August 12, 2015

False-Beliefs-About-Yourself

You ever get the feeling as you age, that you’re entering into this period of unlearning all the false beliefs you had about yourself growing up? I’m starting to feel this great unlearning of all of the things I used to falsely believe about myself and life in general when I was younger.

Everything we know today has something to do with what we learned in our formative years, and sometimes these formative years can lead to crazy false beliefs that we come to believe are true.

Take for instance, if you’ve ever been rejected by someone you liked. (*Raises hand*). It can lead to the false belief that you’re ugly, worthless, or worse.

Or if all of your friends are hanging out without you, and they didn’t even invite you, this can lead to the false belief that you’re not worthy of inviting, or not fun, funny, or cool enough.

Enough of these throughout your formative years will take a massive toll on you. And if you don’t have some kind of truer understanding of who you really are (love), you go through life believing a bunch of false things, and making a bunch of bad decisions. And the funny thing is, no one actually tells you you’re unworthy or unloved, it’s assumed, and then taken as fact.

I got into a car accident when I was younger because I wasn’t paying attention. This led to the false belief growing up that I was a ditz, that I never paid any attention to anything, and that I was a bad driver.

I once dated an engineer who knew a lot about math and science, and a ton about politics. When I didn’t care to argue about political sides or have anything ‘smart’ to say about the things he did at work, I felt stupid. And this later led to the false belief that I was dumb and not really worth anyone’s time. (This one lingered a LONG time).

It’s really, really nice, when you start to unravel though, and begin to unlearn these false beliefs that you carry about yourself. Because as you unspool yourself from the tightly wound person you’ve become, you start feeling this awesome feeling of relaxation that never before existed. Especially when you’re in child’s pose in yoga, and you feel that unexpected crack in your back that feels amazing. It’s kind of like oh, I didn’t realize I was so tightly wound and in need of relaxing! So when you start realizing all of the things you’ve thought about yourself over the years are false, you’re like oh! I’m not actually unworthy, ugly, or stupid.

This unlearning and undoing of our past is liberating. I feel it in more ways than just unraveling past beliefs. I feel like what society has told us about everything is slowly being in some way unlearned in my mind.

Take for instance, being alone. It’s nonsense. When people put you in a room alone as a child, it was almost always bad. It was because they didn’t want you around, or you’d done something to be punished. So when you’re alone as an adult it never feels quite right. It’s this feeling of, well, I’m all alone now, is that because I have no friends? Is that because I need a partner? A roommate? And it becomes something that is almost looked down upon by society as a whole.

This is something to be unlearned though, because you teach yourself to realize you are never alone. If you are with yourself, you are with God. (Or whatever you’d like to call the one consciousness.) There is no way you are not a part of everything else in the world, it’s impossible. There are unseen things around you all the time, like spirits you don’t even know are there.

And dust mites. Those are alive too. And even the mildew in your shower is alive. Everything is alive, and there’s tons of it everywhere, no one tells you about it so you grow up living in purely physical this or purely physical that, and all it does is leave you feeling isolated.

The other one is the biggest false belief of them all: I am not lovable. Robert Holden talks about this in his book Lovability, and he describes this as the basic fear of most people. Everything, he says, is either love, or a call for love. And if you pair those false beliefs I mentioned earlier down to their bare minimums, they all have undertones of ‘I am not lovable’. It’s almost like once we dig into our feelings and fears, or the things we get upset about, we start to realize it all comes down to not feeling loved.

And for all of my talk about self-love, I feel unloved at times too. I’m on this journey right now where I’m trying to fit myself into a world, doing something I’m passionate about for a living. And it’s hard to pin point exactly what mark you want to leave on the world, and it’s a big fat mess of unloving thoughts and feelings, and they’re so freakin’ believable at times.

But I feel like I’m on this journey for a reason. I’m so hyper spiritual these days and it feels so right that I feel like I’m in some kind of incubator ready to be rocketed out into the sky of some great destination. And I’m working so hard on this new product I’m launching here on the blog and it feels so good. Everything in my life is unfolding in the most mysterious yet glimmering way, and I can only stop and stare at it in misty-eyed disbelief.

Is there anything in your life that you feel you’re unlearning over the years? Is there anything you’ve falsely believed about yourself in the past?

Thanks for reading! This post is part of a 30 days to 30 series, read all about it here

Share or Pin this post with your about-to-be 30-year old friends below! Or your 30+ friends :)

Monique Muro

Monique is an exceedingly happy human from LA. She runs the blog A Novel Quest, and writes. A lot.

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