How Therapists Can Address False Beliefs and Facilitate Change
The human mind is vast and complex, with thousands of daily random thoughts, ideas, associations, and imagery. Adding to the mix is a myriad of emotions and feelings. At some point in our cognitive evolution, we began to ponder what is real; what is true about ourselves, others, and the world around us. Ancient philosophers, scientists, psychologists, and theologians have had committed their work and lives to this pursuit and not all can agree.
Excavating into the human brain and nervous system using the tools of modern neuroscience we have come to understand some basic truths about how homo sapiens come to form their own subjective realities, and that they may not actually be objectively real. So, how is our reality formed, and why is it full of misperception, bias, and downright falsehoods? The answer demands a much lengthier explanation, but this article addresses some key ideas on belief.
How Do We Come to Form a Belief?
Very infrequently do we find people asking this philosophical question. Most of us just process certain information through or senses and either accept or reject them as real. Arriving at a firm belief about something is an important matter, especially now, when technology has not only transformed our culture, but also our minds. Taking from the earlier theories of Sigmund Freud, our minds are deeply layered. Our blindest, but perhaps most influential layer, is our unconscious. Then there is the preconscious, which lies between the unconscious and ultimately our conscious thoughts; the one’s we become most aware of. Many of Freud’s theories have been challenged in the last 100 years, however, his work was influential in understanding human thought and behavior. Hidden within our unconscious lies our experiences and observations, assumptions, conclusions, and ultimately our core beliefs. This begins at birth and is an automatic and conditioned process. To make matters more complex, and sometimes confusing, our perception about our outer and inner worlds are more limited than we’d like to accept, full of unintentional deceptions and biases. We see this phenomenon not only in scientific experiment, but also in how we form opinions on just about everything and everyone. Even with the best empirical evidence to support or refute a belief there will always be a certain degree of subjectivity. This does not necessarily mean that the belief we hold does not hold any truth; it just cannot fully hold All truth. There will always be another view, thought, or feeling about such phenomenon, no matter how hard we try to rid ourselves of this subjectivity. Because of our unique experiences, observations made about them, their assumptions about the observations, we reach our own conclusions, resulting in a certain belief. This is a purely cognitive process, belonging to every Homo Sapien that has ever lived. This, the result of our brain’s developed neocortex, and our ability to feel and interpret emotions about these beliefs.
Ongoing research in the field of clinical psychology and neuroaffective science studies the question of what really motivates human behavior. Thoughts or feelings? While both are instrumental in making decisions, more empirical support is being given to our primitive brain areas, which involve automatic body and emotional responses, including our unconscious. Some of these basic emotions include anger, disgust, joy, surprise, sadness, shame, and lust. When these feelings are felt (or not), our neocortex, or thinking brain, analyzes them, makes assumptions, conclusions about the assumptions, and then acts on the created belief. Feelings provide the necessary information about our affective state, caused by internal and external stimuli, and are as important if not more so than our thoughts about them. Without getting too clinical or philosophical, it is apparent that our beliefs are more subjective rather than objective and based less in reality than we might feel comfortable accepting. Human beings are truly averse to uncertainty and the limited predictability in life, so we can actually make stuff up, thinking it is real.
Addressing Negative Beliefs in Therapy
Therapy can be much more than decreasing one’s personal suffering and psychological symptoms, but also a journey in changing one’s perception and beliefs about themselves; all in favor of positive outcomes. The therapist has his/her own subjective field of belief or reality, which intersects with the client’s unique subjective field. Within this intersection a new understanding and perception takes place, which can change the narrative of the client’s situation and life. Spend enough time in the therapy chair and you will hear common and similar core beliefs that clients hold, such as “I am not good enough”, “I am not loveable,” “I am not competent, or wealthy, or sexy enough etc.” We identify this as our inner critic, which is almost always louder and more persistent than anyone on earth. Because we’ve been unconsciously playing this internal audio tape since childhood, we begin to believe it as true. This tape not only gets transmitted from our early childhood experiences, but also from our culture, schools, places of worship, and media. But what if this tape contains falsehoods about us, which it usually does? Even scarier is that we have formed our identity around these false beliefs, so we conclude they must be true and real. Sometimes, these beliefs even feel right and good, but can also be loaded with delusion.
A well-trained, attuned, and experienced therapist can help parse out one’s unconscious, by exploring a client’s negative beliefs, but also in assisting clients in making sense out of their life narrative, and challenging misperceptions about themselves and the world. A deep understanding of the client’s experiences, their stories and beliefs is critical, while exploring and challenging false or hurtful assumptions about those experiences. This is done through compassion and a non-judgmental approach. We must be careful never to demand or insert our view as therapists, because we must also accept our own bias and subjective reality. However, we can guide, be curious, and ask pertinent questions that will initiate deeper inward reflection by our client(s). As clients and therapists alike, we need to be patient and sensitive in that deconstructing one’s negative beliefs can also be very painful, challenging contradictions, ego defenses, and other emotional deflections. We need to communicate the goodness we see in our clients and how we might experience them differently than how they experience themselves. More importantly, we need to teach our clients how to challenge their own false beliefs and painful emotions that keep them playing the same inner dialogue and psychodrama that has held them frozen from life’s fullest satisfaction and personal potential.
Best always,
David