Your Shadow Beliefs and What to Do about Them
In my last article I elaborated on the main reason why Law of Attraction might not be bringing you what you want for your life. I explained shadow beliefs and how they are formed in our psyches, but I didn’t talk about how to discover what shadow beliefs you may be holding onto or how to change them. This article is going to address that.
The top of my list: See a therapist. A good psychologist or psychiatrist cannot be replaced by drugs, yoga/meditation, exercise, or wearing your friends out with all the talking about your problems. While all those things can help, therapy is the absolute best way to address your inner life and uncover negative shadow beliefs.
I am aware that therapy can run into multi hundreds of dollars a month in costs because any number of insurance plans still refuse to acknowledge the need for it in modern medicine outside of a DSM diagnosis, but there are an increasing number of lower cost online alternatives to be found due to the Covid lockdown. A Skype or Facetime session is better than being there in person these days. Google online mental health services to start looking.
Choosing a therapist can be a daunting experience. Who to choose? There is a school of thought that says a person should choose a therapist who is the same sex, race and culture as they are. That’s a safe starting point for someone shopping for a therapist. Especially for someone who has never experienced therapy before.
That being said, in choosing a therapist, you should look for someone who you feel a connection with. Someone who gets you. Race, culture or sex is secondary if it matters at all. Choosing the right therapist may take some time, so be patient and honest and give people a chance. Similar to dating, you may have to have single sessions with a few of them to find the one you feel most comfortable with.
When I first sought a therapist in the early 90’s, I went to a Non-Profit community based mental health program for cost reasons. I had my first session with the head psychologist, who’s job it was to determine which psychologist in the program would best suit my needs.
In that first screening session with her I gave a general accounting of my early life not leaving out that I had smoked pot in high school. I was assigned to a white female grad student who was a straight up, old school, Colorado earth mom and we got along.
Sometime years later in my sessions with the earth mom therapist, I stayed with her after she finished school and began her own practice, she read to me the assessment that the head psychologist gave her about me in the beginning. It included a description about my pot smoking in high school as falling in with the “bad” crowd.
I’m aware that I neglected to tell the head psychologist that I went to a private alternative school (i.e. Hippie School) that had a very small number of students. Fifty from grades 6 through 12. We were pretty much all one crowd for better or worse on any given day.
We definitely weren’t the juveniles hassling people in the Seven Eleven parking lot like some kind of James Dean movie, we were actually good, smart kids. I’m not going to say we were angels, but the extremes of our escapades involved getting baked and listening to jazz fusion records in somebody’s basement or living room.
Major events that were emotionally damaging in my life, happened during those teen years and smoking weed was my self-medication. Getting high really helped me shut out the noise of my painful and confusing family life and focus on school. I could sit and study for hours while high and not feel the need for distraction.
I was doing my boyfriend’s English homework on top of my own schoolwork and he was two years ahead of me, I did all kinds of things for extra credit and graduated a year early because I didn’t want to be in school for two more years without him. (I know, I know) To this day I believe I was as high functioning as I was back then because I was self-medicating with pot. And dealing or not dealing, with some daddy issues…
Anyway. That first psychologist’s judgment of me was based entirely on her personal stereotype of teens who smoked pot. She asked me no questions about what I did when I was high or how I felt about it. And that, my friends, is the sign of a bad therapist. A therapist is not there to pass judgment on you. So, you need to interview them as much as they interview you. Like a date, to see if you like them and feel comfortable enough to let down your defenses around them.
Start writing to yourself. Keep a journal. Write down your thoughts, your moods, your daydreams and night dreams, your memories, whatever goes through your head on a given day. Not necessarily a diary about what you physically did unless it involves what was going on in your head and your heart. Develop a steady self-awareness and inner dialogue with yourself if you haven’t already. That writing isn’t for anyone’s eyes but your own, unless you start writing poetry and prose and end up writing a book or something.
My next suggestions would be hypnosis. While talking to a psych professional really is best, especially if you’re a survivor of serious childhood emotional or physical trauma, hypnotherapy isn’t a bad option. The cost of a live hypnotherapist may be the same as the cost of a psychologist in the short term, but you probably won’t have as many sessions in hypnotherapy as you would in a long-term relationship with a psychologist.
That being said, not everyone is a good candidate for hypnotherapy. You can find out if you’re a person who can be hypnotized and spend considerably less money by trying out a good hypnosis mp3 program. For professional hypnosis MP3’s, check out hypnosisdownloads.com. I have no affiliation with the company, I do like their products.
Ultimately, hypnotherapy is best as an add-on to conventional therapy, both together are ideal if you can afford it. Insurance definitely doesn’t cover hypnotherapy. I do not recommend going on YouTube and pulling up hypnosis tracks made by God knows who. You may just get what you pay for.
Last but not least there is meditation, yoga and a spiritual devotion of some kind. Healing childhood traumas, changing shadow beliefs, is going to be life altering work. Mind changing work. Self-discovering work.
It’s going to take courage, perseverance and a genuine desire to heal your psychic wounds. Seek in your prayers a source of love and peace, seek to heal wounds you may holding on to and pray to understand yourself better. Work on forgiving those who have harmed you. Work on releasing resentment, anger and self-pity.
You have to treat your inner life, your internal world, as a sacred space. This is your temple where you commune with God. If going to a church or temple helps you to connect spiritually, then by all means do it. But you don’t have to go to a different building to connect with God, the connection is already built in. You just have to recognize it and strengthen it.
I hope these suggestions help you start on the path of healing and self-knowledge.
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?”
Corinthians 6:19
