Recognize Negative Beliefs — How To Strengthen Your Thoughts

Your inner critic is just another voice among many others

Who am I? What can I do? Who needs me? The others are better than me. I’ll fail anyway.

Do thoughts of this kind seem familiar to you? If so, then you have made contact with the so-called negative beliefs.

Negative beliefs can be extremely destructive. Many problems and unpleasant behaviors can be traced back to them, which are always giving us a hard time for a better life.

We can be aware of negative beliefs. Then they usually appear in the form of an inner critic who yells such stressful words as the above loudly through our heads. However, there are also negative beliefs that slumber in the silence of our subconscious.

From there they control us unnoticed so that we don’t even have to know who and what is sabotaging us. Negative beliefs can have such a bad influence on us that they can even degenerate into illnesses like depression at some point.

In this article, we look at how you can deal with the beliefs that you are already aware of thanks to the loud vocal organ of your inner critic.

Resistance Is Useless

What does he tell you, your inner critic? How often does he look past? And how do you defend yourself against him? Do you try to ignore him?

If you should have found a magic switch with which you can simply switch off those unpleasant feelings that your inner critic likes to trigger, you should be awarded a medal. Usually, it is useless to fight against him. At least if you go by the findings of Steven C. Hayes. Hayes is known as the authoritative developer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

He proposes to completely avoid a fight with the inner critic. After all, the pain that the inner critic often causes is also a guide. He can show us where to start to recognize and fulfill our true needs. ACT is an approach that originates from traditional and cognitive behavioral therapy and aims to accept negative thoughts and emotions as part of life — and yet not to let them stop us.

The inner critic may cry out — but we are not required to take his views seriously or follow him blindly.

So if the inner critic is allowed to stay and fighting is no longer an option, then it becomes important to develop the best possible relationship with him. After all, it is not the content of our thoughts, but our relationship with them that significantly changes our quality of life. Thoughts come and go as they please, and that up to 60,000 times a day.

According to ACT, to improve the relationship with our thoughts, it can be helpful to recognize how fragile the credibility of our thoughts sometimes is.

You can test it yourself if you feel like it. Just open a window and tell yourself at the same time with full belief: ‘I cannot open this window’.

What will happen to you? The whole thing will probably seem pretty silly to you. You’ll probably open the window and, while you’re still trying to convince yourself that you couldn’t, ask yourself how you could even think such a silly thing.

After all, you can see that reality and thought do not agree with each other at all. You know very well that what you think is not true. It is exactly this kind of relationship that your negative beliefs need to be created — the negative voice in your head no longer needs to be taken seriously.

‘What we have to learn is to look at the thoughts and not from the thoughts.’ — Stephen C. Hayes

This is not so easy, because in everyday life many situations are perfect for giving our negative beliefs a flashy appearance.

A failed project at work, a dissolved tinder-match, or our sweetheart who hasn’t called back for hours without any apparent reason. And already the bad thoughts are raging at full speed. Forgotten is the fact that it was just one failed project out of many great projects. That a resolved match is not related to our value as human beings. And maybe our sweetheart just had stress at work.

Negative beliefs like to put us in the Rambo trap that they — and only they — represent reality as it is. They keep us trapped in a dangerous, imaginary world. How many times in our lives have they led us to not even dare to go near a certain target, even though we could have reached it without any problems? Just because we were convinced that it would not work anyway?

If the voice in your head weakens you, then this is a signal to question it in-depth about its truthfulness. First and foremost, a voice is just a voice. Nowhere is it written that voices always have to tell the truth.

How Negative Beliefs Arrive

Negative beliefs often go back to past experiences that have led us to negative beliefs about ourselves.

A mean and loud laugh from Steve because you stuttered once in front of the class. Mom, who once was at the end of her nerves and said something hurtful, which she didn’t mean at all.

There are many ways in which a negative belief system can form and eat its way into us. Especially the words and stupid sayings of others have the annoying habit to burn themselves especially deep into our memory.

Many negative beliefs are repetitions of what others have said to or about us. Foreign opinions that you never asked for and which are now at work within you. Maybe even for years!

Dealing With Negative Beliefs

The next time a negative belief haunts you, just ask: ‘Who is talking to me and who are you to say that?’, ‘Is that true what you are telling?’, or ‘Is what I think the only possible view of reality?’

You are not responsible for what others have said to you — regardless of whether they meant to or whether the whole thing was simply due to an unfortunate situation.

Therefore you are not required to believe these things any longer. If no one ‘answers’ your questions, you can also give your negative belief a name and talk to it as an adult.

The moment that shaped you negatively is already long gone. Since then you have grown, developed, and are now much more in control than you were at twelve. Ask your belief system what the positive intention behind its recurring appearance is and what it needs to coexist peacefully with you.

Questions like these could help:

• ‘Could it be that you want to protect me from something, such as (further) disappointments or rejections?’
• ‘In which situations did you try to help me and I did not recognize or appreciate your positive intention enough?’
• ‘How can I remember what you want to protect me from without getting myself down? May I reformulate you positively?’

This may sound a little crazy, but it’s probably even crazier to let the same beliefs ruin your life for years, isn’t it?

We cannot change what happened to us in the past. But the good news is that the past is over. And we can always check the conclusions we have drawn from these moments for their usefulness.

Above all, we may also open the window of our mind and simply let them go.