond with nonverbally, or a practice of meeting with myself in silent spaces, I have a strong fountain of love in my life. If I have several sources at once, I have a river.
Hypnotherapy is only one tool that I use. I personally have to move my body a lot to even begin to move the mountains that grow before me in my life. I also love dreamwork and gardening (clawing at dirt).
My practice utilizes repetition, altered states (trance/meditation are altered brainwave states achieved by a relaxed focus, and the emotional intensity that comes from sustained body awareness.
Imagination is my most powerful tool when it comes to creating a sustainable framework for regulating my nervous system in an environment that feels dangerous. Imagination also lives in the subconscious mind. This creative, visionary part of ourselves is sometimes downplayed with great precision in our childhood by authority figures who had come to fear that generative part of themselves. These same authority figures were perhaps under great survival pressures of their own in their generation. My ancestors had to survive freezing cold nights in caves where predators dwell, probably sick from foraging the wrong plant or some bad meat.
Did their fever dreams inspire them to live another day?
