Reply To: Simple Versus Complex Beliefs

[JenWhetham]

Dear Brian,

First off, thank you for your prompt and detailed reply!  I'm so grateful.

You wrote, “The “leaving” piece would be around a fear of abandonment or others leaving you.”

The weird thing for me is that I have not experienced this.  Both my parents remain/ed married and live in our childhood home.  I have had generally peaceful conclusions to relationships and generally I was the one who initiated it.

So I don't have a charge or feeling around this particular belief of “People have always left me” (or however I would frame it in past tense). 

Rather, the core fear for me is that my partner is more attractive than me.  My partner is deemed attractive by conventional standards (people ask him if he is a film star now that we live in SE Asia) and I am . . . well, I am a female who just turned 40 who is aging. 

I also had a lot of traumatic experiences when I was younger when boys teased me and several of them told me no one would ever “like” me or “want to go out with” me.  This was in 7th/8th grade.  I remember one of them laughing at me when I said I had a crush on one of our “popular” boys in the class and he said something along the lines of “he would never even look at you.”  Another time a group of boys all gathered around me to make fun of the way I walk (I am pigeon toed) and chanted “chicken legs, chicken legs.”  Another time this very attractive boy was talking to me for quite a while and one of the girls on my swim team couldn't believe he was talking to me.  She ran outside after him (he had left and was waiting for the bus) to ask him incredulously if he “liked” me.  Her report of his answer was, “she is a sell-out.”  Finally, in 8th grade, when I did “like” someone, a boy from a different class, and we decided to “go out,” we were both teased so relentlessly (it became a huge topic of gossip and laughter and ribald joking) that we almost instantly decided to end our “relationship.”  I remember feeling disgusted with this boy I had so liked before– disgusted at the thought of him– and just wanting to end the whole thing and go back to the invisibility.

So I guess one thought that was coming up for me as I started to the PSTEC Positive (“Men used to find my body unattractive”) was the idea that I am either invisible due to my unattractiveness and when I am noticed (by men or by women) it is an object of ridicule because of the way I am dressed, because of my body, because of my walk, my general unattractiveness).

And that is just junior high! 

I'm just not sure where to even begin.  When i try to the PSTEC negative on one or more of these memories, I don't feel a charge– and because they are all now sort of connected for me . . . my brain bounces from memory to memory rather than staying focused on just one.

You wrote: “Something like “people I love leave me” “everyone always leaves me”  or whatever you catch yourself saying. E.g. A big one I found myself saying for years was “I've been screwed over a million times” and so until you let go of that you will subconciously just keep carrying all of that forward in life to create being screwed over a million in one times etc. “

Thank you for that example for and for sharing your feelings!

I find myself continually looking at attractive women who go to the gym and have gorgeous bodies and/or volunteer for charity (a lot of things that my partner is into that I am not into at this point in my life because I am working in a serving profession and I am consumed with helping people in my role as an educator), I think, “she would be the ideal partner for Ray.”  I see her as being worthy of Ray because of her beauty and her body being superior to mine by the world's standards.

I'm still not sure how to unpack my core belief here.

I guess I'll just share one more thing.  My partner is currently doing a charity bike ride with a group of about 20– many of them are fabulous, charismatic, fit women from all over the world committed to pushing their physical limits while volunteering considerable amounts of time to others.

So I have been terrified that he will fall in love with one of them as they spend 30 days biking through Vietnam.  I have done PSTEC negative around this.

This week, a Vietnamese woman followed my boyfriend on his bike asking him if he was attractive, for his phone number, etc.  He did not tell her, “I have a girlfriend,” but rather, “I don't have a Vietnamese phone number.”  She continued to follow him for 2 kilometers and then gave him her phone number– which he accepted.  He told me this that evening over the phone with the air of this being all a good joke.  When I told him that I was hurt and that his behavior was very troubling for me, he refused to believe he had done anything wrong.  We ended in sort of a gridlock.

so I know that this is a) created by my self-fulfilling prophecy, and b) that this wouldn't bother me if I didn't have these fears.

I've been using the EEF tracks to work on these events/feelings on a daily basis, but I haven't used PSTEC positive yet (I'm very new ot all of this) because I still have so much charge around all this.

Thanks for listening/reading!  I appreciate you!