Index

  1. Peeling back the onion analogy
  2. The Subconscious mind, beliefs, emotions and behaviours
  3. Your belief system and biases
  4. Ego defence mechanisms

1) Peeling back the onion analogy

Peeling back the onion is a notion I’ve been hearing this phrase the last few years in regards to a person’s beliefs and social conditioning. Its only recently that I have come to fully appreciate what it actually means.

Throughout life since the day we are born we are conditioned by our environment, the people around us and the events that occur to us. Through this process we begin to form beliefs, which we soon accept to be out true-selves; our identity.

Whist some of these beliefs may be beneficial, many of these beliefs are actually holding us back. These beliefs can have can a negative impact on you and influence your behaviours. For example a belief that ‘you are ugly’ may drive you to get cosmetic surgery in hope of looking ‘beautiful’ but even after the surgery you still may feel you are ugly. Some of these negative beliefs can even lead to depression and anxiety.

Other examples of these negative beliefs I am talking about are:

  • I am not good enough
  • I am not worthy of love
  • I am ugly
  • I’m not perfect
  • I can’t achieve that
  • I don’t deserve to be happy
  • I can’t be happy unless my parents are happy
  • I can only be happy with more money
  • It is unsafe to relax.
  • It is unsafe to be happy.
  • If I do something good for myself, someone else will be upset.

Now don’t get me wrong, everyone has some or even all of these beliefs. However, certain beliefs may dictate how you live your life more than others. The beliefs are made stronger whenever you are confronted with a situation where the belief is confirmed.  The belief may also be made stronger just based on an association you make that actually may not be true.

For example you may feel you are not beautiful. Then sometime during your life, you fancy someone but this person asks your friend out instead of you. This may make you think the person didn’t ask you out as you were not as beautiful as your friend; hence you made an association. The truth however might be that the person actually liked your friend as they shared common interests.

Now going back to the “peeling back the onion” analogy.

The negative experiences and emotions that you go through (all based around your negative beliefs) form your perceived identity. I say “perceived identity” because it’s the identity you believe you are, but in fact, prior to the experiences you probably didn’t have any of these negative beliefs. These beliefs could have been formed when you were as young as a baby.

Hence by delving into these beliefs and slowly learning to acknowledge and let go of these beliefs, you are able to move forward and not be weighed down by the negative beliefs.

So in the analogy you are represented by the onion. The outer layer protects the inside which is like the “mask” we often wear to protect our insecurities. Whilst you’re conditioned beliefs and experience are the layers that you peel/remove to understand how and why these beliefs formed. The older you get the more experiences you have to “peel” to reach the core and hence it’s a continuous journey but one that will leave you satisfied and content with your true self. Plus like peeling an onion you might find yourself having many tears on the journey to each your core and truth.

Now if you’ve read this far you either super interested or thinking I’ve lost my mind. So allow me to go deeper, into how you can let go of the self-limiting beliefs. Let’s start by understanding the subconscious mind.

2) The Subconscious mind, beliefs, emotions and behaviours

To understand the subconscious mind let start with understanding the conscious mind.

The conscious mind is part of your brain that helps you with logic and reasoning. It also controls the actions of your brain that you do intentionally whilst being conscious.

For example to get from the sofa to the remote, you might to reach your arm out. You did this action voluntarily and hence this is controlled by your conscious mind.

The subconscious mind (or the unconscious mind) on the other hand is responsible for your involuntary actions such as your breathing rate. So if you actively try to control your breathing rate, then you are doing it consciously but when you are focusing on another activity then that’s your subconscious mind. So when your breath naturally and not applying attention to your breathing that’s your subconscious mind.

Your subconscious mind is also where all your beliefs, past experiences, memories and learnt skills are stored. So when you experience a certain feeling or emotion towards something, it is caused by your subconscious mind. This mean’s your environment, family, culture/religion can all affect your subconscious mind. This is especially true during the earlier stages of your life.

For example, if you are about to give a presentation but then you suddenly have fear and anxiety it’s due to negative beliefs and/or memories towards giving presentations in your subconscious mind.

Certain beliefs, experiences, memories stored in your subconscious mind can be all thought of as programs.  An example of this would be if someone upsets you by calling you ugly, this can be due the person triggering a program in you. This program may be a set of beliefs that make you feel that you are ugly and upsets you. Furthermore, you may have experiences in your past where people have called you ugly and upset you; these experiences (that are made up from a belief or set of beliefs) make the program stronger.

Hence experiences/memories can act as evidence and make a belief that you have stronger or weaker. So beliefs get stronger when there is evidence that supports the belief and they become weaker when evidence contradicts the beliefs. The more you focus on a belief and find evidence to support it, it gets stronger. This is why focusing on negative beliefs such as ‘I am not confident’ can cause you to feel less and less confident.

Repetition is vital to influence the subconscious mind.

This means the beliefs we have can alter the perception we have of life and this can in return control our emotional responses to events and interactions. This consequently affects your behaviours and the outcomes we get; our behaviours being our actions such what we say and what we do.

What’s interesting is that many of our beliefs are hidden from us; they are submerged deep in our subconscious minds. These beliefs as mentioned can be formed when you are a baby or later in life.

Furthermore, as emotions are triggered by the subconscious mind it’s difficult to stop them without knowing the beliefs and programs. However by becoming aware of the beliefs you can find it easier to control your thoughts and in turn your emotions. Thus to change our lives we need to go deeper than exploring our emotions. We need to go to the core level of our beliefs.

Another key thing to remember is that your subconscious mind is not critical or judgmental. So it does not analyse or reason the input it gets. It stores information based on the messages, experiences, instructions and conditioning it gets.

What this means your subconscious mind doesn’t distinguish the difference between that which is real or what is imagined.  A good example of this I have heard is when you have a nightmare. So you might wake up with your heart pounding and you’re sweating. But the nightmare existed in your mind, you weren’t in any real danger at all but your mind didn’t know that.  You physiologically reacted as if the nightmare was actually taking place in reality. This is why advertisements can work so well, as they can trigger beliefs/thoughts in our subconscious mind.

3) Your belief system and biases

(This following section is taken from the book ‘The Gamma Mindset’ by Chris Walton)

In the book ‘influence’, social psychologist Dr Robert Cialdini shows that we tend to believe what we are told by people who we respect and are trustworthy authority figures such as doctors or lawyers. We believe what they say and don’t bother checking for evidence.

The following are examples by Dr Andrew Newberg about how we can distort our reality to fit in our biases.

  • Family Bias- we tend to believe information given to us by family and close friends without too much question or checking of facts. We have relied on these people, and we like and trust them, so we tend to believe them.
    • A good example would be if your parents compared you to someone else (i.e. other family members) and say you’re not good as them. If this continuously repeated by your parent, it may develop a belief in you that you are not good enough. So you spend most of your life trying to justify to your parents ‘you are good enough’ through doing things that make them happy.
  • Self-serving bias- we tend to maintain those personal beliefs that benefit our own goals or interests.
  • Group-consensus bias- we tend to put more value on those beliefs that are shared by others; the more others agree with us, the truer our beliefs seem to be, even if they are not factually true. Conversely, the more people who disagree with our beliefs, the more we will begin to doubt these beliefs, even if they are true.
  • Projection bias- we assume that people in the same group (religious, socio-economic etc.) as us have the same beliefs and view the world in a similar way. It’s the ‘everybody thinks like us’ mind-set.
  • Uncertainty bias- generally, we do not deal well with feelings of uncertainty and ambiguity, so we prefer to hang on to some beliefs, quickly form an opinion or make up our minds, or conversely to disbelieve facts about which we are unsure, rather than to remain uncertain for very long. We tend to do this even if it is in our advantage not to come to a conclusion or to wait to make a decision to form an opinion until we have more information.
  • Publication bias- we tend to believe information that is published or reported in the media, such as on television or by some other seemingly reliable source, without asking to many questions. As an example, in 1976 the BBC broadcast that the plant Pluto would have a bizarre gravitational effect on Jupiter as it passed the planet, and the effect could be felt even on Earth. It reported that if you jumped at just the right time you could experience a wonderful floating effect. Hundreds of people called in to say that they had experience it! Of course, no such effect was possible

We all operate every day according to one or more of these belief biases. We need them to survive, to avoid being inundated and overloaded with information. However, we can always evaluate our beliefs bias and our beliefs and see if they are helping us or actually holding us back from reaching our full potential.

So how can we change our beliefs and be more aware of the beliefs in our subconscious mind? Well before we get there let’s have a look at what our ego defence mechanisms are.

4) Ego defence mechanisms

Our ego defence mechanisms can be described as strategies that are unconsciously used to protect a person from anxiety arising from unacceptable thoughts or feelings (Freud 1937; McLeod 2017)

We use these defence mechanisms as a way to protect yourself from feelings of anxiety, guilt or sadness. It’s an evolutionary and natural mechanism in everyone that becomes active when we perceive potential threats. The defence mechanisms work at an unconscious level (i.e. subconscious mind) and help a person feel better or fight of unpleasant feelings.

The table (McLeod 2017) below shows some examples of defence mechanisms and gives an example of each:

These mechanisms can therefore be used against painful aspects of external reality. The ego defence mechanism act is an evolutionary SURVIVAL mechanism. Although, sometimes the defence mechanisms are healthy, other times they are not and can make the problem even worse.

In relation to beliefs, these ego defence mechanisms play an important role because they help protect certain beliefs you have obtained through life, even if the belief is doing more harm to you then you think. Furthermore, some of these beliefs may not even be true, but people will cling on to them despite there being no evidence.

An example of this would be perhaps you have a certain dislike towards someone (let’s call them person X) because you believe they are a bad person and that they hate you. This belief is based on the way they treated you in when they were younger. Perhaps person X bullied you or they were never nice to you. Now 20 years later, you see each other whilst shopping and person X come over to you. Person X apologises to you and explains they had been going through a hard time at home when they were younger and released their own frustration on you. However, you still hate them for what they did to you. Your ego defence mechanism then kicks in, and you believe person X is lying and that they still hate you. You therefore, don’t accept their apology and walk on.

Now this might seem okay, after all person X did treat you badly when you were younger. However, for weeks and years on you carry this hatred towards them and rather than addressing and acknowledging this hatred, you carry on blaming this person. You may justify this hatred, which makes you feel angry every time you think about person X even though they ae no longer in your life. Furthermore, you may even the carry the belief that other people hate you based on how you were made to feel when you were younger by person X, even if this may not be true. Hence this will affect your self-confidence and bring you unnecessary emotional stress. You could also then might meet other people with the same characteristics as the person X and assume they too are a ‘bad’ person.

Ultimately this belief you developed, that you haven’t acknowledged because of your ego defence mechanism, is constantly irritating you and playing with your emotions.

To be truly able to overcome this belief and move on, you need to be first consciously aware of these beliefs and acknowledge them. You need to recognise whether or not these beliefs and defence mechanism are actually beneficial or not for you. Only by consciously acknowledging the beliefs and ego defence mechanisms can you actually be able to start moving past them and begin to let them go.

However, with our ego defence mechanism in place this can be very difficult and in fact you will have to move out of your comfort zone. This means you will feel discomfort when doing this and hence this why it is never easy.

The discomfort may mean you face fears and truths you have been avoiding in your life. Such as the fear of failure or the fear of what others will think of you. It may mean you have to be more vulnerable and empathetic. But if you are able to stay with the tension and move through it and face the truth, it will ultimately allow you to feel a weight has been lifted of your shoulders and allow you to move forward.

A good example of this in my life was when I was overweight and eating unhealthy. As much as I knew I was fat, I would rationalise to myself that it was okay and I would lose the fat in the future (even though I didn’t know how). I never wanted to fully accept the truth I was fat. Why? Because I was scared it would make me not good enough for others and it would mean I was ugly. Now none of this was truth but It was based on beliefs and assumptions I accumulated when I was younger. It was only when I was faced the truth I was able to accept it, I could look forward to taking steps that would move me towards living a healthier lifestyle.

I guess you can think of it as by consciously acknowledging your beliefs, ego defence mechanisms and emotions, you are taking responsibility of your life and this is the first step towards transformation.

So how can we acknowledge and let go of limiting beliefs?