57 - Undoing A Negative Belief

One of the most significant barriers I have found in both working with people with disabilities on dating and relationships, as well as counseling people is how to undo a negative belief. It can be real hard to do so, especially when you had others give you negative messages, reacted negatively to you, or you haven’t received the results you have wanted in your dating pursuits. 

Just to explain a little further by what I mean by results. Results are the outcomes you’re looking to achieve by anything you try. In dating and relationships, results can be getting a date, people responding to your dating profile, meeting new people who could be potential dates.

If we don’t get good feedback on what we’re trying to do and/or the results we want, it makes it hard to undo a negative belief. For example, I know a man with CP who worked up the courage to ask a girl out in high school. She just said to him, “Are you always going to walk that way?” Statements like this can keep negative beliefs, like no one will find me attractive because of my disability, really entrenched in our minds.

When we have been hurt and the world hasn’t validated our worth, it can be really hard to undo negative beliefs.

But what else are you going to do? Go through life letting negative beliefs rule and make you feel worse about yourself?

Our brains can be very sneaky. They can make us think that what we believe is reality. But I don’t think you want your reality to be doubting yourself or feeling you can’t achieve what you want.

You need to consciously choose what you want to think and believe about yourself. Let me show you how to to do this by example.

Let’s take the example of no one will date me because I have a disability. You have to begin to undo this by thinking what is the replacement belief you want. In this case, the thought you might obviously want to have is people will date me and accept my disability.

This may seem like a jump from no one will date me to people in general will date me. But what about a bridge thought? A bridge thought is a thought that is a smaller step to a bigger belief. For our example here, the bridge thought could be, there’s someone out there who would love to date me. That way you’re focusing on believing a more manageable belief. This more manageable belief can then help undo the negative belief of no one wanting to date you.

Now here’s the key to all this. When you find yourself believing a negative, you got to stop your brain and redirect it to the positive belief, almost like you would a small child. Say “Oh no, we’re not doing that, we’re going over here.”

It takes work to redirect our minds away from negative beliefs but that’s how we begin to do it. This is so important because most of the time, whatever we believe becomes our reality. If you believe people won’t date you because of your disability, that will like

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