Limiting Beliefs and Adoption

I am so grateful to my intuition. It tells me to do things that my brain often tells me are not a good idea. Not in the budget. Not safe. Not possible. Two years ago my intuition told me to join Martha Beck’s Wayfinder coach training, and so I put down the deposit. My brain went right to work, telling me stories and showing me movies about how spending $13,000 on something that did not have a steering wheel and tires was stupid, and so I gave up my deposit and backed out of the training.

A year later, my intuition told me it was time to sign up for the training again. My intuition isn’t in my head or my heart or my feet. Now that I’ve gotten to know it better after almost a year of learning the ways of the Wayfinders, I feel my intuition as an energetic disturbance that emanates from my skin, mostly my elbow area. It’s not painful, but it’s not pleasant either. I call it a disturbance because it’s like someone plugged me into a socket, and I’m getting fed just enough electricity to notice the change, but not enough to make me want to run down the street or do cartwheels. I’m more likely inclined to want to lie down—it reminds me of that feeling I get if I have a sip of a Manhattan and wish the bar had a bed so I could wait out the pre-spins I could feel headed my way.

The last time I had more than a sip of a Manhattan, I was at a bar with some friends in Edgartown, and I had to lie down on the floor so I would not fall over. The waiter stepped over me and asked if I were okay. I told him I’d be getting up in a minute. Too much, too soon, too fast, and she’s down.

Intuition hasn’t floored me yet, but it has confused me many, many times. This is all to say that intuition is complicated because it’s not like a big green light that says GO like you might think it would be, at least it isn’t for me, generally.

How can you tell the difference between wishful thinking and intuition? Between unwarranted fearful thoughts and intuition? Between avoidance and intuition? I’m learning those things all feel slightly different in my body. It’s like learning to distinguish one type of peach from another. The differences can be subtle, but once you locate them, they are (often) unmistakable.

I want to talk about limiting beliefs. In the book The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks writes about “upper limit problems.” They—upper limit problems and limiting beliefs—are the same thing. I think of them as cages I construct around my life that I can’t see but that keep me from moving with as much breadth and height as I am capable of moving, or as a ceiling that’s so low you can’t stand up straight. I had a wonderful life coach, Katie Pruvelle, and sometimes I would go to her and ask to be hypnotized so she could walk me through a scenario that would break through the movie I had in my head. Because of her I was able to change my way of being and write You Don’t Look Adopted. One limiting belief she helped me work through was “I can’t tell my story.” When my brain holds a thought like that and believes it, I have put myself in handcuffs and swallowed the key. Katie helped me cough up the key and free myself to do what I wanted.

If you are one of those people who likes to pop pimples, breaking through limiting beliefs may even be more deeply physically satisfying to you than to others. I had a friend once who fell while riding his bike, and for years, pieces of gravel would work their way out of his leg and come through his skin. Locating a limiting belief can also feel a little like that—holy shit! You piece of gravel have been in my body this whole time! I didn’t know you were in there, but boy does it feel good to have you out! I feel so much cleaner.

I have been struggling with some demon I have not been able to identify ever since my dad died a year and a half ago. The struggle manifests itself in depression-like symptoms. I literally feel, physically and mentally, like a brake pedal that is being depressed by unknown forces. I can’t think straight. I can’t find dreams. I don’t want to work, don’t want to create, don’t want to move with much vigor a lot of the time.

There is grief, and that can evoke all of those things I mentioned above, and I knew I was grieving, but I also had the sense—we’re back to intuition—that ache in my elbows, that slight all-over buzz—that something else was also at play. The more I felt like staying in bed, the more suspicious I became. All the stories I told myself were true: yes, I was grieving; yes, I was letting a body that at been traumatized at birth and had perhaps never fully relaxed since then finally get the rest it had been craving; yes, I was sixty and did not have the same energy I’d needed hours of exercise daily to burn off when I was younger. Yes and yes and yes.

And.

What was I not doing that something in me, my Self, wanted to do?

Was it to exist? Was it to play out the cards I’d been dealt with as much joy and abandon as possible, to play the game just for the thrill of the action? When I present questions to myself like this and get quiet, intuition reacts.

Yes, it says. The yes can feel like nervousness, like fear, like amazement. It’s not a one and done.

Learning to be human is not like learning to flip a penny.

It’s so weird we teach history and math and language arts to kids before we teach them anything about feelings and limiting beliefs, about how to work with this body of theirs. What’s the point of knowing 1 + 1 = 2 if you don’t also know that your brain can tell you that you are a bad person and that thoughts aren’t real or necessarily true? What’s the point of learning about Columbus if, when your brain tells you that you aren’t as smart as the others in your class, you believe that thought and prove it right by failing your next test?

This past year, limiting beliefs have been bubbling up to the surface of my consciousness so I can see them. It’s literally what if feels like—bubbles of thoughts floating into my mind. You are not lovable. There is something wrong with you. You are ugly. Thoughts that, when exposed to the conscious mind, can be disproved with concrete examples. Well, actually, I am lovable because I can think of many examples of people who love me. Etc. The fun thing about exposing a limiting belief to the light of the truth is that, in seconds, they can pop and lose their power. Byron Katie has developed a program she calls The Work which helps people identify and questions beliefs. Check it out if that sounds fun to you.

So, yesterday, as I was wondering why I was letting all my classes come to a close and not starting new ones, a thought bubbled up: You can’t survive without us.

Wait, I thought. What? Could you repeat that?

You can’t survive without us.

Clarity has its own way of showing up. Clarity can lay out the origins of a limiting belief like it’s a broad piece of cloth. Clarity showed me that, for me, part of being adopted and having anxious attachment had led to my brain feeding me this thought so I would attach to and stay with my parents who were not my DNA parents. My brain can be like a terrified gerbil who can see a threat in blue skies and will do anything to insure the body stays alive, including telling it stories that are not true so that the body will stay in fight or flight, huddled in its wood chips, to not get eaten.

My parents had never said I could not survive without them. They encouraged me. They sent me to college. And yet. Messaging can be so subtle. One of Byron Katie’s tools is to have you look at your belief, flipped to forms of its opposite, to see if that statement is as true or truer than the original.

You can survive without us.

I can’t survive without you.

So much hidden anxiety can live in the bodies of parents who have adopted their children. What if the birth parents come knocking? What if the child decides they don’t want to be adopted? What if their child disappears? I can’t survive without you can be like poisonous gas that somehow the child eats for breakfast and makes it into their own: I can’t survive without you.

I can’t survive without you, I think now. I take the tool I learned from Byron Katie and ask, Is it true?

No.

I can because I am currently, in this moment, surviving without you.

This is where the real fun starts. Once you’ve identified a limiting belief and questioned it and seen it is not true, it’s like you the wall between you and the open road falls away, and suddenly you can see just how fast you can run, just because you want to, just because you can.