Reply To: Exercise 8: Adopt a New Belief
Exercise 8, by Evelyn Wallace
1. I believe my ex is incapable or unwilling to self-reflect, and that he projects this unwillingness and inability on me. This makes me feel attacked, trapped, and defensive.
2. I’d prefer to feel empowered and collaborative. What would my social worker mentor say? She’d say that all complaints are requests in disguise.
3. New belief: my ex is one of my greatest teachers, and I don’t have to agree to him to hear him out. This makes me feel open, grateful, and safe.
Do I think I can really believe this? Absolutely. Why not?
Did you initial candidate belief feel fake?
I toyed around with a few beliefs. It was challenging for me to find one that wasn’t high-voltage, so I just jumped in. I’ve done a lot of spiritual work around how the outside world affects my inside world (and even recognizing that the boundary between outside and inside is more imagined than we are traditionally taught), so I didn’t feel like it was necessary to practice the “it’s raining, that sucks” type of beliefs. I just don’t have those anymore; or, if I do, they dissipate quickly under the rays of gratitude for all the threads in life’s tapestry. So I ended up choosing between two somewhat challenging beliefs, one more so than the other. Which means I already have next week’s belief-change challenge on deck!
But the short answer is no, the initial candidate belief did not feel fake. It felt like a different mechanism by which to reframe reality. And reframing reality is something I’ve been practicing since 2016. I wrote about one of those experiences in my “book”/ audiobook podcast <Lifegasm: Marshall’s Promise> when I talked about deciding that eating sugar in excess was something I had done often throughout my life. Every time, eating sugar in excess made me feel sick and disappointed in myself. After Marshall’s death, I recognized that layers of identity are mostly imagined and that behavioral patterns (even patterns set every day for our entire lives) aren’t who we really are. I simply decided that I didn’t want to be a person who ate sugar in excess anymore, and as soon as I decided it, it was true. My mind had changed, all that needed to happen was to “prove” it with my actions. And I did! I didn’t lie to myself. I just changed my mind about who I was and who I wanted to be.
Did that feeling change?
When I shifted into seeing my ex as one of my greatest teachers, it lifted a lot of the anxiety around what hurtful thing he might say next. Over the week, he was acting his best, so I didn’t get a lot of opportunity to practice. (Maybe this means I did the assignment wrong and I should have chosen something else?) But I did get to practice in any past-tense replaying of high-voltage conversations I’ve had with him. I didn’t get as worked up in my present-tense recall of past-tense hurts. And I found myself experiencing an absence of dread for the moment when he will (almost inevitably) slip into the high-voltage frame of mind that I previously found hurtful and demeaning.
Did you feel like you could change not just a belief but beliefs in general?
Yes. Though I have to say this is something I’ve had some practice with already.
Did you sense how your mind adopts beliefs and changes them?
Not really. I didn’t really focus on the pattern of belief-making and belief-changing. But I do think that with time, it will be easier to recognize unwanted emotions as (often but not always) connected to a belief and it will be easier to target that specific belief. Step by step, the way Josh loves to do!
Where and how might you apply your experience to the rest of your life?
The next time my ex comes to a conversation in a stormy state of mind, I will be able to apply the belief that he is a teacher and I will be able to hear him in a new way. I suspect I will also find teachers/ teachings in other challenging people. At least it’s pretty to think so!