Limiting Beliefs May Be Holding You Back or How Incest Is Still Affecting My Life

From Your Hands Can Heal You written by Stephen Co and Eric B. Robins, M. D. with John Merryman, page 37,

"Limiting beliefs are mental judgments that we've made about ourselves, the way the world works, or the way we interact in the world based on faulty, incomplete, or improperly understood information we have received, typically in the formative years of childhood. The information can come from primary authority figures (parents, teachers, clergy) or peers (classmates, friends), or indirectly from other sources in the world (books, television, movies, advertising). This information may be true on some level. Perhaps your parents' marriage wasn't very good and loving, or you really didn't have the ability to be a dancer. The information may even be well-intended. Your father may have honestly believed he was trying to motivate you to settle for nothing less than your best efforts. The mind of a child lacks the ability to discriminate and sort through these messages, however, so these unfiltered messages impinge upon your unconscious mind and lead you to form untrue assumptions about yourself and the world. These gross generalizations become limiting beliefs, which, in some ways, are the toughest types of unconscious programming to dislodge or bypass."

Along these same lines, yesterday I read an article written by Alex Blackwell on his blog Personal Development for The Next 45 Years entitled 10 Things You Wish You Had Never Learned found at http://www.thenext45years.com/2007/11/10-things-you-wish-you-had-never.html .

Well, here is my list of limiting beliefs, some of which I am still struggling to change:

1. I learned that I didn't have value as a woman except to be a sexual object.

2. I learned not to expect anything from anybody.

3. I learned that the world was a dangerous place.

4. I learned to not trust anyone, including myself.

5. I learned that God didn't care about me.

6. I learned that I could never be good enough.

7. I learned that there was no one to protect me.

8. I learned that the dark was a scary place.

9. I learned to sleep lightly.

10. I learned to pretend that I was asleep sometimes when I wasn't.

11. I learned to be afraid of sounds in the night.

12. I learned that a child's no wasn't important.

13. I learned to be quiet, to hold in the screams of pain and rage.

14. I learned that to cry was to be weak.

15. I learned to not feel.

16. I learned that what I wanted wasn't important.

17. I learned to pretend that everything was normal.

18. I learned how to escape into my mind, books and movies.

19. I learned how to disconnect from my feelings and my body in order to survive.

20. I learned to be the family hero.

21. I learned to protect my mom at all costs.

22. I learned how to be a parent to both of my parents, rather than being a child.

23. I learned that people and life will disappoint you.

24. I learned that my body wasn't mine to control.

25. I learned to lie when all that I wanted was to tell the truth.

Some of these I have worked on and healed. Some of them, I still struggle with. Can you come up with your own list? Give yourself credit for those that are no longer a problem. Look at the remaining ones and see if there are any that you want to change. Can you imagine the ways that your life will improve by dealing with your own limiting beliefs? Yes, change can be fearful, but isn't peace and happiness worth the change?