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Belief Work
Belief Work
This technique was first developed by world-renowned psychiatrist Dr. Maxie C. Maultsby, Jr., founder of Rational Behavior Therapy, who taught us to apply modern psychotherapeutic skills in emotional self-help. First of all, when you or your loved one is dealing with life-threatening illness, there are no emotions or beliefs that would be wrong or inappropriate. A wide range of thoughts, beliefs and emotional experiences is normal in such circumstances. On the other hand, it is the beliefs and emotions that determine the quality of our lives, so by addressing the unhealthy ones, you can effectively improve the quality of your life.
The purpose of Belief Work is not to avoid or suppress these difficult emotions but to explore them and learn from them. Therefore, we may ask you here to do things that are contrary to your usual way of dealing with such emotions. Many people are either swept by the emotion and follow their emotional habitual pattern or try to run away from them by distracting themselves, getting busy or occupy their minds with TV or social media or use food or other substances to change how they feel. As long as you are not doing anything unhealthy (excessive drinking, drugs, unprotected casual sex, speeding etc.), with TV, social media or food and other substances to change how they feel, that is okay. This insistence on feeling differently or avoiding pain adds only an additional layer of suffering, and we really don’t learn anything from the experience. For that reason, the next time we are in a similar situation and this emotional pain comes, we are at the mercy of our habitual emotional responses.
The purpose of Belief Work is to better understand your emotions and to raise your awareness about how and where from they arise. That’s why we are asking you not to get away from this emotion but to honor it and learn from it. In other words, we ask you to stay with what you are feeling, experience the sensations from your body, where in your body you are feeling them and then explore what thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes go through your mind that fuel this emotion. In order to really benefit from this technique, we encourage you to start writing this down. It will be very helpful in developing healthy ways of effectively dealing with these emotions. In other words, the primary purpose of Belief Work is to learn from these difficult emotions and, if you choose so, eventually free yourself from habitual patterns and exercise your freedom of reacting to situations as it is most healthy to you, not just how you used to.
The most effective time to do this work is when you are experiencing the greatest emotional pain when undesirable emotions are interfering with your life. For example, when you realize that “fear is interfering with my sleep.”
Unhealthy beliefs are easier to identify when you’re actively thinking them. So when you experience a distressing feeling or emotional pain (sadness, fear, guilt, shame, anger, etc.) follow these steps:
Instructions for Written Belief Work
1. Assess your emotional pain. Here’s how to do it: take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle creating two columns. On the top of the left column, write down the level of emotional pain you are experiencing at the moment on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 indicates no pain and 10 indicates the most intense emotional pain you ever experienced.
2. List your unhealthy beliefs. This is the most important part of this exercise nobody can do for you. We can help you complete this Belief Work once you have listed the beliefs you want to work on.
In the left column, list at least five beliefs that seem to be fueling this emotion. Write them down as they go through your mind without self-censorship or concern for whether or not they make any sense.
Do continuous writing. If you are in significant emotional pain and are unsure what beliefs to list, simply start writing down whatever is on your mind (i.e. not what happened but what you think about it).
Write continuously for at least 7 minutes without taking the pen off the paper. If at some point your mind goes blank, write “my mind went blank,” but keep writing.
Similarly, if you think the assignment is stupid, write down “this assignment is stupid” – do not censor yourself and do not stop before the 7 minutes is up.
If after 7 minutes you still have things on your mind, keep writing. Most people don’t need to write longer than another 7 minutes.
Once done, read what you have written and identify the unhealthy beliefs. If you still do not know how to identify them, just bring your notes for the next session and we will help you.
Or you can post them using the comment box below to get help from other users. Feel free to use an alias when submitting your notes.
3. Test each belief with the Five Rules of Healthy Thinking. For each belief ask:
1. Is this belief based on facts?
2. Does this belief protect my life and health?
3. Does this belief help me achieve my short and long-term goals?
4. Does this belief help me resolve or avoid my most unwanted conflicts with others?
5. Does this belief help me feel the way I want to feel?
If you cannot answer “yes” to three or more of these questions that means this belief is unhealthy.
4. For each unhealthy belief in the left column write down in the right column a new, healthy thought that is incompatible with your unhealthy belief.
5. Check all of your healthy thoughts to see if they obey at least three of the Five Rules for Healthy Thinking.
6. Stop and check how you feel. On the bottom of the right column, write down the level of emotional pain you are experiencing on the scale from 1 to 10, where 1 indicates no pain and 10 indicates the most intense emotional pain you ever experienced.
7. Keep your list with you at all times. When you experience this emotional pain or distressing feeling again, pull it out and read both sides of your list. You may need to pull it out multiple times a day.
8. To speed up the process and intensify your practice, put yourself in a relaxed state with calm breathing and imagine the healthy beliefs several times a day. Simply repeat in your mind each healthy belief for at least 30 seconds. Do this until you no longer feel the emotional pain that this belief work helped you to resolve. According to the standard learning theory, when you proceed as described, it typically takes four to six weeks for your new beliefs to become your new non-conscious, “automatic” attitudes.
9. Initially, people usually do not believe in their newly found healthy thoughts. Thinking them may feel wrong, weird, awkward, and unnatural. The fact is that any new thoughts and behaviors that are in conflict with our habits feel wrong, weird, awkward, and unnatural (like visiting England and driving on the left side of the road for the first time). We call it cognitive-emotive dissonance. With practice, this weird feeling will go away, and the new healthy beliefs will feel as natural as the unhealthy ones did before them.
10. If you still experience emotional pain or some distressing feelings when you pull out your list or try to imagine your healthy beliefs, there are still some unhealthy beliefs present. Therefore, take a piece of paper and proceed again from step #1 of Belief Work.
11. Bring your belief work to your next session and discuss it with your therapist.
12. Over time, you will probably do much Belief Work. Collect all of them and keep them in one place (a folder on a notebook). You may want to revisit them in the future, either to deal with emotional pain, to practice, or just out of curiosity to see how much you have changed.
If you practice your healthy beliefs, you will likely notice major progress. You may even come to feel like you could rewrite them and make them even healthier.
13. Remember, in order to feel better, it is necessary to think healthier.
14. Healthy thinking ≠ positive thinking
The biggest difference between healthy thinking and positive thinking has to do with the factual aspects of the belief. For example:
Negative: “I cannot get well.”
Attachment: “I have to get well.”
Positive: “I will get well.”
Healthy: “I can get well no matter how sick I am.”
Positive thinking is healthier than negative thinking. However, the problem with positive thinking is that it does not necessarily align itself with the facts of nature or with real life. In the Simonton program we want to be in harmony with our nature, so developing beliefs that are in line with facts of nature is important.
An example of Belief Work done by one of our patients
| I can’t get well. | I can get well no matter how sick I am. |
| I will die soon and in suffering. | I don’t know when I am going to die but I know that what I do can significantly influence when and how I’ll die. The most important thing for me is what is happening in the present moment, how much joy and meaning I can experience here and now. Healing takes place only now. |
| Cancer eats me up from the inside. | Cancer cells are weak, confused and sick. It has never been demonstrated that a cancer cell could eat or destroy a healthy cell. On the contrary, immune cells have the ability to recognize and devour or eliminate cancer cells and these processes have been operating without our conscious effort since before we were born. |
| Chemotherapy is only going to hurt me. | Chemotherapy has helped many people get well and is helping me to do the same. Chemotherapy is my ally and is effective in combating cancer. Chemotherapy is designed to eliminate cancer cells and to spare healthy cells. |
These new healthy thoughts were acceptable for her, but still, she had difficulty believing in them. In order to begin to believe in them, she started to practice: think of the new thoughts with joy. She practiced until the new thoughts became her beliefs, and then her attitude.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. Do I have to do my Belief Work in writing?
Yes, to get the most benefit, it is best to do it in writing. We can only have one thought at a time and the current thought is typically the most convincing, so we don’t have the proper perspective to objectively evaluate whether this thought is healthy or not. Eventually, you will develop a habit of “automatically” evaluating the health of your thoughts and dismissing the unhealthy ones as they come. But if you are feeling emotional discomfort, it means you are not there yet.
Also, writing in the right column gives you a ready script for practicing new beliefs.
The other – also correct, but not as useful – answer to FAQ 1 is: “No, there is nothing that you have to do as you learn from the handout on Healthy Semantics.”
2. What do I write, if nothing comes to my mind?
If there is indeed nothing on your mind, then there is no suffering, and nothing needs to change. But for most of us, there is always something on our minds.
And most of us are simply not used to paying attention to what we think and how it creates our emotions. Since we are not aware of the thinking process, it is easy to say, “Nothing is on my mind.”
Also, many of our “automatic” emotional reactions are triggered by attitudes that are non-verbal forms of habitual beliefs. Therefore, the most effective time to access them is when we are experiencing intense emotional pain.
At this time, we are actively thinking the thoughts that create this pain. Since they are so prominently on our minds we can capture them more easily.
Keep writing them down as long as they come and as long you are in emotional pain. Once on paper, they can be evaluated, and if they’re unhealthy, new healthy thoughts can be written in the right column.
3. I always run out of space for healthy beliefs in the right column. What can I do?
When you write down negative thoughts, you may first write them continuously (see step 2 in the instructions for Belief Work). Once done, you may transfer them into the two-column format leaving more space between each of the thoughts in the left column.
Alternatively, you can make the left column narrower and the right wider. Also, you may use the back side of the page. Once you are finished, you may re-write it for practice.
4. Am I done once I’ve written on both sides?
No. You may feel better, but you are not finished. What you’ve completed is the basis for future practice.
There are two main forms of practicing new healthy thoughts and it is most effective to practice both.
First, schedule time to relax and then rehearse the healthy beliefs in the right column several times in your imagination. Second, every time you find yourself in similar emotional pain, take out your belief work and read both columns.
The right column shows which thoughts fuel the emotional pain and the left shows how you can resolve it. If you still feel the emotional pain, it means that you are still thinking unhealthy thoughts and have not written and reformulated them into healthy ones yet.
5. How can I keep unhealthy thoughts from popping into my head?
You cannot control what kind of thoughts pop into your head, but you can decide which ones to keep. By practicing certain thoughts in your head, you increase the likelihood they will stick and decrease the probability that incompatible ones will pop in.
Also, a thought is just a thought. It will dissolve quickly if you do not pay attention to it, so do not try to block it or fight it because it will begin to replay in your mind so much so that you may eventually come to believe it.
6. How will I know if this is helping me?
First, you will notice that you feel better after completing the Belief Work. Second, if you start practicing it you may notice that the episodes of emotional pain related to unhealthy thoughts are becoming shorter, less frequent, less intense, and eventually disappearing altogether.
You will also know it helped you when you no longer need to pull out the piece of paper with your Belief Work on it.
Here simple comment form at the bottom of the page, that allows people to make comments – alert would go to info@beat-the-odds.org.
In the form below, you can enter questions or thoughts and beliefs that you don’t know how to deal with. Please, first check them if they obey at least 3 of the 5 rules – if they don’t, they are unhealthy.
Your name (or alias)
Your email address (hidden on the page)
Your thoughts and beliefs
Thank you. Someone of our clinical staff is going to respond to your question shortly.
Evidence
- Cancer and stress: counselling the cancer patient
- Effect of psychosocial treatment on survival of patients with metastatic breast cancer
- Malignant melanoma
- Impact of psychotherapeutic support for patients with gastrointestinal cancer undergoing surgery
- Psychologic intervention improves survival for breast cancer patients
- The Science and Practice of Beat the Odds