Limiting Beliefs, Adoption, and What Life Can You Dream for Yourself When You Feel Stuck in Tar?
I am unlovable.
I don’t belong.
I need to be perfect to be loved.
I’ll always be an outsider.
I can’t trust anyone.
I have no control over my life.
I shouldn’t feel this way.
I should be grateful.
I am different.
I must please people to be accepted.
I can’t be my authentic self.
I can’t trust my own decisions.
I don’t deserve good things.
My feelings about being adopted can’t be understood by those who were kept.
I have to prove myself to be worthy.
I am not worthy of happiness or love because I was given away.
I will be disloyal to my adoptive family if I express curiosity about my origins.
I am responsible for my parents’ happiness.
I can’t support myself financially.
I have a hole in my heart.
For the first eighteen on this list, thanks ChatGPT. (What are limiting beliefs adopted people have about themselves and their life?) I came up with the last two to bring the list to twenty. It was interesting to me that AI didn’t pick up the money thing with adopted people because it’s one I hear A LOT along with the statement “I have a hole in my heart,” said with the conviction of “I have a nose on my face.”
What I am saying is I did not make up these limiting beliefs. They are in the ether.
I have been aware of the concept of limiting beliefs for decades. Playing softball in 6th grade, I knew if I believed I could not hit or catch the ball, chances were good I would wiff both. I knew to imagine I was hitting a home run when I went to the plate. I also knew this did not mean I would hit the ball, but I also knew my swing would be stronger if I imagined ball/bat contact. Growing up, I could feel my limiting beliefs as a muscular weakening and as a sort of dark, inaccessible soft spot in my brain: I can’t run a 5:20 mile. I can’t get an A in this class. I can’t get into the college of my dreams. I can’t dance. There is something wrong with me. There is something wrong in general.
Oh! The joy of confronting and overcoming a limiting belief! I did that!! The brain gets to work rewiring itself and my whole life alters. It’s like a plane that has been two degrees off course adjusts and is not flying straight toward its intended landing spot. The relief! The freedom of feeling right! And, oh, the tightness when you act in a way you know is not in your best interest because your brain tells you that is who you are. Limiting beliefs can feel like prisons we have built with our own thoughts—and this is crazy-making! How can you set yourself free when you are the one who imprisoned yourself?!
Working with Kathy Delaney-Smith on her book Grit and Wit (https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Wit-Empowering-Lives-Leaders/dp/B0DSFQT2L7) was an extended lesson on the power of positive thinking. That woman walks her talk—just last month she was one of four to be awarded the Harvard Medal this year. Earlier in the summer she was given the W. E. B. DuBois Medal. I mean, come on. This was after she had retired as the winningest coach in Ivy League history. Kathy has become a master of positive self-talk, and you can feel her positivity when you meet her. It feels like a magnet pulling her close. It feels fun.
When figuring out who you are and what you want, Martha Beck said in her Wayfinder course, it’s often more powerful to ask if a story you tell yourself is helpful than if it’s true. Is the story I carry in my head that I was not held much the first ten weeks of my life helpful? No. It makes me feel like I was irrevocably injured as a baby. Is the story even true? I don’t know. I don’t know where I was the first ten weeks, so I filled the empty space with stories. Because my brain works with a negativity bias in the effort of keeping me safe and alive, I have filled the space with sad stories. No one held me. I was terrified. I was not given the care I needed. I learned to trust no one.
But you can’t always just leave truth by the wayside, so let’s look at both Is it helpful? and Is it true?
Byron Katie is a woman who woke up one day with the realization that all her suffering was caused by her thoughts. She created something called The Work (https://thework.com/at-home-with-byron-katie/). In Martha’s course, we used The Work often to address limiting beliefs.
The Work was a direct challenge to how I saw myself in the world. I believed the stories I told myself. I had built a sense of self out of those stories. I could retitle You Don’t Look Adopted asThe Stories I Tell Myself About My Life. I had made a career out of encouraging other people to tell their stories. I felt like a pocket that was turned inside out, letting the contents spill to the ground. I slowed down with work. I was an empty, inside-out pocket. What was life about if not the stories I told myself? I needed my stories. They were my babies. They were who I was. They were my spine, my eyes, my way of being in the world. I had already lost so much. What if I wanted to hold on and just stay as I was?
You can listen to Byron Katie do her work on her podcast or you can sign up to witness her work with volunteers Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings via Zoom. (Maybe YOU could raise YOUR hand and do the work with Katie!) She is incredibly generous with her time. I have heard more than one person describe her as enlightened—seeing her do her work right there in front of you (on the screen) is powerful. It’s easy to download the worksheets from her website and do The Work but to stay up in your head and to not really do the work. Watching her do it shows you the real deal.
With that said, I’ll give you a taste of what it looks like.
Let’s take the first limiting belief on the list: I am unlovable.
The first thing is for me to anchor myself in a particular time and space when I had that thought so I can feel how it affected my body. I can actually bring it up right now, so I’ll work with that. I’m sitting in a chair, looking at a computer, having the thought I am unlovable.
The next thing is to get still and to let the thought drop into my body like a stone to the bottom of a pond. I am lovable. Is it true? I can only answer yes or no. I feel the statement and I go into my whole system, asking it, is it true that I am unlovable? I see me as a baby, arms open, soft. An answer bubbles up. No.
I go to the next question. How do I react when I believe the thought I am unlovable? I notice that I take in small breaths. I notice that my shoulders cave in, that I feel sort of dead, sad, still. I notice I have a rush of negative thoughts that follow that first thought, all giving proof for the ways I am unlovable.
I go to the next question. How do I treat others when I believe the thought I am unlovable? I see myself isolate. I see myself in a kind of low-blood-sugar state where I don’t feel able to connect with others. I see myself as unable to laugh. I see myself build a fence around myself. Keep out.
I go to the next question. How would my life be different if I were unable to have the thought I am unlovable? Immediately, I feel a lightness in my body. Life would be so fun! I’d just walk around saying hi to people and doing whatever came to mind, not worrying if people would hate me. I’d be me.
I go to the turnaround where I flip the statement and see if various opposites are as true or truer than the original.
I am lovable. Can I come up with three specific examples that support this statement?
My daughter loves me.
My dog loves me.
My parents loved me.
Huh. I have proof I am lovable. How can I believe I am not lovable when there is PROOF I am?
This is what helps change the brain. The brain has to rewire itself to take in this new thought, and I understand it’s not generally as easy or fast as all that. Oh, look, three examples of how lovable I am. That limiting belief is gone! I think maybe that’s one reason this is called The Work. It’s a practice.
I find it so helpful. When I hear an adopted person (or my own self) say, There’s a hole in my heart, or I can’t afford that, or I will never feel at home in my body, part of me thinks, Who would you be without that thought?, and what almost always comes to mind is free.
This is what I’ve been wrestling with for the last year or so in the Wayfinder course: What if I’m not my stories? Who am I if I’m not my stories? Why am I so identified with my stories? What do I lose if I no longer believe I don’t belong? Who am I if I don’t need to heal? Who am I if the main question I ask myself on a daily basis is not What is wrong? but instead What is right?
What if I am free?
Seriously. What if I am? What if I get to step out of the tight skin of stories in order to find out who I am in the expansiveness of this giant world?
Am I more curious or am I more fearlful?
Which one’s more fun.
I vote for fun because I know fearful, and that path keeps getting narrower and tighter and less and less like anything that feels like home.
What if home feels large and out of control?
Whoa.
Baby steps, Anne. Itty bitty tiny baby steps into the expanse of what’s possible.
You can do it.
We can do tiny things.
