Thoughts shape our very existence. They have the capacity to enhance and build or deplete and destroy our life experience. And because they are so much a part of our everyday experience, we don’t tend to think about them in an objective way. Because of this, many truths about thoughts in and of themselves elude us. Including the truth that I am about to share with you today. What I am going to offer you today is a revelation regarding thoughts, one that has the capacity to transform your life experience completely. 

  First, I’ll give you the truth and then, I’ll explain it in depth so that you fully understand it. Here it is: Thoughts, especially beliefs, in and of themselves are part of the picture of adaptive strategy. Basically, beliefs can be and often are an adaptive strategy in and of themselves. And the letting go of the thought, is dependent upon the strategy being seen and the decision that the need for that strategy is no longer there. Ok, let me explain. 

Each and every one of us experiences trauma in our lifetime. A simple definition of trauma is distress without resolve. What should stick out to you about this definition of trauma is that this could mean anything from a toddler who is having chronic experiences where he is prevented from crawling to the things that he wants, to touch to that one time in kindergarten when your teacher shamed you Infront of the class, all the way to a woman being beaten and brutally raped while jogging in the park. Trauma is something that happens in all demographics, across all societal classes, to people of any age, race, class, religion or sex. There are so many types of trauma that a person can experience. Everyone has trauma. Everyone has experienced distress in their lifetime that is unresolved. The problem is, because people are normalized to the idea of people in general (including themselves ) experiencing distress in life, trauma flies under the radar in the vast majority of people’s lives. 

When we experience distress, most especially distress that we can’t find a way to resolve, we adapt to it. We create adaptations. An adaptation is a specific alteration that you make mentally, emotionally or physically so that you can manage something that is causing you distress. Each and every one of us adapts to our surroundings. This begins when we are children. We adapt to our parent’s personalities, beliefs, wants and needs, likes and dislikes. We adapt to our culture. We adapt to the language we are taught to speak. We adapt to the schools we are educated in. We adapt to the peers we play with and are bullied by. We adapt to society at large. We adapt to traumatic situations we find ourselves in. And this list just keeps going on and on. We adapt so as to keep ourself safe and give ourselves the highest chance of meeting our needs and succeeding at whatever it is we have our sights on, consciously or subconsciously. If we didn’t adapt, we would be in real trouble in many ways. So, adaptation is a survival strategy, if not at times a strategy we use in order to thrive. 

The big problem with the adaptations we make to things, most especially to traumatic and dysfunctional environments, is that those adaptations can and do absolutely destroy our life. They form and forge us to fit into those things we adapt to. This includes traumatic and dysfunctional environments. And so, we start to only make sense in those environments and only feel a sense of personal power in those environments. We feel like a fish out of water in different, even far more functional and healthy environments and relationships. And when we really, really want something different, these adaptations work against us. They act as resistant forces to the very thing we want and need. And so, we feel trapped in suffering. Trapped with our trauma on repeat in our lives. Our adaptations often set us on a trajectory of negative impacts and effects, taking our life in a direction that we would never want to go, if we were conscious of it. Basically, they doom us to creating something we don’t actually want to create. The problem is, we aren’t conscious of it. So here is a truth: If you want a different experience, you need to change the adaptive patterns within YOU that are lining you up with that experience. 

So how does all this relate to thoughts? When we experience something distressing or downright traumatic, we don’t just live through it and shake it off and go on our merry way. Instead, we create a thought and essentially form it into a belief, or several, in response to it. And this in turn changes everything. Beliefs shape our existence. They change the way we see the world. They change what we say, the behavior we exhibit, our personalities, the choices we make and the actions we take or don’t take. They change our direction in life. Because we experience thoughts as rather automatic, responsive and usually subconscious, we don’t relate to thoughts and beliefs as something that we, ourselves can make and with intention. This is especially true of what we often call “negative thoughts/beliefs”. We don’t see them as a part of the picture of adaptive strategy. When they absolutely are. 

You may have been hanging around psychology, personal growth, self-help and new age spiritual circles long enough to be familiar with the truth that there can be a positive emotional payoff for holding a negative belief. Well, consider this the kindergarten version of recognizing beliefs in and of themselves as adaptive strategies. But let’s graduate, shall we? When a person experiences something distressing, they form an adaptive belief that helps them in the situation in some way. It diminishes the distress in some way. This belief acts as an answer to a need. There is a need for this belief for some reason. It is really hard to see why a super painful, negative belief might be an answer to a need and therefore might help a person to manage the situation, but I assure you, the why exists. That negative belief serves some purpose. Never forget that people are more than capable of choosing between two terrible things. This is important to remember because when it comes to beliefs, this means that we often come up with explanations for things in the form of beliefs that are superbly painful, simply to save ourselves from something we find even more painful. But, when we do this, we set ourselves on a path heading in a whole different direction in life. One that ultimately leads us to the experience of future pain. 

In order to change this, and in order to truly heal the distress from the traumas we have experienced, we need to find the adaptive belief that we formed. We need to fully understand the why behind the formation of that thought. The self-preserving purpose it serves. This includes the need it seeks to meet and the pain it seeks to quell. We need to recognize that the need for that belief is no longer there. The belief is no longer a strategy that makes sense for us to use. This then causes us to pull our energy out of the belief, which causes the belief to dissipate. This allows new, healing truths about the distressing situation to flood into our conscious awareness. It also allows us to replace it with a different, conscious belief.   

So that you understand this in principle, here is an example. Brianna found herself in repeat situations where her mother was exasperated with her. Brianna felt like she could do nothing to prevent her mother getting upset and then upset again, and then upset again at her. When her mother would get upset at Brianna, she would look at her with a facial expression of utmost disapproval, act the victim to her, shame her, criticize her, withdraw from her, act appalled at Brianna, as if she should know better, insinuate that she did not relate to Brianna at all and direct Brianna’s father to confront Brianna. She also frequently would catch Brianna doing something and say “my god, sometimes I swear you were switched at birth.” This experience felt profoundly othering and like constant attack. Brianna was drowning in confusion. She could not figure out why she was being treated like this by her mother. She could find no reliable way to please her mother so the attacks would stop, nor did she manage to find a way to endear herself to her mother enough to be treated like she was her own. She was drowning in the painful, dizzying, vertigo-like onslaught of the experience. So, she formed a belief: I am an imposter. Essentially that she isn’t actually her mother’s daughter. That she was implanted there, so her mother would think that she was her daughter, but really, she isn’t. 

Brianna related a lot to stories like the Ugly Duckling and Stella Luna. When her biology teacher taught her about starling birds, she related to that too. And when she got interested in spirituality and someone taught her about star seeds, she was convinced she was one of them. The belief “I am an imposter” hurt like hell. But it made the situation she was in, no longer confusing. It made her mom feel safer. It allowed her to believe that even though she did not belong in her family, out there somewhere was a family where she did belong. It also helped her to cope through superiority, by imagining that she was better than the family that was rejecting her. That they were muggles or that whatever family she had before she was switched at birth was a more powerful, better, richer family. Like all children, she made her mother’s behavior about herself and thus, this belief about herself, rather than seeing the truth about her mother. 

The problem is, with this belief, she also unintentionally ruined her life. She just “took” the abuse, telling herself that any mother who had lost her true child and had a false child put in its place would reject the false child. And this, only enabled her parents in their dysfunction. She started identifying with being different to them and thus, separating and distancing herself from them more and more, only fueling all of their feelings of estrangement from each other, making her experience further “othering” within her family. Because this belief makes a person feel alone in the world, and believe themselves to be alone in the world, the world felt cold to her. The tissues of her body started armoring. Inherent in the idea of imposter-ism, is the idea that you are deceiving or did deceive someone, which makes you relate to yourself as bad. She felt guilt for existing. Because she slipped into the vibrational range of being “other”, she was also rejected and “othered” by her peers. The negative effects and impacts of this belief could go on forever. She has spent her entire life “othered” in the world. To the degree that she tried to commit suicide. 

Brianna isn’t consciously aware of this process that was taking place within her. She simply remembers never fitting in with her family and her obsession with stories like The Ugly
Duckling and Stella Luna. But, in order for Brianna to end this pattern and subsequent life experience within her life, she has to identify this adaptive belief she carries: I am an imposter. She has to see the strategy inherent in this belief. Essentially the self-preserving purpose it serves. The pain it is designed to quell and the specific need she had for it. Essentially, everything I just explained. She also has to recognize the negative effects and impacts that operating from that belief had on her life.  From there she has to recognize that the need for it is no longer there. It no longer serves her and is no longer a strategy that makes sense to maintain. 

By pulling her energy out of this belief, she would see more truths about her mother. Truths like: Her mother is actually mentally ill and did not get through her own trauma enough to actually be a true mother to Brianna. On an emotional level, her mother was covered in wounds and so, nothing could prevent those cuts and bruises from being touched. Because of this, trying to avoid getting in trouble was like walking on broken glass. She would see truths like her father also wasn’t an actual father to her, and instead only cared about his own personal peace, and that meant pleasing her mother. So, he did whatever it took to placate her and in doing so, failed to be a true father. From here, she could consider: In the place of where that old belief was, what positive belief is actually true instead? One that is in alignment with what I actually want to experience? And with that new belief, her entire reality will begin to shift. Different thoughts, different words, different choices, different personality, different behaviors, different actions. A change in her direction in life. A completely different life experience. 

This realization is one of the key components of coming into the actualization of yourself as a conscious creator. And I mean a conscious creator, even in the womb, even as a child. So much of what we end up creating before we begin to engage with thought and belief in a conscious way, is what we intended to create on a more objective, life-purpose level. This includes the terrible stuff in our life experience. But on another level, they are things we would never, ever intended to create for ourselves or anyone else for that matter. Sometimes not even for our worst enemy.  

Any belief you find yourself gravitating towards or thinking, may just be an adaptation you are fixing to use in the distress you are currently in. And any belief that you developed in childhood, may just be an adaptation you used to manage the distress in your childhood. Seeing the strategy inherent in these beliefs will make it so you can’t put your full belief in them. Seeing the negative impacts and ripple effects of them, will make it so you don’t take yourself down a road to creating a life experience you don’t want to live into, or continue to live into. And this will allow you to use beliefs in a far more conscious way. One that actually brings about the life experience that you are longing for.