28. Pull the weeds out by their roots

You have been observing. You have been noticing which responses are yours and which are not. Now comes the next step: finding where the conditioned ones started.

A limiting pattern that you can see is a problem you can work with, and a limiting pattern you can trace to its origin is one you can dismantle.

Here is an exercise that has helped me and many others I have spoken with. This is not therapy, and it is not a replacement for professional support. It is a structured way of examining a programme that is costing you, by going back to the moment it was formed.

Start by listing the patterns or beliefs you’ve identified from the observer exercise in The Alien Observer.

Circle the one that costs you the most in time, energy, maybe even relationally.

Take that pattern and ask: when was the very first time I remember feeling this way? Not the most intense time. The first time. It might be surprisingly early. A moment in childhood, an interaction with a bully, a punishment for something you did not understand. It does not have to be dramatic from your adult perspective, in fact often the most powerful limiting beliefs are formed in quiet moments that nobody else noticed.

If it helps, draw a line on a piece of paper. Your birth at one end, today at the other. Mark the first occurrence. Then mark the other significant moments where it was reinforced.

Now here is the part that matters, you can write it out or you can walk through it in your mind’s eye:

Imagine you could go back to that first moment as the person you are now, with all the hindsight and everything you’ve learned, and sit with the younger version of yourself who was forming that belief or pattern. What would you say to them? What do they need to hear? What context are they missing that you now have?

The younger version of you formed that belief under specific conditions. They were inside a system designed to produce exactly that belief. They had less information than you do now. They had fewer resources, less experience, limited perspective. The belief made sense given what they knew and where they were.

But you are no longer there. And the belief, which seemed like the best response from the perspective of your younger self inside that environment, may be actively harmful outside it.

If an entire belief system can be wrong - and you already know it can, because you lived through that realisation - then any other belief can be wrong too, including the negative ones about yourself.

If an entire belief system can be analysed, dismantled, and discarded, then maybe the other limiting beliefs that have weighed you down can be too…

If you want to be extra thorough with this exercise, imagine walking forward along the timeline of your life to each significant moment where that belief was reinforced, and offer what was missing: context, compassion, the simple truth that the system was wrong and your younger self was not.

You can’t rewrite history, but you can re-evaluate a conclusion that was drawn under duress, by a version of you who did not have the information you have now.

If you are willing, pick one belief this week. Just one. Trace it back. Write down when it formed and what was happening at the time. Then ask yourself: if I were forming this belief today, with what I know now, would I still choose it?