In his book “Escaping the Labyrinth – Body Memory: The Secret Code That Creates, Sustains and Can Unlock Our Chains” author David Sohn describes how by the time we’re (5) years old we’ve made three firm decisions – who I am, who you are and how the world is.
Prior to language acquisition the world simply is, language allows us to name things other than ourselves. The world then becomes you, me and everything else that’s not me. Once we’ve identified these, we go about deciding the nature of all three. This decision gets placed back in the subconscious and is in play without our even knowing it.
We spend our years afterward gathering evidence that these decisions we’ve made at an early age are true.
In my new book, which is slated for release June 2nd – Absolutely F#*king Amazing: Living a Life You Love – I talk about my own personal experience in uncovering the base belief put into place before the age of five and how that belief affected all my relationships from that point forward. The decision made at that young age was “I’m unlovable, you can’t be trusted, and the world is judgmental”. These decisions were all formulated from the experience and perspective of a sensitive young child. The problem is they became the default “story” through which all future experiences would be filtered. Imagine going through life in each relationship unconsciously looking for evidence to support these decisions?
In romantic relationships everything would be wonderful until my partner would say something critical, and not anything out of the ordinary or super critical just normal interaction, and that would immediately confirm that I was “unlovable”. From there it was a short hop to “you can’t be trusted and then the leap to “the world is judgmental” wasn’t far behind. Needless to say, that made being in relationships a challenge.
How about business? Running a tech company and working in sales for over 30 years provided ample evidence that I was “unlovable”. Every lost sale was an unconscious confirmation of my base statement. Every employee who quit was due to those unwavering “facts”.
It wasn’t until I was able to identify and articulate what the base statements were that were made all those years ago that I was able to replace them with the my current world view and base statements of “I am amazing, you are joy and the world is exciting and fun”. As you can imagine my life now is remarkably different and endlessly joyful with those old, false statements laid to rest.