Simple Versus Complex Beliefs

[JenWhetham]

Hello!

I just purchased Belief Blasters and listened to the instructions.

I'm trying to think about my list of “simple” versus “complex” beliefs.

For example, I think this is a complex belief: My partner will leave me for someone more attractive than me.”

So the simple beliefs would be “My partner does not really love me,” and “I am not attractive.”

Thanks for any clarifications!

[Brian TuckerPSTEC User]

I'm not loveable
I'm not attractive

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

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.

These should also be in the past tense format as per the instructions.

[Paul McCabePSTEC Pro and Forum Moderator]

Hi Jen,

Thanks for your question.

Brian has nailed it.

Also, it might be worth checking in with any relationship or “men” beliefs you may hold. Examples:

“Men are only interested in one thing”
“Relationships don't last”
“Men can't be trusted”

Also, about “self”:

“I'm second best”
“Everybody will let me down”
“I'm not worth loving”

For expectation-style beliefs, I find that PSTEC Negative (http://bit.ly/pstecnegative) handles these very well indeed.

For example, “It is my belief that my partner will leave me.”

By all means, as an experiment, you could go in with “My partner will leave me for someone more attractive” and then blast this. That might go into the past tense as “My partner would have left me for someone more attractive.”

Again, keep trying to believe that while running the BB. See if any “evidence” or counterexamples crop up.

All the best,

Paul 

---

Paul McCabe – PSTEC Master Practitioner

http://www.lifestyleforchange.com

Please contact me anytime if you want any assistance in utilising PSTEC to help you live a life of tremendous freedom & possibility.

Recreate yourself with PSTEC.

Skype, Zoom, in-person & phone sessions available…

[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!

[JenWhetham]

Dear Paul,

Thank you so much for this wonderful response!  I'm so absolutely grateful to you.

You wrote, “By all means, as an experiment, you could go in with “My partner will leave me for someone more attractive” and then blast this. That might go into the past tense as “My partner would have left me for someone more attractive.”

I'm going to do this TODAY!  I especially appreciate the “translation” into past tense, as I'm struggling with that. 

I'll fill you in on how it goes.

peace,

Jen

[Paul McCabePSTEC Pro and Forum Moderator]

Hi Jen,

Thanks for your posts. You are most welcome.

Your posts provide a really great insight into the pattern you are experiencing.

You mentioned, in your response to Brian, that you tend to end the relationships. Could that actually be a self-defence mechanism because you fear being hurt again? In other words, might it be that you want to get in there first?

“Abandonment” can be conceptual and does not mean that you were literally abandoned by your parents, or that this was formed as an interpretation of your parents' relationship.

It might well be a by-product of feeling betrayed or abandoned by friends or people you admire.

It is perfectly conceivable you might hold beliefs like:

“Everyone I like will betray me”
“I”m inferior”,
“There's something wrong with me”
“I”m invisible”
“People can't be trusted.”
“I'm not deserving”

Even the belief “My partner is more attractive than me” is not an objective truth. Some people may say such things, but not ALL people. More importantly, if you are not saying it to yourself AND feel good about who you are, that will be empowering.

If you do hold such beliefs, it would serve you well to eliminate them with Belief Blasters.

It seems that you already have a keen sense of various traumatic events in your life. There is more than one way to get there with PSTEC, so no pressure on that front. PSTEC is a very forgiving process.

If you happen to have the Click Track 2015 package (http://bit.ly/clicktrack2015), I would recommend simply clearing all of these historical pains. You can bundle them together via the Wrapper track and then run one of the Click Tracks. Keep going until you get the emotional rating down to a 0 or 1.

For events where you felt that people were picking on you, you could isolate the insult(s) (“chicken legs”, for example), imagine everyone calling you that and clear it.

You can also imagine that your partner IS going to leave you and Click Track what seems to be a very visceral fear for you. Whatever you imagine, you can clear and you meet those unwanted feelings “head on” and clear them.

Once you clear these, please let us know and then we can come up with some PSTEC Positive suggestions – even though you can use these at any time, I think in this case it might be best to clear the unwanted emotional intensity first.

Paul 

---

Paul McCabe – PSTEC Master Practitioner

http://www.lifestyleforchange.com

Please contact me anytime if you want any assistance in utilising PSTEC to help you live a life of tremendous freedom & possibility.

Recreate yourself with PSTEC.

Skype, Zoom, in-person & phone sessions available…

[JenWhetham]

Paul!  WOW!  THANK YOU!

You wrote: “Could that actually be a self-defence mechanism because you fear being hurt again? In other words, might it be that you want to get in there first?”

OH MY GOODNESS.  That thought had sort of flashed through my brain when I was writing it but I didn't consciously register it.  THANK YOU for sussing that out and saying it back to me.

You wrote: “Abandonment” can be conceptual and does not mean that you were literally abandoned by your parents, or that this was formed as an interpretation of your parents' relationship.

So I had no idea about this, and I am so grateful for this new way to think about this concept.

You wrote: “It might well be a by-product of feeling betrayed or abandoned by friends or people you admire.”

BINGO.  I didn't realize it until I read it, but yes, yes, yes . . . 1,000 times yes.

You wrote:

It is perfectly conceivable you might hold beliefs like:

“Everyone I like will betray me”
“I”m inferior”,
“There's something wrong with me”
“I”m invisible”
“People can't be trusted.”
“I'm not deserving”

Are you reading my mind?    These are very real core beliefs for me.

You wrote: “Even the belief “My partner is more attractive than me” is not an objective truth. Some people may say such things, but not ALL people. More importantly, if you are not saying it to yourself AND feel good about who you are, that will be empowering.”

Agreed 100%.  I'm especially grateful for your insight that my thought that Ray is more attractive than me is not an objective truth.  I'm thinking about Byron Katie here and the work . . . that question, “is this true?”  I feel like I've had a huge paradigm shift reading this!

You wrote: “If you do hold such beliefs, it would serve you well to eliminate them with Belief Blasters.”

FOR SURE.  I'm on it.  I'm planning to do one a day while walking (using the 18 minute track).

You Wrote: “It seems that you already have a keen sense of various traumatic events in your life. There is more than one way to get there with PSTEC, so no pressure on that front. PSTEC is a very forgiving process.”

I love that notion of PSTEC being “very forgiving.”  And yes, I do have a keen sense of the various trauma– I've tried EFT and EMDR, but for various reasons, it was hard to “feel the feeling” and my mind kept wandering . . . I think it's a combination of the tool and me being maybe finally ready to heal?

You wrote: “If you happen to have the Click Track 2015 package (http://bit.ly/clicktrack2015), I would recommend simply clearing all of these historical pains. You can bundle them together via the Wrapper track and then run one of the Click Tracks. Keep going until you get the emotional rating down to a 0 or 1.”

I don't have this package, and I very much appreciate this suggestion.  I didn't even know about the “Wrapper Track” so I'll definitely procure it and use it.  Fascinating!  I appreciate this specific technique.

You wrote: “For events where you felt that people were picking on you, you could isolate the insult(s) (“chicken legs”, for example), imagine everyone calling you that and clear it.

I will definitely do this.

You wrote: “You can also imagine that your partner IS going to leave you and Click Track what seems to be a very visceral fear for you. Whatever you imagine, you can clear and you meet those unwanted feelings “head on” and clear them.”

I have done this once, but only once.  I will do it again.

You wrote: “Once you clear these, please let us know and then we can come up with some PSTEC Positive suggestions – even though you can use these at any time, I think in this case it might be best to clear the unwanted emotional intensity first.”

Agreed– I will clear the unwanted emotional intensity first.

After my really intense day on Monday clearing all this with a combination of Belief Blasters and PSTEC Negative . . . I got really sick the next day (Tuesday).  Nausea, chills, aches, physical pains, cramps in my stomach . . . and I felt a deep sadness and loneliness.  Being sick and alone in a foreign country didn't help.  I was wondering if I was having a “healing reaction”?  I had one when I did a detox for the first time a few years ago (like a cleanse) . . . is it possible to have a detox effect from doing really intense emotional clearing? 

And then I had a huge melt down with Ray (me blaming, me taking on the role of victim), but he kept me on the phone and I told him a few of the stories I described above and he was really empathetic and caring.  So I feel like while it was tough, we had a pretty big breakthrough.

Anyway, wow.

I'm going to do belief blasters on one of these beliefs, but just one for today.  Yesterday was pretty intense! 

I am so grateful to you for being willing to offer me such concrete help and advice!

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