More and more of us use Facebook these days, and it is a convenient means of exchanging news on a fairly trivial level. However, recent experiences have reminded me that there's no such thing as privacy, once you go online. This especially applies to Facebook.
Hypnotherapy Blog
Anxiety and Self-Belief
In previous news updates I’ve discussed several components of fear and anxiety, such as physical sensation, thoughts, and imagination. In this update I’ll be looking at a further aspect of the problem, namely “meanings”. By this I mean what our fears mean to us, what they tell us about ourselves.
An example will make this clearer. Suppose someone is anxious in social situations, becoming “tongue-tied” and embarrassed when meeting new people, especially people whom they find attractive. This will often set off a train of thought in which you imagine the other person to be thinking that you are pathetic or ridiculous. You might even imagine them mocking you to other people, damaging your reputation. All of these imaginary ideas might lead you to form certain negative beliefs about yourself. Beliefs such as “I am an unpopular person, an odd person, a misfit, who will never get anywhere in life”. The most common distressing belief that people have about themselves is that belief that “I will always be like this, I was born this way.”
Once we create a belief about ourselves, it tends to feed upon itself and become a permanent feature. This happens because our memory and attention are selective. Suppose we believe we are a social misfit. We will notice evidence that agrees with this idea, and ignore evidence against it. Likewise we remember things that agree with our beliefs, and forget things that disagree with them. in this way, a negative self-image persists long after the events that originally created. Challenging and testing negative beliefs is an important part of effective counselling.
In my next news update I shall discuss how our “values” contribute to anxiety and other problems.