Healing Trauma 11: Core Deficiency Beliefs

It's common for children and adults to believe there is something wrong with us. Core deficiency beliefs like "I’m broken, unlovable or disgusting" protect us. A child’s best chance for survival is to do everything they can to increase the amount of support and protection from their parents. We try to make sense of our experience and take on the blame for everything that happened to us as a child. Seeing the truth would jeopardize the relationship.

Say to yourself “I’m lovable.” Feeling unloved and left out is the basis of feeling we are unlovable. As adults, we can see the flimsy evidence for what it is. It was never true.

Transcript

Welcome back to Healing Trauma,

Working with Core Deficiency Beliefs.

One of the ways that children protect themselves is to try to maintain their relationship and their connection with their parents or other adults.

Our best chance for survival is to maintain that connection,

To do everything we can to increase the amount of support and protection that we get from our parents.

Sometimes a child will even take on the parent role and balance the checkbook,

Shop for groceries,

Cook all the meals,

Feel responsible for the emotional and financial and physical health of their parent.

Our core deficiency beliefs have protected us.

They are a way that we make sense of our life when we're a child by taking on the blame and the fault.

We could come to recognize that this is a protective mechanism and that it's actually not true.

It was never true.

What happened to me as a child was not my fault.

It's common for children and adults to believe that there's something really wrong with us.

We're broken,

We're unlovable,

We're disgusting,

That we were the one to blame for everything that happened to us as a child.

What is the benefit of believing that we were the problem?

It's our fault.

It's a survival mechanism.

Looking back on our childhood,

We can see that we actually were not at fault.

We don't even have to blame our parents and the responsibility is theirs.

It's not a child's responsibility to create a safe,

Nurturing environment.

That is up to the adults.

We might be angry,

We might have compassion,

There might be all kinds of emotional connections and disconnections happening between parents and children.

The bottom line is we've spent years believing something that was not true and that that's how we explained our life.

Through the eyes of a child,

We believed that we were wrong,

That we caused everything bad that happened to us.

And could we now open ourselves up to having some compassion?

In order to really let go of that belief,

We need to see that it's not true in more than just our conscious mind.

One of the ways that we can do that is to imagine ourselves as a child.

Bring to mind that difficult situation.

Or maybe if you have children or you know children,

You could imagine what it's like for them to explain their life to themselves.

This also is affected by the negativity bias in the brain.

We have all had experiences of feeling loved.

We tend to not form beliefs that were lovable based on that experience though.

When we have experiences of feeling left out or unloved or emotionally neglected,

We do tend to form beliefs that it's because we're not lovable.

So if you were to look at that,

On the one hand,

I have experienced love,

I'm lovable.

On the other side,

I have experienced not feeling loved.

And it's my fault because I'm actually not lovable.

If my own parents couldn't even love me,

That's pretty big proof.

There's something wrong with me if my own parents didn't even love me.

Now when we look back on that as an adult,

We might be able to see,

Well,

There was mental illness in the household.

One of my parents was too depressed.

They could hardly get out of bed,

Let alone show me love.

There might have been addiction,

Violence.

People have such a problem coping with these kinds of environments,

Including the adults that are in them.

If we have an emotionally regulated parent or an aunt or a schoolteacher who we can regulate with,

Who really sees us,

Who we get a sense of,

This person is on my side,

I'm not alone,

That makes a big difference to a child.

So then we end up as an adult.

Deep down,

We believe that there's something broken or unlovable about us.

What do we do now?

Well,

It helps to understand how that cord efficiency belief developed and just how common it is.

It's not common everywhere in the world,

But it's definitely common in Western cultures.

We rely on our parents for safety,

And when we don't have that,

It feels like a life threat.

Now we have whatever adult experience we have,

And we often still carry these lingering beliefs.

What do we do with them?

This is some of the deepest work that we can do.

What are my beliefs?

One of the ways we can find out is by saying the opposite.

If you were to say to yourself,

I'm really lovable,

I'm smart,

I have a good brain,

I can figure things out,

I'm strong and resilient,

Sometimes we'll get a sensation or an energy or even a thought that says,

No,

That's not true.

We might say,

I'm whole,

And we have a thought,

No,

That's not right,

I'm broken.

Things that happened to me when I was a child or things that I did as a child or younger adult,

It's clear,

I'm broken,

I'm disgusting,

I'm not good enough,

I'm not worthy.

One of the steps clearly is to see what those beliefs are,

And another step then is to look into,

Why can't I let that go?

Let's take an example.

My core deficiency belief is that I'm not lovable.

I got a lot of evidence for it.

With the negativity bias in the brain,

We can come up with lots of different examples of when we felt left out,

Disregarded.

We interpret other people's behavior,

Lack of attention,

Perhaps abuse,

As proof.

If I was lovable,

They would have loved me.

Why is it that we need to hang on to that belief?

Even if we see with our conscious mind,

Okay,

I get that,

That's not true.

There's something in me that makes it hard to give that up.

One of the elements at play is that that was how we kept ourselves safe.

We turned against ourselves so that we could maintain the best possible relationship with our parents.

And now that we're an adult and we can get a job,

We can fend for ourselves,

We have a lot more agency.

We're not dependent on our parents in the same way,

And yet we still would like them and need them to respect us and care for us.

Sometimes parents and children are estranged.

We don't feel like there's enough safety there or enough capacity there to work towards connection in a way that would be healthy and healing.

Sometimes the conditions of childhood are still very much at play when we're adults.

There's still the violence,

The abuse,

The contempt,

The dysregulation,

And we need to set boundaries.

For our own health,

We need to get ourselves out of those situations.

And now we're back to parenting ourselves.

We might have other people in our life,

Chosen family who believe in us,

Who care for us.

We care for each other.

And when it comes right down to it,

Our best parent is our own self.

There's a guided practice in the session on connecting with our inner child or connecting with our younger self.

It's really worthwhile to do that kind of work.

If we come into this inquiry of why I'm hanging on to this belief,

If I was to really know deep down inside that I am lovable,

Then how do I explain my experience?

If I admit that,

In fact,

My childhood experiences were not because I'm bad,

They are because my parents,

My adults,

Were not providing me with a situation where I could thrive,

That,

In fact,

The responsibility was theirs,

Not mine,

As a child,

Where does that leave me?

We might have a lot of sympathy and compassion for our parents.

We might have been parentified and taken on that responsibility for them.

That was one way that we proved that we had worth.

And yet seeing clearly is the most powerful thing that we can do for our own healing.

We can also repair some of the developmental delays.

We can create new neural networks for connection rather than protection.

We can do a lot of that as an adult by changing our personal life experiences now.

So many people are lonely and isolated.

In big part,

It's because we don't feel safe enough to be around other people.

We could work towards having some safe enough experiences,

Taking some social risks,

Building more resilience and strength in our own nervous system so that we could widen our window of tolerance.

We could get professional help,

We could get the support of friends,

We can do this kind of work.

Learning about trauma is a very powerful step in our journey of healing.

This somatic mindfulness process,

We look into something,

We notice how we feel in our body,

What is the energy,

The sensation?

Am I tightening up?

Is my breath getting choppy?

Or am I holding my breath?

And then we might do a practice.

We do some cyclic sighing.

We do relaxations on a regular basis.

We get more rest.

All of these things that we do to regulate our own nervous system are the ways that we have that strength and clarity to really see that what happened to me as a child was not because I'm broken or bad.

I'm not bad,

I'm hurt and traumatized.

And that is something I can work with healing now as an adult.

That is something that we can all do.

We don't need to hang on to those old beliefs for our survival,

Not anymore.

We can see through those old false core deficiency beliefs.

It was never true.

I want to say something here about our parents.

I have parents and I am a parent.

What I see is that most people are trying to do their best.

Sometimes our best as a parent is clearly not good enough.

I would parent very differently now that I have healed a lot of my childhood trauma than I did when I had my child at 20 years old.

Sometimes parents are abusive and they are not safe for us to be around.

If that's the case,

We might start with boundaries.

They might be very strict boundaries.

And sometimes we need to move to estranging them,

To not seeing them at all.

Especially if the parent continues to be harmful,

Contemptuous,

In our business,

Not respecting us.

We might have to set very strong boundaries with them.

And we also might have to not see them.

My father died when I was 40,

Many years before I started doing this healing work.

With my mother,

What I grew to accept is that she was very uncomfortable when I tried to talk about anything emotional or real.

In my view,

She really didn't have the capacity to connect with me or others on a deep personal level.

And it was very distressing for her when I kept pushing for that.

At one point,

About 15 years before she died,

I gave up and I let our conversations center on the things that were safe.

We talked about gardens and birds and horses and nature,

A little bit about what was going on with the rest of the family.

And I stopped trying to have a deep emotional bond with her because I realized that that was never gonna happen.

It still hurt.

And I was an adult.

She wasn't being abusive.

She was running into her own lack of capacity around feelings.

She wasn't able to go there.

And so when I accepted that,

I accepted her as she was instead of how the mother I wanted her to be.

When I was an actual child,

I did need her to be something that she wasn't.

When I was 40 or 50 years old,

I realized I actually don't need that anymore.

As much as I would have loved it,

It was not something she could do.

So the relationship that we had was fairly surface.

It was definitely not one of those,

My mom is my best friend kind of relationships.

It wasn't that close.

It was amiable.

It was respectful.

I still challenged her on things that I didn't agree with.

And I did it with respect.

And we worked it out.

When we're talking about adverse childhood experiences,

Intergenerational trauma,

Court efficiency beliefs,

We're really looking at a situation where our parents have fallen short.

And can we,

As much as possible,

While we're taking care of ourselves,

Also extend some compassion to them to do as little harm as we can and to set boundaries as compassionately as we are able to.

It's true that sometimes we need to limit their access to us because it is still harmful.

Many people don't have the capacity to change or even think that they should change.

A lot of parents still have a lot of entitlement around their children,

Even their grown children.

And as an adult,

I can set my own course.

I can do my own work.

I can do my own parenting.

I can be on my own side.

I can protect myself.

I can do many of the things that didn't happen for me as a child now that I'm an adult.

As we're working with these concepts,

We might need to step back a little bit for a while.

We might need to get some professional help to work with some childhood trauma.

We can always work on building strength and resilience in our nervous system.

And we can always work with being as kind and compassionate as is possible.

These are very complicated relationships.

When we look at it as an issue of capacity rather than ill will,

That often really shifts it so that we can see with more clarity.

And it also helps us to have some compassion and understanding for how we let people down.

If we have children,

How we let our children down.

There are so many things that I regret and then I would do differently now and I can't go back and do them differently now.

And I can change my relationship now with my son and with my grandchildren.

And that can help everybody to heal on so many levels.

We can't change the past and we can be the one who does the healing and stop that cycle of intergenerational trauma.

These generations of children who feel like they're broken and no good,

We can be the ones who let everybody into our heart.

That is the most profound healing that we can do.

Reviews

Thank you for sharing, I found this to be very helpful and reaffirming. Helpful information and for sharing bits of your personal story and healing as well- thank you for all this work, it is helpful💐☀️take good care🦋

Thank you for this. It’s always helpful to be reminded that having an unregulated parent was not my fault, and the core deficiency beliefs I created as a result are not true. Thanks for offering a meaningful and compassionate way forward in the form of reparenting.

Thanks for sharing your story Lynn, mine is much the same timing ⏱️