How to Create Healthier Beliefs

Have you ever caught yourself hiding who you really are? Held onto a conviction without ever examining where it came from? Picked up an idea from someone else and treated it as your own, no questions asked? Say yes to any of those and you may be carrying beliefs that were never really true to begin with. For me, figuring out that most of what I believed about myself was false sent me straight into a depression. My life suddenly looked like one long lie, and I didn't know which thread to pull first.

A college professor suggested I talk to the campus counselor. I doubted it would do anything. In that first session, though, the counselor handed me something useful: resources, and a way to reach people who had lived through similar things and could actually understand. Before I left, she told me, "You are more than your past. You are who you believe you are. You can make your life whatever you wish it to be." I sat with that at home for a long time. She was right. Change was possible if I was willing, and I was.

The groups I joined put me around people at the same crossroads. They supported the shifts I was trying to make, and they also held up a mirror to the false beliefs I hadn't noticed in myself.

Common false beliefs tend to surface once you start looking. A lot of people who get a depression diagnosis discover, through counseling and other work, that they've been dragging around convictions that quietly weigh them down. We all grow up with different experiences and absorb ideas we then build our lives around. Some of those ideas get revised as we age. Some never do. And plenty of them are unhealthy from the start. When I stripped my own beliefs down to the foundations, I found I was carrying several of the most common ones.

Life owes me everything. That was near the top of my list, and it turned out half the group felt the same way. For years I'd reasoned that after everything I'd survived (sexual abuse, growing up in a divorced household, a string of bad relationships), the world owed me a payout. It doesn't work that way. Nothing worth having gets handed over. It takes work, commitment, patience. If this belief sounds familiar, start by naming it, then write down what you actually want. From there you can map out steps toward each goal. Slowly the belief shifts from "life owes me everything" to "I'm going to build everything in my life myself."

I can't get out of my current lifestyle. Here was another one we shared. We were convinced we were trapped in how we lived because nothing seemed to be moving, nothing seemed to change. A lot of us in that room, me included, were addicts. I'm four years and three months sober now. A wise woman there said something that stuck: "nothing changes until something changes." Your situation stays exactly as it is until you commit to changing it, and then you keep changing it until you can live with what you've built. I got sober, put together a recovery plan and a stress management plan. My depression was already easing by then, and I could see that things might actually break my way once I had healthier beliefs underneath me.

The longer a false belief lives in you, the harder it digs in. But the choice is still yours, the same one I had. You can replace the false beliefs with healthier ones. It won't be quick. Hard work, commitment, and patience are the price. Bring those three, and you'll watch things start to turn.