The Beliefs of a Child

The Beliefs of a Child

Gratitude, compassion, love, and trust. Oh, are they wonderful or what? When we live our lives with these feelings flowing within us, we are having a nice time, we are living our natural life.

Sometimes things happen to us, and these feelings go away. Sometimes, when we are little, people with power do things to us, or around us, or don’t do things, and we feel angry, or frightened, or left behind, or unloved, or any of a number of very sad things. Poor little we.

As small children, we have childish minds. We have far fewer internal resources than we will as adults. and so we learn things, and mislearn things, about how we think the world is. It’s like we are little explorers drawing our maps as we feel our way through uncharted lands and seas, like the maps of the old adventurers who, at the edges of the world they knew, wrote “there be monsters.”

Because we are small, we often don’t quite get what’s going on, so, because we are people, we make it up, about the dark, about thunder, about the grownups’ behavior, about our personal value.

The monsters live in the closet/ under the bed/ in the basement.

God is bowling.

I am not good enough and deserve this bad treatment.

What happens sometimes, is that the lessons we learned, or mislearned, are so powerful that many examples of the world being different from our beliefs about it don’t make any difference.

And so, we lose our compassion and become indifferent.

We lose our gratitude, and feel entitled.

We lose our love, and feel afraid.

We lose our trust, and feel adrift and beaten.

Or other stuff, those are not the only equations.

The point is that we come to conclusions based on bad information, misinterpretations, or guessing, and then internalize it as the truth. Those internalized conclusions then become our belief system, and that’s how we live our lives, based on the misunderstandings of a small child.

Wow.

But, my very dear one, all is not lost. Because this is what growing up means. When we grow up, we recognize that we are feeling indifferent, or entitled, or angry, or afraid, or beaten, and because we are adults, we say, “I will change this. I will choose my natural life.” And then we commit to talk therapy, or any of a dozen modalities, and we enhance each of them with our use of good Creative Questions.

Why am I grateful? Why can I feel compassion? How do I feel when I love? Why can I trust?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 05252013