How Trauma Impacts Deep Beliefs – and How to Change Them
Sometimes what looks like people pleasing, low confidence, procrastination, overthinking, or playing small isn’t simply a mindset problem. It can be an old protective pattern that once made sense.
A common way of talking about trauma is to distinguish between “Big T” and “Little T” experiences. Big T trauma can include experiences such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, domestic violence, severe neglect, or other events that overwhelm our ability to cope.
Perhpas Little T experiences are quieter: having our needs dismissed, being repeatedly criticized, feeling inadequate, growing up with instability, or living around conflict and unpredictability. I’ll refer to trauma here as anything that’s a crosscurrent and that gets stuck in your craw, lol. It remains unfinished, whether it’s regrets, grief, unexplored passions, risks you wished you’d taken.
This type of trauma or unfinished business exists on a continuum, and different experiences can have very different impacts. Attachment – that area of human development and the soul’s journey re: the way we learn about relationships, safety, trust, and ultimately our relationship with ourselves – is hugely affected by the past.
And while Big T trauma can have profound and obvious effects, Little T experiences can also leave surprisingly deep imprints. (Good news is there has actually been progress for treating trauma in the last 15 years – more on that in another blog.)
Sometimes the impact isn’t a memory we consciously think about. It’s a belief. A perspective.
A way of approaching the world that insists, This is how things work. This is what I can expect. This is what is possible for me. These beliefs can limit our choices, our relationships, our work, and the possibilities we allow ourselves to imagine.
And the funny thing is, everytime you want to expand, that old story can show up. Trip you up. It’s not malicious, I’ve come to realize. No, it’s the way growth happens on the deep level. Kind of like having a physical handicap – and you want to be a dancer. Growth in this case involves some strengthening, maybe rolfing; there’s healing and repatterning to do, to fully embody and support that leap you envision.
How Do These Deep Beliefs Form?
When something overwhelming or painful happens, our systems adapt.
We learn from the qualities of the experience in an attempt to protect ourselves from something similar happening again.
That adaptation may have been incredibly intelligent at the time, serving protection and safety needs. We take on roles or jobs in order to belong, to fit in. But what protected us then may not be serving us now.
This is where I think of it as – It’s time for an update. Yep. The whole system needs to update.
The old belief, perspective, or modus operandi may have worked beautifully for an earlier version of you. But now the same inner program may be quietly sabotaging your growth – reining in what’s possible for you and your life.
It’s a little like running modern software on an old operating system. The system isn’t bad. It’s simply overdue for an update.
EXAMPLES OF HOW OLD BELIEFS ARE FORMED
Do you recall any instructions you received, or perhaps intuited, from the adults around you? Even just verbal suggestions, get filed away in our inner archives. Messages like: Don’t get your hopes up – you’ll be disappointed. Or, No matter how hard you work, it won’t matter because you won’t get ahead. Or, You can’t trust people – you can’t trust anyone.
The list goes on, often targeting success, how the world works, how to guard against threats of many kinds. Parents, teachers, and others leading the way often have good intentions of protecting their young ones. That’s their main job. But the less aware the teacher, or the culture of the time, the more they’re prone to be passing on negative messages, or ones that simply don’t apply to you now.
The culture also asks teachers at various periods to “not let them get a big head” or get “conceited” – in addition to not being disappointed, or hurt. Imagine how wise some of these kids were, how hopeful, exuberant even as they shared their dreams. That can be triggering when the adult has had their own disappointment in the past, and wants to shield the child against a similar challenge.
One trauma formed belief can grow an entire root system. Updating one of these roots will start to positively affect the whole system – but this does involve changing habits and perspectives. As malformed as the belief system is, it’s known. Comfortable. So that can explain why we sometimes will moan when one of these “growth periods” or change corridors visits.
Good News – Change Can Happen Quickly At Times
Yet, change can also happen quickly in the sacred space of healing containers like therapy or my model of integrative coaching. Once you get out of your head and include the heart, or work with a professional for a time, perspectives shift Old experiences are seen differently. That’s the power of awareness. The truth about the past is seen fully from a present time view, compassion often comes. The update swishes through the system.
Yes, the new possiblities take practice to believe and embody. And that’s the real work. And the resulting freedom – liberation from the past constraints that were once protective – so worth it.
The takeaway: When a pattern keeps showing up, instead of simply asking, “What’s wrong with me?” try asking, “What old belief might be trying to protect me here?”
Sometimes the Old Program Is Running Quietly in the Background
I’ll share one of my own recent examples because these patterns aren’t just something I see in clients. I believe growth cycles and their timing to be part of our soul’s contract, but not always (or ever? lol) in our control.
During a recent eclipse, an old pattern came into view that I recognize as something I inherited from my mother. This iancestral trauma or intergenerational patterns seem to be coming up for healing all over the place.
My mother had a difficult career trajectory after raising eight children. There were painful experiences when she returned to the nursing field, along with challenges around communication and work. She did the best she could at the time, and it’s good to remember that as a culture, we didn’t have the knowledge in the past that we do now. There wasn’t any Brene Brown podcast she could watch.
My experience of that pattern reemerging in my life didn’t land only in the land of thoughts or beliefs. It was somatic. I felt a weight land on my chest. And, it felt like an energy that wasn’t entirely mine. It was a surprise, and not welcome at first. In the end, I came to understand a lot more about the situation, including gaining a new appreciation for my Mom’s grit.
INSIGHTS FROM INNER CHILD EXPERIENCES
Using some of the tools I’ve learned, I connected with my inner child and discovered something surprising underneath it.
A young part of me had taken on the job of helping Mom be happy. Not an easy assignment! Mom likley had some depression at times; there was always overwhelm on many fronts. And there was more.
As one of eight children, I didn’t always get to simply be a kid. I jumped into adult responsibilities, including (trying to) help with financial challenges and the never-ending cycles of cleaning, laundry, problem-solving, caregiving, and anticipating what needed to happen next. This vigilance was a lot for a kid.
A belief formed:
**You are never done with work. ** There is always more to do. More to solve. More to care for. More to anticipate.
When I asked this younger part of me what job she would actually like to be, do or have if she had more choice, her answer was immediate: REST.
Ahhh. Oh, yeah… A deep breath came through my whole being when I heard that. And then an intuitive message arrived:
Rest = abundance.
No wonder abundance and rest have been such interesting themes for me, if an old program has been quietly running underneath them.
Deep beliefs aren’t sitting on the surface waiting to be found. They’re running in the background.
The takeaway: When a reaction feels bigger, older, or more physical than the current situation seems to warrant, it may be worth getting curious about what else is being activated.
A good question to ask in these cases: What % of this feels like mine? Or, try, What % doesn’t feel like mine?
Tools for Changing Deep Beliefs
Awareness is the first step in most meaningful change. It’s OK to just watch patterns and triggers for a time as you stand compassionately with yourself.
This is one reason I don’t automatically see those uncomfortable crosscurrents in life as problems. Often, they’re information. You can mine the emotional intelligence offered for the purpose of updating or healing old views.
Watch the dynamics. If you notice that something keeps getting activated or triggered, that can cue you to look more deeply. It isn’t working the way it used to. Yes, it’s asking to be seen.
Yes, it can feel inconvenient. It can feel like terrible timing. It can feel like, Seriously? I have to work on this now? But that disruption is an invitation to look underneath the surface.
First Awareness, Then Your Tools
This is when tools that support emotion-focused coping and awareness-building come into play. And it helps to have more than one or two tools in our toolbox. In the last weeks, I’ve used about four.
RAIN is one practice I return to. It’s a meditation practice for examining an emotion that feels more charged than makes sense. It helps you investigate what’s underneath it.
Thought work can also be powerful when negative beliefs appear – especially when we go further than simply replacing them with a cheerful statement. Instead, more integrative work names the deeper truth under the primitive blurt of the thought, that the system can actually begin to believe. That revised or updated thought holds the truth yet is helpful and supportive. This shift from the blurt to the bigger picture thought helps your next steps continue. This is belief change at work.
Another favorite tool is a core beliefs process developed by Marc Allen of the New World Library, who discovered Eckhart Tolle and published many other favorite authors. I like the way this exercise brings together the emotional, somatic, and thought components of an experience. It helps you identify the core message in language “simple enough for a five-year-old” to understand. This can be challenging when you’re in the throes of a growth cycle. You then develops an affirmation that functions like an antidote. Sticky notes are handy to write these on, because new beliefs do require retraining our minds and beings. You can book a session with me to try this out, and see what next steps beckon.
(STAY TUNED / TO BE CONTINUED) (This one ended up being quite a long missive!!)
Love,
Denise
