Changing Beliefs Part 2: My Mother’s Remembrance of Her Father
September 23, 2008 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
As many of you know, my mother is my office manager and the developer of the Willow Bend Wellness Center. Her expert guidance has helped me make my dreams come true. If any of you missed yesterday’s blog, I would ask you to read that one first to really understand this blog because I am not going to repeat the framework for what I am talking about here.
I asked my mother to remember the first thing that would come to her mind about her father. She said, “That’s easy. I remember when my father took me to a jewelry store and wanted to buy me a Rolex with all of these diamonds in it, and I told him, ‘No, I don’t want something that fancy.’” She went on to explain how her father had always been very abstemious and never did anything for himself. He always gave everything for the kids. He would never buy anything new for himself. He felt guilty doing so.
It was amazing that I figured out my mother’s belief system was passed straight from her father, specifically never to spend any money on yourself and only to help others. Even though this principle is a fundamentally good one and has helped my mother help so many people around her, I saw the flaw in it that was crippling her. When she bought a new house, she felt tremendous guilt. If she bought a new purse, she would feel tormented that she was spending money on herself.
It is always great to help others but not to the expense that doing something for yourself would make you feel an internally negative feeling instead of a good feeling. I asked my mother to change the belief system that doing something for herself, small or large, should be considered something bad or that would elicit guilt. Instead of changing the belief into one in which she felt better than everyone (which is not a good thing either), I wanted her to repeat every day, “I deserve to enjoy life as much as everyone else.”
When you have come across your old belief system that may have crippled you, you can hopefully overcome that belief system by introducing a new belief system to replace the old one. Then repeat the new belief system twenty times a day out loud as a mantra to help you start to believe your new belief system. If any of you have interesting stories to share about your life or belief systems here, I would not only be happy to hear about them, I think your sharing can help others hopefully in a way that I have done by exposing my own limitations.