Dear ninibee:

Glad you started this new thread!

1. “How do you know what the reality is?”- let’s take an example of reality: gravity. You know it is reality because when you jump, you don’t float in the air, but instead you come down to the ground.  You observe other people, animals, objects and you see that gravity is reality for them too and that nothing in reality puts gravity into question. Gravity is congruent with all that is observable.

Hard science is very good at determining reality. Always look for science and the scientific method of thinking, researching and experimenting in your efforts to determine what is real and what is not.

I will now jump to one of your core beliefs and that is that you rejected your mother from the beginning, from the time you were a young child and onward: science shows that young animals don’t reject their mothers. Science shows that young animals depend on their mothers to survive and that animals are very unlikely to do anything that endangers their survival. Therefore, I say, it is impossible that as a young child you rejected your mother.

2. “How do you change core beliefs?… I can only really think to ‘challenge’ them”- you have to challenge your core beliefs first. After all, maybe this or that core belief is true to reality (we have those too). So challenge first. You can’t and shouldn’t change a core belief unless you can see that it is indeed not true to reality.

It is easy to do with gravity, isn’t it. Regarding your core belief that you rejected your mother as a young child, challenge it: look for examples in nature of young mammals who reject their mothers, that would be a start of challenging.

3. “How would changing them make healing possible?”- the easy gravity example: if you change a core belief that gravity doesn’t exist, into the core belief that gravity does exist, then you’d stop jumping from rocks trying to float in the air and hurting yourself that way. The more difficult example that applies to you: if you change your core belief that you rejected a loving mother, to the belief that your mother rejected you, you will no longer feel like a bad person. People who believe they are bad people live bad lives- they suffer a whole lot.

4. “what keeps me ‘in’ my core beliefs, since many of them feel so bad”- a child is not capable to endure the belief that her mother doesn’t love her, that her mother is rejecting her. So she closes her eyes to that reality and believes something else that is not true. Now, the something-else doesn’t feel good, but the original (true) belief feels worse. Many false core beliefs feel bad, but not as bad (for the child) as the true core beliefs that we close our eyes to.

I typed all the above before I read your last sentence: “I feel like a bad person, a problematic person, and I just can’t stop being bad and problematic”- this is your false core belief. You believe it to be true to you ever since you were a young child. Maybe you believe that you were born that way,  bad, problematic. But I can see that it is not true as clearly as I can see .. anything.

Now that you started this thread and I replied, let’s keep the conversation going, okay?

anita

Dear ninibee:

It is better to respond in small amounts, like you did in your recent post. This kind of work, emotional learning, is different from intellectual learning, such as we do in school, tackling a large amounts of information at one time. Emotional learning is about tackling a small amount of information at a time, and repeatedly over a long period of time, returning to the same topic  already understood, because there is more and more to understand about it.

This means that if your thread is to work for you, it will need to extend over a number of pages and over a longer period of time.

“You also said about my belief that I am bad/ problematic: ‘But I can see that it is not true..’ I am confused on this one because many people do see me this way. Many people tell me I have lots of problems and that I am difficult”.

I will explain this point further: you believed that you were bad and problematic from an early age while you were good and not at all problematic. You believed this as a child because your mother treated you as if you were bad and problematic. In other words, the core belief was formed before you displayed any abnormal or problematic behaviors.

Later on, as you grew up, you did/ do act in problematic ways: dysfunctional, ineffective ways, because dysfunction is the consequence of childhood mistreatment.

Healing is a combination of correcting current dysfunctional behaviors, and going back in time, so to speak, so to understand what kind of child you were (not different from any other, not abnormal, not problematic, and definitely not bad).

Understanding your beginning in life will make it possible for you to catch up to the child that you were, and know that you are still good and that there is nothing wrong with  you.

anita

Dear ninibee

Regarding your first post: you do have direct evidence that a parent or a few parents of your peers didn’t want their children to play with you. I figure that you carried the distress of your home life to outside your home: other children’s homes, the playground, school. I don’t know if there is a case where a misbehaving physically healthy child is not reacting to the distress in his home and/ or the complete lack of parental guidance at home.

A child is a “bad influence” on other children when at home he is ..  badly influenced by a parent!

Regarding your second post: I wonder if your intense fear of vomiting has to do  with you having been forced fed as a baby- maybe your mother forced food into your mouth and you gagged, feeling like vomiting. I don’t know if you have or can possibly get this kind of information.

Regarding your third post: please don’t worry about this thread being all on me- I want to read from you. When I read from you and answer you, I learn more about myself, about people, about life, and I enjoy learning these things. So you are helping me learn. You mentioned feeling shame- I can’t take away your shame, of course, but I assure you: I don’t think of you in any way that will validate the shame you feel when you do. I don’t think of you in a bad or a lesser way for anything at all that you share honestly, as you do.

anita