DWQA QuestionsCategory: Limiting BeliefsIn legal contracts, the boilerplate language can get quite lengthy and detailed. It has been said that every sentence in the boilerplate represents something bad and disastrous that happened, which necessitated the invention and introduction of that language into the model contract. Does the complex collection of beliefs held by every sentient being regarding safety and what constitutes it, and what is needed to provide for it, evolve in a similar fashion—that with every disaster, beliefs about safety and what is needed to assure it are created and/or augmented?
Nicola Staff asked 2 years ago
This is a quite accurate perspective of the working of the mind in the face of adversity. Repeated trauma will worsen things because the adversity of prior experiences and the emotions generated, and the negative beliefs that became entrenched, will all be retriggered and reexperienced with a similar occurrence that happens in the future at some point, and that learning kicks in. There will be a much quicker response and a surge of negative feelings from feeling threatened and uncertain about safety in the new experience that raises old issues, and every time something like it happens, it may get worse with a more intense need to escape. So given the length of the human life, there are many opportunities to experience bad things again and again, and people develop many thousands of negative beliefs as a consequence, and it is much like a lengthy contract of many pages and clauses and subclauses, to reference all the shades of grey and variations on the theme for being unsafe to some degree and what one needs to do about it. Most people are quite a walking catalogue of negative self-limiting beliefs about many, many subjects, and they truly are life-limiting with respect to happiness, and many times severely, in restricting the possibility of engaging in many activities simply because they are too painful for the person to tolerate making the attempt. Someone who is a wallflower at a school party, because they feel uncomfortable around their peers, may well grow up to be a recluse and unable to engage in interpersonal relationships of a personal nature to any extent. This is a tragedy of missed opportunity, all because there is a great healing need being unmet and the negative beliefs grow to an intolerable degree in stirring up inner torment, doubt, and fear, and make life a kind of prison for the sufferer—they simply have too large and extensive a rule book that controls them and rules out much of life and its many options.