How updating your paintings is a simple way to start getting the results you want in life
Updating old, unhealthy belief systems into new, healthy ones is a simple way to start getting the results you want in life. Learn how self-defeating behaviours and patterns form, and how to replace them with ones that are more in line with the life you want.
MINDSET
3/8/20263 min read
“We can't choose where we come from, but we can choose where we go from there.” - Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
When we’re born, we create belief systems based on situations we experience as we’re getting accustomed to the world. I like to view belief systems as paintings since as we encounter life situations for the first time, we paint a picture in our heads based on our unique, personal experiences. These paintings are then carried around and updated throughout our life to be used as reference points as to what to expect in life situations as they reoccur.
During our formative years, usually ages 3-8, the pictures we initially paint don’t tend to be complete accurate representations of what we experienced. I believe this is mostly due to the fact that we were still getting to grips with this new world we woke up in. Quite like a child drawing a picture of the Eiffel Tower: You can tell what it is but it’s not quite right compared to what it actually looks like in real life.
This is why it’s important to be constantly updating our paintings as we get older so that we’re operating from ones that form an accurate depiction of the world around us.
At the beginning stages of our lives, our belief systems are heavily influenced and reliant on our surrounding environments (mainly our parents and school). This can be unfortunate solely due to the fact that the parents and therefore, the environment we’re born into, is a lottery. We create belief systems based on our environment whilst adopting our parents’ ones (that they most likely got from their parents and environment).
Whilst we pick up on the healthy belief systems our parents pass down to us, it’s also true that we pick up on the unhealthy ones too. Unfortunately this can include any unaddressed trauma.
As we enter the world, we’re coming in hot and fresh. And so, because we don’t have anything to compare our experiences of the world with, we have no choice but to believe what is happening in front of us to be the absolute truth.
Parents and the surrounding environment are the world in the eyes of a child. We are not yet aware of how big the world is: different countries, cultures, beliefs, attitudes, ways of life, etc. If your parents are telling you ‘No’ when you do something, you see it as the world telling you ‘No’. It’s quite like how an animal kept in a cage is not aware of the world around it.
Whilst these paintings we created as children provide significant insight as to how we viewed our world growing up, carrying inaccurate paintings based on a repetition of anomalous and confined experiences will affect our day-to-day lives in a more than negative way once we get out into the real world. Just think about how your football (soccer) trial would go down if you’d been taught all your life that outfield players could pick up the ball…
The fear of re-experiencing what is depicted on the outdated painting can prevent us from creating a new and healthy one. Because of this, we end up avoiding that situation entirely. This was spoken about by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk in his best seller The Body Keeps the Score on how traumatic moments can be frozen in time. This causes us to feel as though we’re reliving that moment as if it were actually happening again.
Now with that being said, it’s not our fault for being taught unhealthy belief systems by our parents and the surrounding environment, but it is our responsibility to fix them and ensure we don’t stay this way.
To put all of this into perspective, imagine if you carried around that drawing of the Eiffel Tower you did when you were a toddler into your adult life thinking that was what to expect if you ever went back. It’d probably stop you from going back at all.
The only way to get an up to date depiction is to first change your perspective on the situation, and then go back and see for yourself. This is essential if you want to stop feeling trapped by old experiences, and instead gain a realistic depiction of the world around you so that you aren’t constantly finding yourself in survival mode.
If you want to learn how to identify, address, and replace old and unhealthy beliefs systems with new, healthy ones, please consider checking out the following article:
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