Understanding

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Stand Firm, Grow or Fly Free with Balanced Negative and Positive Core Beliefs

Negative Core Beliefs Background

Resonance

This recurrence of the same issue in so many aspects of our life is called resonance. For example, if one of your unbalanced beliefs happens to be ‘I will never get it right’ then (as long as you do not get round to balancing and transforming that belief) you will attract people as friends who like you but who see you as awkward and unreliable (even if you are not really like this in everything you do.)

You may perhaps take up a career as a teacher (helping others to get things right) but your core belief will act as an unconscious brake on your natural teaching ability so you end up wondering why so many of your students don’t seem to get things right and inside will blame yourself for failing as a teacher. (I can’t get it right).

You might marry a partner who criticises you constantly for your inability to get things right and when the partnership breaks up you will tell yourself it was because you could not get it right. Right now you would probably be saying to yourself ‘I won’t even get this balancing and transformation thing right.’

If you have a belief ‘I am powerless’ you might find yourself in a relationship with a very controlling person.

My own issue is about the core pain associated with my sensing that I was of little ‘value’ to my parents when I was a child. One of my strongest unbalanced beliefs which developed as a result was ‘I am not valuable’ Today, by the way, I balance this with a positive belief by stating it immediately after the negative one, ‘The more I give my gifts away the more valuable I become’.

All my life, however, until I balanced these two beliefs, I have been troubled by people who failed to treat me as valuable. I even worried about whether this book would be sufficiently valuable to warrant publishing and whether my readers would ever see my teaching as being of sufficient value. Today I know that most of those fears were groundless, it was just one of my old unbalanced beliefs resonating through my life.

I also know that my own family would have found me a far more lovable father if I had spent more time with them, casually, just being ‘me’ instead of trying too hard to be valuable in other ways for them.

Your Triggers

A trigger can be an event, a specific comment, a specific experience, an action by another person, it can be a particular sight or sound, a sudden flash of a past memory, a tone of voice. Triggers (usually or always) ignite your immediate, strong and automatic reaction or bring on feelings of extreme pain, discomfort, fear, confusion, disappointment or devastation. Some of your triggers have been with you all your life, many have been there since early childhood. Usually, they will set off the same reaction each time you are reminded of the original situation.

All it takes is an event (being ignored) that in some way reminds you of your core pain, hearing a familiar phrase (‘you are so helpless’), being touched somewhere on your body, an emotion (someone else’s fear or anger), hearing a piece of music or a particular aroma. Often just talking about a painful past event will trigger you.

For each particular trigger, one of your individual protector selves will automatically try to take control and to ‘manage’ your reaction for you. There are some very clear links with your core issue and the roles played by your inner protectors (inner selves). Most disempowering polarised selves, high intensity patterns and addictions are directly linked to our core belief-adaption bind. Adult awareness frees us from these patterns as it unlocks the bind. However, as an self-empowered and aware grown-up self, you can learn to control your reaction to the trigger (and your core belief-meaning) including your emotional, physical, and mental responses. That means you can choose whether to follow the same old mechanical coping pattern (reactions) or choose a new way of behaving to deal with the problem.

Once you have identified your core issue and one or more unbalanced beliefs, you can begin to dialogue with the inner protector characters (inner selves) that work with and protect you from the pain of those beliefs. Learning to recognise your triggers helps you to see which of your inner protectors (inner selves) are cutting in automatically in response to whatever triggered you. As you become more aware of your inner protectors (inner selves) as they try somewhat ineffectively to cope with the pain of being triggered you can start to deal with your triggers in more adult ways.

This in turn helps you to recognise your core pain, your core issue and to understand the unbalanced beliefs you have had about yourself.

Your self-empowered and aware grown-up self Can Help Here

This website as it expands will include step by step worksheets that have been thoroughly "road tested" to allow you to identify in private your own particular core beliefs. As you work through the activity pages you will develop a much greater awareness of your core issue and your core beliefs and how you are triggered. You also become aware of the way your automatic protector characters (your inner selves) react to triggers and as a result how they control your life and play havoc with your friendships and even more havoc with your relationships.

You may be interested in my 2012 Core Belief Workbook by e-mail. The introductory cost if e-mailed is under $6.00. This workbook contains more information and extra worksheets and I recommend it because the worksheets are clearer and easier to print than the copies that needed to be reduced in size here to fit on your screen.

Growing awareness (the process not my year 2000 book of the same name) means that instead of being automatically triggered you can use your self-empowered and aware grown-up system to hold back those out of control reactions and instead choose your own reaction to suit the particular occasion. You will also discover how to use your grown-up aware boundary system (energetic shields) to help you deal in more functional ways with the pain that comes from being triggered. From that point it is also easier to transform your unbalanced core beliefs, as explained at the end of this section so that they no longer bind you into the old automatic reactions that stop you being authentic.

Using Self-awareness to Help Understand Your Core Beliefs

There are some very clear links with your core issue and the roles played by your inner protector characters (inner selves). Most disempowering inner protectors (inner selves), high intensity patterns and addictions are directly linked to our core belief-adaption bind. Adult awareness frees us from these patterns as it unlocks the bind.

As soon as you have identified your core issue and one or more unbalanced beliefs, you can begin to dialogue with the inner protectors (inner selves) that work with and protect you from the pain of those beliefs. This helps extend your awareness of what triggers each of them into action and how they then try to protect you.

Later, as you start on the process of balancing your old negative core belief with a new positive one, you will find it helps to dialogue with the beliefs themselves and with your inner gifts.

I have found that, as explained at the end of this section, this particular kind of dialogue usually provides the key to a really positive and successful transformation process. (See Balancing and Transforming Your Core Beliefs - Book N-3

See also How and why your inner protectors (inner selves) react when a core belief is triggered

How Your Unbalanced Core Beliefs Bind Your Reality

While you have powerful unbalanced negative beliefs in place, your sense of reality will be so tied up, bound and distorted that you literally cannot see the positive parts within you. You may even fight it when someone else tries to show you that you have a positive side, until you begin the balancing process. Your inner protector characters (inner selves) as they work hard to protect you, use their automatic, repetitive patterns to keep you out of the pain of a negative belief.

However, each repetition of the protection also helps keep the beliefs in place. As a result, every day of your life you will find ‘evidence’ that seems to prove that your negative core beliefs are true! If one of your beliefs is ‘My ideas are not worth listening to’ you will notice every instance where people ignore your advice (and you will be hurt by that).

You may totally miss those situations where someone compliments you on a worthwhile suggestion or you may hear it but get no joy from the compliment (you may even devalue it) wondering to yourself. ‘What is he trying to get out of me?’ You will miss the truth because you were so busy trying to cope with the lie. The problem you are trying to lessen is actually being helped to stay put.

In this way, whatever your unique unbalanced beliefs about yourself might be, they will control much of your life. They will unconsciously attract (towards you) the kind of people whose behaviour fits in with your beliefs.

At the same time your beliefs will help repel (away from you) those who do not fit in with the belief. And this in turn, will shape many of the ways those people then react towards you! Your core beliefs will also shape your choice of a career and marriage partner.

Author’s note - I gratefully acknowledge the valuable help and understanding I received while writing this section on Core Belief balancing and transformation, firstly from Nikki Nemerouf, and also from John Falcon for his guidance and valuable additions. I thank Earl Cass and Anthony Nutting for their support and suggestions, Jack Morin for his concepts so well explained in ‘The Erotic Mind’ and finally my ex-wife Rosamond for permitting me to include extracts from her own book on the core belief process.

I emphasise that these pages do not follow precisely the core belief and core profile model as taught by Nikki Nemerouf. Many of the ideas are however based on his teachings and the training I have undertaken with him. From that point I have introduced some alternate concepts, in particular the connection between this work and the psychology of the inner selves (xxxx) as taught by Hal and Sidra Stone. I have found that working with the self-empowered and aware grown-up self and dialoguing with the inner selves of great help in clarifying, balancing and transforming core beliefs.

With thanks - John Nutting

DETAILS OF CORE BELIEF WORKSHOPS - BRISBANE, SE QUEENSLAND, QLD NORTH COAST, GOLD COAST, AND SYDNEY NSW

Don't worry about these copyright notices at the foot of each page. It just means I want to hang on to legal ownership of what I write for use in future books. Until that day, please feel free to copy and even adapt them for your own use and for friends as long as you acknowledge me as the author and owner of the copyright and you don't charge anyone for them. If you want to use them professionally or commercially (charge a fee for them) or for clients, each sheet you hand out must include full acknowledgment of copyright ownership as above and if you are benefiting as a result, I would appreciate an appropriate sharing.

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HOME PAGE

What is a negative Core belief?

Why it is not easy to recognise your Core beliefs

Examples of negative core beliefs - is yours on this list

Typical over-reactions - the 'F' patterns

Fable - The case of the stolen self-esteem

Where did they come from?

The self-fulfilling prophecy trap

Why you react when a core belief is triggered

More about core beliefs - Resonance

Why you cannot remove or change or alter or engineer a core belief