The "not good enough" negative  core belief
It is a big mean, ugly dragon, that once you take it in and believe it from that moment on you feed it constantly and it gets meaner and uglier, and bigger, and louder.

The dragon says the same old things over and over again, whenever anything goes wrong or life just happens.....What does the dragon say?
"I am" "not good enough" "doomed/hopeless/helpless" unworthy and unlovable, and also "something wrong with me" "defective/unacceptable/a mistake" "I have nothing to offer" "I should not exist"  I do not deserve to exist" and when he get roaring and breathing fire...."I am a worthless POS"


(actively questioning and fighting) "poisoning the dragon"
This is something that you would have to decide to take on, in other words a quest to slay the dragon is voluntary, not something someone tells you to do. It also takes a lot of mental effort and bandwidth to take on this task.


Empirical disputes (you can google disputing irrational beliefs if you like online) are the ones about "where is the evidence?" Where is it written? "Where is the proof?" if that makes sense?
Functional disputes are different in a way, it is like "How is having this belief impacting my life?" "Is this belief harming me?" Things like that? If I continue to have this belief for the next 10 years what will my life be like then?"
Logical disputes are about where is the logic that b/c someone rejected/devalued/dismissed/etc me that it must be or mean that it is a reflection of my value/worth?
Or another way is how does it follow that if X, then Y must be true?

Philosophical is about deriving satisfaction from life with the belief and how much more one might get out of life without the negative core belief... if that makes sense?

I also add one more, called spiritual (which may or may not apply) Humanitarian but it goes something like, is it consistent with my spiritual system to believe that anyone is valueless (including me)? Does my personal belief in humanity then might be a way to rephrase that one.
******
The process is every single time the dragon says something, you will actively fight and question it and state the truths to counter the dragon.  What I refer to as "poisoning the dragon".    From a neuroscience perspective it is about removing the established thought patterns and replacing them with new pathways.  It is like going through the woods to a destination instead of taking the highway that already exists.  Eventually the old pathways are pruned away, as the new ones become more familiar.   If that makes sense?
******
Oh generally it comes into our lives fairly early, maybe 8-12 years old...if we are shy or if our parent never give us praise, or if we are excluded or bullied, or really any number of things. The main thing is the internalizing or starting to believe that "there is something wrong with me"....once I start to think that kind of why me or how thought, I get to start the process of taking in the dragon egg, starting to believe I am not good enough and feeling like I am worth less than all the "normal" people....If that makes sense?
********
Thoughts are often the result of something at the deeper level and that influences how I see everything around me, myself, others and the world.
Lets say I have a negative core belief that "I am not good enough".   So when I work on a project the "check" questions are "is this good enough?", is it "right" will it be "ok/correct/good?"  Those thoughts generate a lot of extraneous negative emotion.  On the other hand if my "check" in thoughts get away from the assumed negative, I  might start asking, "is this my best?"  "Am I proud of this result?"

*******
So here is how bad it is, right say a man has the belief that he is unlovable. And a woman comes along and says that she loves him. Does he change his belief and thank her for the truth? Not a chance! He believes it totally and so he also views her through that belief, she must be dumb or clueless, mistaken or manipulative (wants something).....it is impossible for him to love her back or believe he is loved....... So what happens? maybe he decides to "test" her, so he keeps doing thing or saying things to her, and keeps asking her "do you still love me?" eventually when he pushes her beyond all human tolerances and she leaves, he says "I knew it all along, she never loved me,"

Ok so when that thought pops in your head you are going to fight it and fight it, every time it shows up. No matter what form it takes, it pops up and says you can't or you are doomed/hopeless/weak, or whatever it pops up with you are going to go against it over and over again. Did you ever watch the movie Doctor Strange?

Do you remember when he confronted Dormmammu over and over again?

"Dormammu I have come to bargain" it is like that over and over poisoning the dragon and refusing to feed it from your life event, until it dies. I know that sounds terrible......

here is a YouTube clip, just in case you want to see it.
Doctor Strange (2016) - 'Bargain with the Dark Lord'



***********************
I think you have happened upon something called "embracing the absurd"
This is a proposition put forth by Albert Camus
In "The Myth of Sisyphus" 1942
juxtaposing 1. The human need to attribute "meaning" to life and 2. the "unreasonable" silence of the universe in response...

What does this require?  Suicide? No Revolt!  And the revolution was called "embracing the absurd""!!!!!!

To quote the book, "The struggle itself.....is enough to fill a man's heart.  One must imagine  Sisyphus happy."

It is in fact liberating, and something I planned to talk about at some point, but the sorcerer "Joker" having escaped Arkum Asylum beat me to it.....
********
The inner critic.
We all have an inner critic inside us, the one who has all the rules that we learned from all the sources around us, the critic who demands perfection, yet does not stop us from the act in question, instead beats us with the guilt hammer after the fact.  The critic may wear our face or have our voice, or it could wear the face of a parent/other and show up to beat us all the time.  The critic is useless because it does not deal with reality, and cannot be reasoned with.

I imagine the critic like a cartoon cop from the Simpsons, who stands over us as we are face down on the pavement and lists all the reasons we are at fault for being mugged.....That street light was out, your shoes were no good for getting away, you were robbed of your phone, so could not call for help....thank you Captain Obvious!

The critic matches the idea of the Super ego in Psychodynamic psychotherapy very well, so the idea is that we need to disempower the super ego, take its power away; and since we cannot make it change it's rules, or reason with it, or make it stop beating us down.  Even people with severe depression get hammered by the guilt of not doing more or right or enough or whatever....

So the idea is to replace the character face and voices of the inner critic.  Perhaps you watched the Muppet Show (late 70's early 80's) or some Muppet Movie.  There are a pair of critics that sit in the balcony and all they do is criticize the show, their names are Waldorf and Statler, so the idea is to permanently replace your inner critic with those two elderly men muppets.  How does that sound.

I often say it this way, "In my head is a shit show, but the least I can do is promote myself to director, producer and casting agent..."

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
"A person must hone the art of talking to himself."
-Carl Jung

Recently I heard it said a different way, that is that everyone is delusional it is just a very important matter which delusions we believe in....or something like that.

*******
Some time ago Carl Rogers the father of client-centered counseling, noted that a gap always exists between my ideal version of myself and the "real" me that currently exists.  This gap or descrepancy is often considered to create existential anxiety, the low level, might be the source of motivation.

In the past it was often the case that something "bad" happened or some bad decisions, resulted in the real life me dropping down, or the bottom falling out.  One such might be the fate of Pookie in new Jack City,becoming a homeless drug addict, or I recently acquired a disability, or recently had a massive set back, such as failing out of medical school.  (not to mention the grief that might come along with it); but many people felt that the return to "normal" was so large it was insurmountable, leaving them disincentivized or unmotivated to even try.

More recently the phenomenon has gone the other way, instead of the bottom falling out, the top has blown off, like the reactor in Chernobyl; due to increased comparison of self to others, this is sending the "ideal" version of self into the stratosphere, creating a new form of the insurmountable gap, leading to people being depressed, hopeless, unmotivated, and making no efforts towards betterment.  This is of course observation from clinical experience.......




So the idea is that a form of anxiety exists because we all have a gap between our ideal self and our real self in the present moment, and the bigger that gap is the more anxiety it will create.  The notion is that a small gap will result in a bit of existential anxiety also known as "motivation" ; however it is possible that through bad life choices people move further away from who they were and the gap gets bigger, such as a person who fell into substance abuse, if the valedictorian ends up homeless and addicted that gap between the real life self in the present is so far from the ideal self that they find it insumountable to get back to aplace like even "normal".
Social media and comparing yourself to others has created the same thing in the reverse, it has elevated the ideal self to a place that is so far away that the person feels that the gap is just as insurmountable and instead of motivation to move forward they are as disheartened/unmotivated and depressed as the homeless addict....  If that makes sense?
This message was last edited by the GM at 16:32, Sat 13 May 2023.