Music. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy, the podcast that empowers you to transform life's challenges into opportunities for personal growth and healthier relationships. We're your hosts, Tim and Ruth Olson, licensed marriage and family therapists and trauma experts. As experienced therapists with backgrounds in addressing trauma and mental health disorders, we believe there is hope and there certainly is healing.
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We're so glad that you're here with us today. As we just celebrated the new year, a lot of people are feeling that motivation to make changes. And in the last episode, we talked about resolutions and changes that you could make. But one of the changes that we often overlook is addressing our limiting beliefs. And these are deep-seated thoughts like, I'm not good enough. I'll never succeed. I don't deserve love.
And as great of New Year's resolutions as you have and goals that you set, if you have these limited beliefs going on in the background, they're going to stop or at least stall your growth. And you're not going to progress as much as you could if you did the work to get rid of these beliefs. And so whether these beliefs come from childhood trauma, codependent relationships, or just general self-doubt, they can hold us back from really experiencing personal growth and enduring love.
So today we're going to focus on how to recognize and replace these limited beliefs so that we can carry healthier internal narratives into this new year and help you to stay on track. So let's jump into just discussing what negative beliefs actually are and why it's so crucial to reframe them, especially when we want a fresh new start in the new year.
So negative beliefs, sometimes called limiting beliefs or negative cognitions, these are deeply rooted thoughts that shape how we see ourselves and the world around us. They often form from repeated messages in childhood. Maybe we were told you wouldn't amount to anything, or you witnessed unhealthy relationship patterns in your home, or you're in some type of life-threatening circumstance. These things are all things that can program your mind to believe different things.
Whether you actively want to believe them or not isn't really important to if they are believed.
And so you may want to reject some of these negative belief systems But if they are currently programmed into your mind It doesn't really matter so much if you want them there or not They're just there And so additional things like your parents getting a divorce Emotional neglect or codependent relationships in the family that taught you I have to earn love by sacrificing my own needs These beliefs can become the default script for running in your mind Another
way to think about is that the limiting belief is like a broken record that's playing in the background even if you logically know better like I am capable there is still that voice whispering you'll fail or you're not enough. The goal of reframing is to rewrite the script so it no longer sabotages your personal growth and relationships.
And so to tie this into our last episode talking about the new year when we're trying to set goals of losing weight saving money improving our marriage but there's this core belief saying I always quit or I'm just not lovable. It can cause these goals to feel impossible and not just feel impossible but the way I like to describe it to our clients is that it's a giant roadblock that makes doing these things much more difficult than for somebody who's not fighting with these negative beliefs.
And so it's not impossible to overcome it and press through it, but for an already difficult task, it's making it even more difficult for you to achieve it. So how do you spot limiting belief? First, you want to pay attention to your self-talk. You want to notice moments when you say things like, I can't do this, or I'm a failure, or no one will understand me. And we actually did a whole podcast series where we covered negative beliefs and negative cognitions.
And so that would be a really great one to go back and listen to, to help you identify some of these negative cognitions or negative beliefs that you're believing. Another way that can help you identify these beliefs is journaling. It can be a big help here as you write down stressful situations or times where you felt anxious, depressed, triggered.
Maybe there are times where you've overreacted. Then look at that time and ask yourself things like, what are thoughts that crossed my mind right before I felt upset? Or if this was my thought, what does that say about me? So if I thought, oh, no one's going to come to my party, what does that say about me? It might be I'm not lovable or I don't deserve love. So this is kind of how you connect the dots between these external events and the internal beliefs that you're experiencing.
Another way is to consider the earliest memory of feeling that way. So when we're working with clients in EMDR, we often do this. We look at what is the negative belief that you resonate with. So maybe it's, I'm not good enough. And then we ask you to what we call float back, where you try to recall when you first felt that same way or you first heard that message. Was it in childhood? Was it from a parent or sibling?
Maybe it was a traumatic experience. Maybe it was just in second grade when Susie got a higher grade on the spelling test than you, or you got picked last for kickball. Even though these memories just seem like, oh, they're just part of the childhood experience, understanding the origin can really help us as we work with you through EMDR and healing that trauma around the belief. And I think for you, too, being aware of that origin can also help you challenge that idea.
Or if you know, oh, you know what, that's something my mom said to me, and my wife's not saying that to me right now. But I can see that it's agitating me, but it's not about her. It's about me thinking back to what my mom did. Right. And so be gentle with yourself, because discovering these beliefs can bring up a lot of uncomfortable emotion. But like you said, just acknowledging them is a powerful step toward growing
and healing from them. But once you've identified them, now you're ready to challenge them. So next, what we're going to be talking about is replacing limiting beliefs. Now, we can either do this with positive self-talk, or we can go in and reprogram those negative underlying beliefs. And so the first thing we're going to talk about is that positive self-talk. When you catch a negative belief like, I'm always going to fail, trying to ask, what's the actual evidence for this?
Oftentimes, what we do is we have a tendency to ignore the success that we have had, and we focus on isolated setbacks. Or maybe we don't even really have much evidence at all that we're going to fail. But we just have this looming feeling of I'm going to fail.
And I think one of the things, and this can be very difficult to do, but when you stop and you think about how it could possibly go wrong, and I'll say this as a recovering pessimist, that I have this uncanny ability that without even trying, I can just identify this horrific potential outcome that can come from almost any situation or circumstance. And when I stop and I think about the likelihood of that horrific outcome coming to pass, it's almost always infinitesimally small.
It's very unlikely, very improbable. Could it happen? Yes, but it's probably not going to happen. And so when you stop and you think about something like that, you have to rework your mindset to say, well, you know what, actually, it's probably going to work out a little bit more like this. Now that's going to be hard because a lot of time what that's going to feel like is that you're lying because it feels like it's going to be a bad outcome.
And it's going to feel like if you say the opposite, it's going to feel like I'm not being true. But you are actually being more true with the reality of the situation and circumstances. And so if you stop and you do what's called a thought audit, and you audit your thoughts, and you stop and you think, okay, how many of these negative thoughts or unhealthy thought processes are coming through? And how often are these based in reality? Or how often are they based in my worst nightmares?
And when you stop and you recount and you think about that, you might end up being very unpleasantly surprised where you realize, man, almost all of my thoughts are very highly negative based. And if that's a part of the case, it's going to make it harder and harder for you to one, enjoy love. But two, I always tell people you have a love bucket.
And when someone tries to pour love into your love bucket, if you have too many of these negative belief systems, it's like somebody's drilled a hole in the bottom of your love bucket. And so when someone pours in, it just falls out of the bottom. And so then you won't feel love or success or gratitude or any of these things because you're not able to hold on to it because your brain is too focused on these negative belief systems.
And I'd say another good check for this is, would I say this to my best friend? And this is a good check because we are so mean to ourselves and we say things to ourselves that we would never say to the people around us that we love. And actually, I really like that. And I think that's so good because when I ask a client that, they'll screw up their face and look at me in like shock. I would never.
And they get like so offended about even the thought about saying something like that to their best friend. Because they realize it's so horrible but when they're just thinking about it about themselves they've become so accustomed and used to talking about themselves in such a degrading way that it feels normal and natural.
So jumping back to what we were talking about after this thought audit, when you're thinking about that and you identify all these different negative statements or beliefs or always coming up with the worst possible outcome, you want to sit there and you want to craft a new statement in your head. So instead of something like, I'm always failing, shift it to something like, I've overcome many challenges in the past and I'm capable of success.
Or it's okay to struggle sometimes, but I can learn and improve with each step. Or failure is one step on the path to success. And something to even take it a little bit further is you actually want to sit down and write out these new affirmations or these new ways that you're trying to think. And then you want to revisit them on a regular basis. Because one of the things you want to think about is that you're trying to reprogram your brain.
And every time you naturally think these negative thoughts, if you're not then immediately challenging it with these positive thoughts, your brain is getting still more and more reinforced with these negative thoughts. And so just sitting down and one time thinking something like, I am worthy of love and respect and kindness, that's not going to challenge 15 years of believing that you're unlovable. But over the course of weeks or months of you doing that, it will challenge
that and it can help to correct that. Now, the other thing connected with this, too, is that sometimes this doesn't work so great. Sometimes you can get stuck where it's like, oh, man, these affirmations, I've been doing these forever, and they just never make me feel any different.
And that may require a little bit more of a deep dive where you might need to get some EMDR therapy, and you might need to go in and really work at reprogramming some of these unconscious belief systems because it's just a mountain that's a little bit too tall for you to climb on your own. And if that's the case, that's okay. There's plenty of times and plenty of experiences where people run into that, and they just can't manage that on their own. And you don't necessarily have to.
Coming in for assistance and getting help making it up to the top of that mountain isn't a bad thing, because once you're over that, the amount of benefit that you get is so unbelievable. And once you replace those negative belief systems with those positive belief systems, and now those really feel true, it really can be life-altering.
And as you're talking about replacing these limited beliefs with more positive self-talk, and as you're talking about crafting a new statement or using these affirmations, it makes me think of a kid's book that we got, and it's just called The Power of Yeti. I'll make sure that I go in our Facebook group, and I'll have a little story time, and I'll just read through that book. Because they do cover changing your words and how that really does make a difference.
So how do we take these new beliefs into the new year and keep them alive and keep them consistent and going throughout the entire year? One suggestion that we'll make is to have a daily journaling practice. Even if it's just five minutes a day, it can help you track emotional triggers. It can help you rewrite negative thoughts, reinforce positive ones. And you can just have a simple format. Just noting four different things.
What happened today that triggered a negative thought? Two, what was the thought? Three, what's a more balanced or positive replacement of that? And four, noting or writing down one personal win or something that you're grateful for. So you can use that daily journaling practice in that format. Or another powerful tool is a vision board. And these visual cues can help remind you of those affirmations. It can be inspiring quotes, photos that represent your goals or what you want.
And we talked briefly about this when we talked about the New Year's resolutions in the last episode. But vision boards are great because they keep your goals and the things that you're trying to achieve and who you're trying to become front and center.
For relationships try doing a couple's check-in early in our podcast in episode two we covered the daily dialogue which is a form of a couple's check-in and this can kind of help you stay on top of things and you're not just shoving things under the rug or pushing it under the rug and never dealing with it and having this huge mound that comes between you and your spouse but allows you to kind of correct things as they come. You can have shared affirmations as a couple.
Maybe there's something specific that you're both working on. Like Tim, you and I will make sure that we are staying away from all or nothing thinking. So we're not going to use always or never. And then Tim can check me when he hears it from me and I can check him or just something like that, where you're working toward the same thing and you guys can use each other as accountability.
And another practical tool, and we talk about this throughout most of our episodes, to seek professional help, whether it's coaching or therapy. Because if these beliefs stem from a deeper childhood trauma, like Tim said, we can help guide you through that EMDR process to really reprocess those painful memories that are fueling this negative self-talk.
And we can help to rewire that brain and rewire the neuropathways so that you're able to achieve these goals and you're able to live a healthier life and you're able to do these things with more ease because you're not fighting against these past memories or these past traumas or these negative beliefs that keep popping up even though cognitively in your mind you understand and you know that it's not true emotionally you feel it and it's
weighing you down you just feel so stuck and you can't get past it. So those are all things that we can help with through EMDR. And we have a link in the show notes for you to contact us, and we'd love to coach you through it and walk you through the EMDR process. But as the new year begins, don't just focus on these external goals or things around you, or I want to clean up my house and declutter my house. Give equal attention, if not more, to the things that are happening internally.
And clean out these negative beliefs so that you can cultivate personal growth and improve your relationships in a lasting way. And just remember as you do this, shifting these long-held beliefs takes time. And you're gonna have good days, you're gonna have bad days. But each time that you catch that negative voice, replace it with compassion and truth. So we hope that this episode inspires you to kind of flip that script on the negative beliefs that you hold as we head into this new year.
So have a great day and remember, your mind is a powerful thing. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. We hope that you enjoyed today's episode and found it helpful. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend? Also, we'd love for you to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It lights us up to know that this podcast is helping you. If you have any questions or a topic you'd like discussed in future episodes,
visit our Facebook group. Just click the link in the description below. Although we are mental health providers, this podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide diagnosis or treatment. If you are struggling with persistent mental health issues, chronic marital issues, or feeling hopeless or suicidal, you are not alone. Help is available. Please seek professional help or call the National Suicide Hotline at 988.
Thank you again for joining us on Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. Remember, there's always hope and there's always help. Music.