The Programming of Self-Limiting Beliefs

And rewriting the code

Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash

We all live the stories we subconsciously believe to be true. In fact, those stories create the projections we cast out into the world that then becomes our lived reality.

If you're hesitant to accept this as an accurate description of why things are the way they are for you, I get it. I was once extremely skeptical that this was the case. I mean, why would I (or anyone else for that matter) choose to cast a projection resulting from a subconscious “story” that caused them any manner of hardship?

It didn’t make any sense at all.

It didn’t, in fact, until my work with clients began many years ago. And I began to understand how the human mind is conditioned.

Side note: if you’re looking for a real-world PhD in psychology, I jokingly say you’d be hard-pressed to find a better training ground than athletic training, stripping, or bartending. And seriously: the best facilitators I’ve ever worked with come from one or a combination of such backgrounds.

From pre-birth until the age of about 7, we are, for all practical purposes, curious and hyperactive programmable computers. During this very important developmental period, we live in a perpetual brain-wave state primed for absorption. We unilaterally accept, catalog, and store (as per our internal representation of the experience), everything we encounter.

And I do mean EVERYTHING.

Now, this IS a very important human characteristic. Early in our humanity, we would not have been able to acculturate a child into the tribe so as to move them from liability to asset fast enough otherwise. Communication and cooperation being what gave humanity the edge. Even countering the huge negatives we had in “animal prowess” (speed, strength, natural weaponry, etc…).

And in order for that advantage to play out, we had to counter the huge burden that a long developmental stage can be for a mother and the tribe as a whole.

But you can already see the issue, here. In an unadulterated environment, the childhood “programming” is all completely useful to the to-be adult (relative to the functioning of the tribe). In “simpler” times, one could trust the purity and efficacy of the programming.

Not so in a chaotic, tumultuous, modern world. In that environment, we’re apt to pick up some very dysfunctional programming. Even if we come from a stable environment with a solid family structure.

In my work with clients, I do not judge the embedded story or the resultant behavior.  It’s the client’s choice as to whether a behavior is functional or not. It’s also completely their choice as to whether or not the story ought to be rewritten.

To use an extreme example, drug addiction is universally seen as a “bad habit”. And addicts, in addition to struggling with the addiction itself (and all the fallout surrounding the addiction) carry the additional burden of cultural shame and ostracisation associated with their condition. They’re awash in a stew of self-loathing and unworthiness that then perpetuates the need for the addiction to dampen the pain. It’s a disastrous self-perpetuating feedback loop.

The first step to breaking an addiction is to offer the client a reframe of the situation: that the addiction was — or maybe even still is — a legitimate coping mechanism for dealing with whatever trauma the addiction is serving to quell.  It’s very likely the first time the client has *ever* been offered such a reframe.

Such a reframe then removes shame and judgment from the picture (at least in this transformation container), which then leads to the client’s CNS “quieting” and feelings of being safe, loved, and understood.

I’ve had clients tell me that the only reason they are alive and in front of me now is because of their addiction. At which point I tell them that, from my perspective then (the only thing in which I am an expert), I *love* their addiction. Precisely because it got them here, to this point in time.

Now the question becomes simply this: is this (currently legitimate) coping mechanism something you wish to continue, or would you rather rewrite that story with a different one?

Once the decision to move forward on a new story is made, the work — quite seriously — is already half done. And we haven’t even yet entered the psychedelic space.

That’s the power of languaging and shift of perspective. And that power — especially so as leveraged in the proper psychedelic container — can be utilized to change *any* self-limiting belief story. No matter the experience or trauma that put the story there.

These tools and modalities can even change imprinting patterns, which I will discuss in the next post.

In short, one can think of imprinting as the seed code for a person's psychology.  The most basic wiring of our psychology which primes the organism’s most rudimentary relationship with the world — at the most base physiological level — with associations to safety and power/strength.

Til next time —
Keith