Out of the Mire
…because thriving is the goal
Expanding Your Life: Unearthing Negative Core Beliefs
I don’t think I’ve ever gone this long without posting. For what it’s worth, I’m almost ready to move from the Twin Cities to the Bay Area. This has been a daunting task requiring maximum effort. So much good has come from the endless hours of preparation. I want to elaborate on that, but I should first begin with a story that requires a visit to a dark place. Bear with me because therein is resolution.
I no longer think of myself as someone who was trafficked (For readers unfamiliar with my blog, when I was 18 years-old, I was abducted by a human trafficker to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The film “Taken” is a decent representation of my experience). It happened a long time ago, and I have spent many years with highly trained clinicians working through the trauma surrounding that time. About ten years ago, I arrived at a place in my life wherein I believed I was, for the most part, healed from that event. I rarely thought about it. And then my marriage started disintegrating, and domestic violence entered my reality. Old tapes that I thought were erased started playing again, and I became paralyzed. I felt trapped and frozen in my circumstances truly believing there was no way out. Worse, I believed it was my fault.
Fast forward to the present. A few weeks ago, I had an epiphany. I have been meditating or praying on the idea of negative core beliefs that exercise power over our lives and keep us locked into self-sabotaging patterns. I wanted to unearth any hidden false beliefs that continued to linger and, thusly, change them. While I was getting on with my day, a memory from my time in the trafficking environment came to mind which surprised me. That rarely happens these days. This particular memory is likely my most hated memory, and I was a bit disturbed to be faced with it again. Alas, I decided to lean into it. Why would my brain bring this particular thing to mind now? What might it hold for me at this point in my life?
Before I can explain the significance of this memory, I must explain something. The key thing to understand about human traffickers in general is that they view the people they sell as a commodity–a product. For example, I was called “real estate” or “the property” when I was being moved around. Generally speaking, to effectively produce a sex slave or any kind of slave, the girls and boys themselves have to adopt the beliefs of their handlers, and that is that they are no longer human. Slaves are objects or chattel–property. So, the primary goal after abduction is to dehumanize the “property” as quickly as possible through a process called “breaking in”. It takes as little as 72 hours to achieve Stockholm Syndrome, and this can be an effective way to go for some traffickers if they intend to stay on as pimps or handlers/owners. If the trafficker is merely a broker, then they have to break in their “property” quickly and strip them of their sense of self, identity and humanity efficiently before sale. By far, the fastest and most effective way to achieve this is through terror, trauma, and torture. The man who abducted me was a wanna-be broker. He chose the latter.
In one of his torture sessions, he very succinctly stated that I was expendable. I was disposable. He had the ultimate say over my life. I was no longer a person. I only had the worth that he determined. After all, there was a literal price on my head, and my existence was now only to serve him and anyone else who might acquire me. At any moment, he could kill me, and he just might if he felt like it. He said all of this in the Everglades with alligators outside the car. It was an unforgettable moment of sheer terror for me. I believed that he was going to throw me out to alligators to be eaten alive. It was an extremely effective strategy. Brilliant really.
That moment defined a part of me in terms of how I viewed my own humanity, and it is hard to explain. From an observer’s perspective, it might be easy to say that he was an evil man who was lying to me. Many therapists have tried to convince me of this to no avail. You see, there is something that changes in you when someone actually takes you from your home, puts a literal price on you, tries to auction you off, and tortures you to make you: 1) compliant and fearful and 2) believe that you are sub-human and disposable. Even if you don’t buy in to their agenda, you walk away defiled in the deepest parts of yourself, and that kind of existential fear traumatizes in ways that you never believed possible. To sit in the presence of a psychopath with a will to murder you who looks upon you as truly disposable alters your psyche. To do so with apex predators just a few feet away hissing and thrashing around changes how you view the world, other people, and yourself. Events like this become lines of demarcation on your personal timeline. They are before/after events. You look back upon them and try to recall what kind of person you were before the event vs. who you are now. You wonder if you’ll ever be redeemed from such a thing. Is it even possible? It haunts you.
This is what came to the surface for me a few weeks ago–this experience–along with that negative core belief: “I am disposable. I am expendable.” I have never been able to change that or correct it. My brush with a barbaric death in the Everglades locked that in place, and the last two years of my marriage reactivated that negative core belief. I felt utterly disposable. Ontologically insignificant. As I sat with the feelings associated with that belief, I prayed, “What do I do with this?” Suddenly, a new thought emerged.
“What if he wasn’t going to kill you? What if this was just psychological torture? What if this was just part of the program he used on all the people he abducted? What if everything he said to you was just part of a script? You’re not disposable. This entire experience was simply designed to make you believe what he wanted you to believe so that he could get the job done. You were simply a means to an end, and the end was making money.”
As offensive as it was it was nothing personal. He knew me well enough to effectively manipulate me, but nothing he ever said or did to me was about me. The significant aspect of being viewed as an object fit for sale is that he only said what he said to quicken a process that would lead to making money. Nothing he said was backed by a conviction of belief. It was all just scripted words designed to achieve a goal. Make a sale.
Why does this matter to me? It is extremely significant to my brain because there is a distinction between torturing someone because you’re following a script and torturing someone because you’re following your own convictions or set of beliefs. I had, on some level, believed that he was going to kill me because I was innately disposable. I believed that there was causation linking the two acts. The truth likely falls somewhere on the spectrum of my being a means to an end. My identity had nothing to do with anything. He was a villain and a con. He saw an easy mark and easy money. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Why is this distinction so powerful? It is powerful because, in the end, nothing he said was actually true. He could have said anything to me in those moments to get the job done. He could have said, “Chickens will rise in twenty years to rule the world! Cows will turn on their ranchers, and, in thirty-five years, humans will be farmed by dogs, and cats will eat horses! Long live the Order of the Anemone! All hail the clown fish! Now, do as I say and submit to the clown fish.” He could have made me do anything, and I probably would have to avoid being eaten by carnivorous reptiles. Why did he choose to go after my existential worth? Because he was smart. Humans have a need to feel safe, to feel loved, and to feel a sense of belonging and significance. Any con man would know this. Tell a person enough lies and eventually you’ll land on one that will stick. If the “Order of Anemone” con would have worked, then he would have gone with that. We all have chinks in our armor. Drug and sexually abuse a person for a prolonged period of time, and, eventually, they will become vulnerable to deception. Some lies are obvious, ridiculous, and completely unbelievable, but others just feel true. How could they be a lie when they resonate so powerfully? And, if you come from a dysfunctional family of origin, then you will be even more vulnerable because you likely grew up attempting to meet the needs of your parents and/or siblings forgoing getting your own needs met making you that much more vulnerable to perpetration and exploitation. This is why victims of abuse are easier to exploit and con.
Consider your own negative core beliefs or the conclusions we draw from our own life experiences. For example, would I have stayed married to an abusive person for as long as I did had I believed I wasn’t disposable? Would I have had better boundaries with my mother sooner had I recognized and corrected this negative core belief sooner? Likely.
Here is a question: How do we know when we have a negative core belief or false belief influencing us? In my experience, when we tolerate mistreatment and abuse repeatedly, engage in self-sabotage, thusly, thwarting personal success and happiness, engage in avoidance behavior for prolonged periods of time to our own detriment, find ourselves attracted to unhealthy relationships and situations repeatedly, and struggle with addiction with an unwillingness to seek treatment (This is a short list). These are all markers for hidden negative beliefs.
The effects of addressing a long-standing negative core belief is much like casting a stone into a pond. It has a ripple effect. After I addressed this, I began to see just how far-reaching this deeply held belief was. It touched on almost every aspect of my life, but it was most evident in my thought life. I used to feel constantly oppressed and fearful. It was as if I could not believe that any kind of happiness or goodness would stick around. I was somehow waiting to die or waiting for it to be stolen from me. All good things were ephemeral. All happiness was evanescent. I didn’t deserve them because I was…disposable. That negative core belief contaminated everything. All these thoughts and feelings are part of the more generalized experience related to Complex PTSD. There is nothing smooth or easy about healing from C+PTSD, but healing isn’t out of reach either.
I like to think of our process in terms of swimming. I used to be a competitive swimmer, but, before that, I swam in the ocean for joy. I grew up near Galveston Island, and I was once a fearless person. It didn’t matter if I was bitten by sharks, stung by jellies, or caught in riptides. I loved the ocean, but, after I was abducted and taken to a port city wherein I could occasionally smell the ocean air, I stopped swimming in the ocean. The scent of brine became associated with a profound fear of death in my mind. I lost my sense of adventure and confidence. I moved from the coast to the Midwest although it was to the Land of 10,000 Lakes. I just didn’t go in the water anymore. I was, in a very real sense, stuck in time. Trauma does that. Time passes, but, when we are bound by false negative beliefs, we are held captive. A part of my could not move forward or heal. Providence has a way of forcing our hands. We are put at crossroads wherein we must make choices for our own benefit, and this is a good thing. I don’t want to stay stuck.
A few weeks ago, I went to Big Island, Hawaii. A big part of the trip was all about freediving, and I started having nightmares weeks before departure. I hadn’t been in the ocean in decades. My mind came up with countless reasons why I didn’t need to swim, but I knew what it was about. I also knew it was time to overcome these old fears. These were old traumas, and the only way to truly move forward is to actually do the things I feared. Make new memories to override the old ones. I wanted to obliterate the old ones. So, I quite literally dived into the Pacific Ocean, and it was the best decision I could have made. I returned home a changed person. This is the caveat inherent to healing–almost every step of the healing process involves active engagement and with that comes fear. For those of us with PTSD, C+PTSD, anxiety, depression, and anything else, fear will be your companion. That’s normal. The good part? The more you engage in your life with intention, the more expansive your life becomes. The more expansive your life becomes, the greater your capacity for positive emotions like joy, peace, happiness, compassion, generosity, and wonder becomes. The greater your capacity becomes for positive emotions, the smaller the more corrosive emotions in your emotional repertoire will become by comparison like cynicism, bitterness, anger, rage, apathy, envy, despair, and self-pity. This is all process-based. It takes time and intention, but, when you engage in this process, you will progress. As always, I will say this: Keep going and never give up.
*keiki honu: juvenile green sea turtle
4 Comments on “Expanding Your Life: Unearthing Negative Core Beliefs”
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Out of the Mire 
I’m so excited for your move. And proud of you for taking such a big step. Good luck.
Thank you! It is a VERY big step or perhaps a series of small steps taken over time. Nonetheless, it is a the closing of a very long chapter.
My goodness, MJ. You are a wonderful writer. I find even the thought that what you speak about could be done to anyone is extremely upsetting, and yet I can read every word because I know you are writing with a purpose. We all travel on our own journey and I feel deeply honoured that you have chosen to share some of your journey with us. Thank you.
Good luck with the move.
Nice photo btw.
Love&light
BR
Thank you, BR! Nothing is meant to upset. It is more about the idea of transforming ourselves. Moving from one place to another. A growth mindset rather than one of entrapment and limitation. Thank you for your kind comment. I really appreciate it. 🙂