Developing Alternatives to Your Core Beliefs
When you've put your finger on your core beliefs and identified those that are negative and unhealthy, you're in a position to develop healthier alternative beliefs.
Your new core belief doesn't need to be the extreme opposite of your old belief. Changing an extreme belief such as ‘I'm unlovable' to ‘I'm lovable' may be too difficult when you're just starting out. Instead, cut yourself some slack and realise that simply by beginning to understand that an unhealthy core belief is not 100 per cent true all of the time is enough. Here are some examples:
Beth's alternative to her unhealthy belief ‘I'm bad' is ‘there are good things about me'.
Rashid replaces his unhealthy belief ‘I'm a failure' with ‘I succeed at some things'.
Mahesh chooses the alternative ‘good things do happen in the world' to replace his old belief ‘the world's against me'.
Sybil replaces her belief ‘other people will turn against me' with the healthier belief ‘many people can be kind'.
Milo substitutes his old core belief ‘I'm unlovable' with the more accurate belief ‘some people do like me, and some people will love me'.
Generating alternatives for your unhealthy and absolute core beliefs is not about positive thinking or platitudes, but is about generating less absolute, more accurate, more realistic opinions about yourself, other people and the world around you.
Revisiting history
Many people can look back over their lives and get a fairly clear picture of where their core beliefs have come from. Sometimes, though, the source of core beliefs is not so clear.
Although most core beliefs arise from your early experiences, you can still form deep entrenched ideas about yourself, life and other people when you're older. For example, Mahesh develops his core beliefs about the world being against him following a string of bad luck and tragic events during his adult years.
Revisit your history with a view to coming up with some reasons behind the ways that you think and behave in the present. Be compassionate with yourself, but recognise that you're the only one who can retrain your brain into updated and healthier ways of understanding your experiences.
Replacing old meanings with new meanings
Experiences that you had earlier on in life were given a meaning by you at the time. As an adult, you're in the fortunate position of being able to reassess the meanings you originally gave certain events and to assign more sophisticated meanings where appropriate.
For example, Beth forms the belief ‘I'm bad' based on the information she had when her father was abusing her. She was young and worked on various assumptions, including:
Daddy tells me that I've been bad, and this must be true.
You get punished when you're bad.
I must've done something bad to deserve this treatment.
Now that she's no longer a child and recognises that she has this core belief, Beth can choose to look at her father's abuse and assign different meanings to his treatment of her:
My father had an anger problem that had nothing to do with me.
No child should be punished so severely, no matter how disobedient they've been.
My father was wrong to beat me, and I didn't deserve to be beaten.
My father did a bad thing by beating me and his bad behaviour doesn't mean that I am bad.
Use the three-column old meaning/new meaning worksheet in Appendix B to review past events that contributed to the development of your core beliefs and reinterpret them now as an older, wiser person.
The sheet has three headings. Fill them in as follows:
1. In the first column, ‘Event', record what actually happened.
2. Under ‘Old Meaning' in the second column, record what you believe the event means about you.
This is your unhealthy core belief.
3. In the ‘New Meaning' third column, record a healthier and more accurate meaning for the event.
This is the new belief that you want to strengthen.
Table 16-1 shows an example of Beth's worksheet.
Incorporating new beliefs into your life
Constructing newer, healthier, more accurate core beliefs is one thing, but beginning to live by them is another. Before your new beliefs are really stuck in your head and heart, you need to act as if they're already there. For Beth, this may mean her forcing herself to face up to criticism from her boss and making appropriate adjustments to her work without berating herself. In short, she needs to act as if she truly believes that there are good things about herself, even in the face of negative feedback. She needs to operate under the assumption that her boss's anger is a reasonable (or possibly an unreasonable) response to an aspect of her work, rather than proof of her intrinsic badness.
In Chapter 17, we suggest several techniques for strengthening new alternative beliefs.
Starting from scratch
We won't tell you that changing your core beliefs is easy, because that simply isn't true. In fact, erasing your old belief systems is so difficult that we think the best way of dealing with them is to make alternative healthy beliefs stronger so that they can do battle with your unhealthy beliefs.
Think of your old beliefs as well-trodden paths through an overgrown field. You can walk quickly and easily down these paths, as they've been worn down from years of use. Developing new, alternative beliefs is like making new paths through the field. At first, the new paths are awkward and uncomfortable to walk on, because you need to break down the undergrowth.
You may be tempted to walk along the old paths because they're easier and more well-known, but with practice, your new paths can become familiar and natural to walk along. Similarly, with regular practice, thinking and acting along the lines of your alternative beliefs can become stronger and more automatic, even when the going gets tough!
Thinking about what you'd teach a child
When you're challenging your negative core beliefs, try to think about what you'd tell a child. Act as your own parent by reinstructing yourself to endorse healthy ways of viewing others, yourself and the world.
Ask yourself what types of belief you'd teach a child. Would you encourage him to grab hold of the negative core beliefs that you may hold about yourself, or would you want him to think of himself in a more positive and accepting way? Would you wish for him to think of other people as evil, untrustworthy, dangerous and more powerful than himself? Or would you rather he had a more balanced view of people, such as variable but basically okay, generally trustworthy and reliable? Would you want him to believe that he can stand up for himself?
Considering what you'd want a friend to believe
When challenging your core beliefs, think about having a friend like Mahesh, Beth, Rashid, Milo or Sybil. What advice would you give them? Would you say ‘Yes, Rashid, you're a failure'? ‘I agree, Mahesh - life's against you'? ‘Beth, you're bad'? ‘Sybil, no one ever thought you were important anyway'?
Or would you be quietly horrified to spout these unhealthy and damaging beliefs? We assume the latter.
If you wouldn't want your dear friends to believe such things, why believe them yourself? Talk to yourself like you would to your best friend when your negative core beliefs are activated.
Shaping your world
When you start to adopt healthy core beliefs, it can feel as if you're going against the grain because in fact that is what you're trying to do. Your old, negative core beliefs are familiar, deeply entrenched and ‘feel' like they must be true. New, healthy beliefs can ‘feel' false and unnatural at first. Remind yourself that just because you've believed something for a long time doesn't make it true. People believed the earth was flat for a long time but that old belief doesn't change the fact that the world is round!
Some things are true, regardless of whether you believe them. Other things will never be true, no matter how fervently you believe them.
Chapter 17: Moving New Beliefs from Your Head to Your Heart
> In This Chapter
Strengthening your new, helpful attitudes and beliefs
Dealing with doubts about a new way of thinking
Testing out your new ways of thinking in difficult situations
Preparing for setbacks
After you've identified your unhelpful patterns of thinking and developed more helpful attitudes (see Chapters 2, 3, 14 and 16), you need to reinforce your new thoughts and beliefs. The process of reinforcing new beliefs is like trying to give up a bad habit and develop a good habit in its place. You need to work at making your new, healthy ways of thinking second nature, at the same time as eroding your old ways of thinking. This chapter describes some simple exercises to help you develop and nurture your new beliefs.
In many ways, integrating your new method of thinking with your mind, emotions and actions is the critical process in CBT. A parrot can repeat rational philosophies, but i doesn't understand or believe what it's saying. The real work in CBT is turning intellectual understanding into something you that know in your gut to be true.
Defining the Beliefs You Want to Strengthen
Many people who work at changing their attitudes and beliefs complain: ‘I know what I should think, but I don't believe it!' When you begin to adopt a new way of thinking, you may know that something makes sense but you may not feel that the new belief is true.
When you're in a state of cognitive dissonance you know that your old way of thinking isn't 100 per cent right, but you aren't yet convinced of the alternative. Being in a state of cognitive dissonance can be uncomfortable because things don't feel quite right. However, this feeling is a good sign that things are changing.
In CBT, we often call this disconnection between thinking and truly believing the head-to-heart problem. Basically, you know that an argument is true in your head, but you don't feel it in your heart. For example, if you've spent many years believing that you're less worthy than others or that you need the approval of other people in order to approve of yourself, you may have great difficulty internalising (believing in your gut) an alternative belief. You may find that the idea that you have as much basic human worth as the next person, or that approval from others is a bonus but not a necessity, difficult to buy.
Your alternative beliefs are likely to be about three key areas:
Yourself
Other people
The world
Alternative beliefs may take the following formats:
A flexible preference, instead of a rigid demand or rule, such as ‘I'd very much prefer to be loved by my parents, but there's no reason they absolutely have to love me.'
An alternative assumption, which is basically an if/then statement, such as ‘If I don't get an A in my test, then that won't be the end of the world. I can still move on in my academic career.'
A global belief, which expresses a positive healthy general truth, such as ‘I'm basically okay' rather than ‘I'm worthless', or ‘The world's a place with some safe and some dangerous parts' instead of ‘The world's a dangerous place'.
When you do experience the head-to-heart problem, we recommend acting as if you really do hold the new belief to be true - we explain how to do this in the following section.
One of your main aims in CBT, after you've developed a more helpful alternative belief, is to increase how strongly you endorse your new belief or raise your strength of conviction (SOC). You can rate how much you believe in an alternative healthy philosophy on a 0-100 percentage scale, 0 representing a total lack of conviction and 100 representing an absolute conviction.
Acting As If You Already Believe
You don't need to believe your new philosophy entirely in order to start changing your behaviour. Starting out, it's enough to know in your head that your new belief makes sense and then act according to your new belief or philosophy. If you consistently do the ‘acting as if' technique, which we explain here, your conviction in your new way of thinking is likely to grow over time.
You can use the ‘acting as if' technique to consolidate any new way of thinking, in pretty much any situation. Ask yourself the following questions:
How would I behave if I truly considered my new belief to be true?
How would I overcome situational challenges to my new belief if I truly considered it to be true and helpful?
What sort of behaviour would I expect to see in other people who truly endorse this new belief?
You can make a list of your answers to the above questions and refer to it before, after and even during an experience of using the ‘acting as if' technique. For example, if you're dealing with social anxiety and trying to get to grips with self-acceptance beliefs, use the ‘acting as if' techniques that follow, and ask yourself similar kinds of questions, such as:
Act consistently with the new belief: If I truly believed that I was as worthy as anyone else, how would I behave in a social situation?
Be specific about how you'd enter a room, the conversation you may initiate, and what your body language would be like.
Troubleshoot for challenges to your new belief: If I truly believed that I was as worthy as anyone else, how would I react to any social hiccups?
Again, be specific about how you may handle lulls in conversation and moments of social awkwardness.
Observe other people. Does anyone else in the social situation seem to be acting as if they truly endorse the belief that I'm trying to adopt?
If so, note how the person acts and how they handle awkward silences and normal breaks in conversation. Imitate their behaviour.
When you act in accordance with a new way of thinking or a specific belief, you reinforce the truth of that belief. The more you experience a belief in action, the more you can appreciate its beneficial effects on your emotions. In essence, you're rewiring your brain to think in a more helpful and realistic way. Give this technique a try, even if you think that it's wishful thinking or seems silly. Actions do speak louder than words. So if a new belief makes sense to you, follow it up with action.
Building a Portfolio of Arguments
When an old belief rears its ugly head, try to have on hand some strong arguments to support your new belief. Your old beliefs or thinking habits have probably been with you a long time, and they can be tough to shift. You can expect to argue with yourself about the truth and benefit of your new thinking several times before the new stuff well and truly replaces the old.
Your portfolio of arguments can consist of a collection of several arguments against your old way of thinking and several arguments in support of your new way of thinking. You can refer to your portfolio anytime that you feel conviction in your new belief is beginning to wane. Get yourself a small notebook to use as your portfolio of arguments. The following sections help to guide you towards developing sound rationales in support of helpful beliefs and in contradiction of unhelpful beliefs.
Generating arguments against an unhelpful belief
To successfully combat unhealthy beliefs, try the following exercise. At the top of a sheet of paper, write down an old, unhelpful belief you want to weaken. For example, you may write: ‘I have to get approval from significant others, such as my boss. Without approval, I'm worthless.' Then, consider the following questions to highlight the unhelpful nature of your belief:
Is the belief untrue or inconsistent with reality? Try to find evidence that your belief isn't factually accurate (or at least not 100 per cent accurate for 100 per cent of the time). For example, you don't have to get approval from your boss: the universe permits otherwise, and you can survive without such approval. Furthermore, you cannot be defined as worthless on the strength of this experience, because you're much too complex to be defined.
Considering why a certain belief is understandable can help you to explain why you hold a particular belief to be true. For example, ‘It's understandable that I think I'm stupid because my father often told me I was when I was young, but that was really due to his impatience and his own difficult childhood. S
o, it follows that I believe myself to be stupid because of my childhood experiences, and not because there's any real truth in the idea that I'm stupid. Therefore, the belief that I'm stupid is consistent with my upbringing but inconsistent with reality.'
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