Reply To: More Freedom – What you believe you are vs. what you believe you "should" be

Hi Lee,

Thanks for your post.

Further to what Brian wrote, there can be different ways to resolve this.

You could, for instance, imagine being told “you should be ashamed.of yourself”, bring up the emotion linked to this, trying hard to feel it and then Click Track this down to 0 or 1.

This will take all the charge out of it.

Then you could hunt around for the beliefs around this being said.

In other words, as a child, what would.you have concluded about yourself when this was said? What was the implication?

The answers will come to you. You could also see if any of these resonate with you:

“I was bad”
“I was not acceptable”
“I was letting everyone down”
“I was not worth loving”
“(Whoever was criticising) was ashamed of me”
“There was something wrong with me”

For expectation beliefs, you can just work in the way you have. However, there is an even easier way for your friend to re-word this:

“Mom thought I would never get what I wanted”

She could then counterexample this, or come up with other explanations. For example, “Just because she said it didn't mean it was true”, “Mom was wrong about many other things too”, “Just because she said it didn't mean she thought it,” “Mom was just frustrated when she said things like that”

Then, she could be very playful with the PQT suggestions:

“Mom never really appreciated my tenacity and I can get past that now”
“I look forward to showing what I can get now”
“I can absolutely achieve whatever I put my mind to”
“Even though Mom was wrong, she did the best she could”
“No matter what Mom thought, I can absolutely get what I most desire”

For the other ones like “I'll never be successful”, you can use “I would/could never have been successful.”

Again, there are many other pathways available, so please ask away.

All the best,

Paul