Something must be wrong with me; overcoming conditioned beliefs.

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What is wrong with me? Countless times my brain has made this question surface. I have spent so many nights in tears with my chest physically hurting thinking that I was not enough. I know that I am not alone in this. 

Our thoughts create our beliefs, meaning if we think something about ourselves a certain way and for a long enough period of time, we will ultimately believe it. This can either be beneficial or detrimental to ourselves depending on our thought patterns.  

I must be ugly. I must be too fat. I must have made too many bad choices in life. I must be too abrasive. I must be too much. I must not be enough. 

I spoon fed myself all these toxic thoughts and more every day for years. That is no exaggeration. I have watched others do it to themselves and I cannot express the amount of hurt that these thoughts can cause. conditioned beliefs have the power to be the most crippling words.  These thoughts, if left unchecked, can send someone into a darkness that is next to impossible to return from. I myself almost swallowed a bullet to escape the amount of pain and self loathing I experienced from my own thoughts. 

The tricky thing about these conditioned beliefs that fill our minds with is a lot of times they were already planted and we just watered the seeds. Sometimes they come from childhood traumas, sometimes from bad relationships. Sometimes it takes years to uncover the roots. By not addressing the seeds and constantly watering them, we are creating a root of bitterness. This is as upsetting as it sounds. What exactly does a root of bitterness mean? A root of bitterness is where something hurts us, words, traumas, or memories and instead of addressing it and dealing with the underlying problem, we internalized it and it takes deeper roots. Eventually, these roots start wrapping around themselves and get so tangled up that light can no longer penetrate the core. 

I have always been the type to actively seek validation from others in my life growing up. Even as a young adult, I spent so much time and energy on making sure that people liked me. I became a people-pleaser. I was the one who would always say yes to people when asked for favors, even if I desperate wanted to say no. If it meant there was a chance that resulted in whoever was asking for the favor liking me, I would say yes. “Please like me. Please tell me you like me” is what my brain would constantly plead. 

If people liked me I felt less broken and damaged. It would give a sense of worth, since I had none for myself. However, one person liking me was never enough. If in a crowd of 50 people, and all of them except one liked me, I would get that feeling of being too much again and would obsess with finding a way to get that last person to like me. I would worry and fret, wondering what it was that caused them to not like me.  What had I done to this person for them to not like me? 

I had this sick idea that I had to be perfect in every way. My life had to be perfect. Perfection does not exist. Perfection is nothing more than an illusion and those who seem to have the perfect life and everything put together tend to be really good actors but the moment that mask is removed, I imagine they have some of the hardest battles to fight. I know this. The logical part of my mind did at least. The other side, the one who needed validation, didn’t believe this for a second and believed perfection was real and that I needed to achieve it in every aspect. My body needed to be perfect, my hair needed to be perfect, my clothes needed to be perfect, I had to say the right words, I had to do the right things, I had to fit into societies guidelines and not slip out even for a second. 

Trying to be perfect was too exhausting. I couldn’t do it anymore. I woke up one day and went “I’m not doing this anymore. I cannot. ‘ I had failed at perfection, but I was okay with that. 

We have to be so kind to ourselves. Self-love is crucial for survival. We speak to ourselves more than anyone on this ride called life. Our words and thoughts will manifest. What we put out into the universe we attract back to us, meaning if we want positivity and growth to manifest into our lives then we must be positive and radiate that outwards. We cannot do that if we are still allowing toxic thoughts into our minds by the spoonful. So, how do we let go of false beliefs that have taken deep roots inside of us? The same way we formed them. 

We begin by detachment. We detach from the individual thoughts that feed the conditioned belief, or the multiple thoughts, one at a time we address these negative thoughts that are building the negative beliefs, and then let go of the belief all together. It doesn’t happen overnight. This is where you learn a lot about patience. 

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the Earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.  To make a mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our life. “ -Henry David Thoreau 

In order to truly let go of conditioned beliefs, we must practice observing our thoughts, and we must keep doing it. There were times when I thought I had truly worked past whatever trauma was needing to be addressed just for me to realize a few days later I hadn’t quite gotten to the root. We have to realize that we are acting on old chapters about our self-worth. When we choose to finally turn the page, we can begin to experience a new life in ways we could have never imagined. 

I have recently started working out, so I am going to use a gym reference here. People do not go to the gym once and wake up the next day in the best shape of their life. They may be stronger than they were the day before, but it takes time to see the real results. They go three to four times a week, they start eating healthy, they start drinking more water, they start resting, they do this over and over and over again. The same goes for ours minds. The more we work toward mindfulness and self-love the quicker we default to it. It becomes habit. We will be more likely to have positive thoughts about ourselves because that is what we’ve programmed ourselves to do. When we have a negative though surface, because we will, we must acknowledge it, ask ourselves why it came to surface, but not attach fall victim to it. Let it go. It may be a hard struggle to let it pass, but we must allow it to. 

The most important thing to remember is this: it is not our fault. We did nothing wrong. We are not so flawed that something is wrong with us. We are human beings. We will make mistakes. We will lose our footing and maybe make some bad choices. This is human, and does not in anyway diminish our worth. 

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