How to Create New Core Beliefs

Core beliefs are usually unconscious but can stand between you and your goal to put an end to your food and body image issues. When first formed, usually when you were younger and during times of transition, trauma, or emotional upheaval, core beliefs are solutions to problems you couldn’t solve—perhaps because you didn’t have the resources at the time. Core beliefs are the result of unmet primal needs — the need for safety/protection, care/nurturance, and emotional expression (Basile, et al., 2021). For example, you may have learned not to show any emotion as a child as a way to avoid being hurt, or because you believed that your intense emotions would hurt another person. Your core belief, in this case, might be “Showing others how I feel is dangerous.” And this strategy can be detrimental in many areas of your adult life. Understanding that such damaging core beliefs no longer function for you will help you shift to new guiding principles that will serve you better.

Here's an example from a former patient:

David and his older brother often got into fights over David’s mother being more protective of David, her youngest child. He coped by finding comfort and solace in food. As a result, he struggled with food and body image issues as a child. By the time he was a teenager, he was bigger than his brother, and unconsciously he felt safer and less vulnerable when he was in a larger body. When his brother tried to fight with him, David was no longer afraid. As an adult, he was able to identify a core belief from his past of “bigger is better,” which explained his difficulty in staying at his desired weight.

Core beliefs represent the way you see yourself, other people, the world, and your future, and are activated in situations that you perceive as threatening to your primal needs. These beliefs were formed as a way of coping with some problem that perhaps you were too young or too inexperienced to deal with.

Research highlights the importance of addressing these negative core beliefs: When they are not addressed, you may find it more difficult to stop unhealthy behaviors (Ford, et al 2011). Negative core beliefs play an important role in the development and maintenance of the symptoms of food and body image issues. Core beliefs have also been implicated in the difficulty some women with food and body image issues have in becoming more aware of and learning to express their emotions.

Core beliefs come out of adverse childhood experiences or insecure attachment styles. Sometimes core beliefs are related to trauma, abuse, or neglect, but they can also originate from other experiences you had in your family growing up (Basile, et al., 2021). Following is a list of some typical family scenarios that lead to specific beliefs (Young, Klosko, and Weishaar 2003):

Children from permissive and overly indulgent homes may not learn to respect others and could have poor internal limits and boundaries. Their core beliefs may include one of the following:

• I should be able to have or do whatever I want when I want.
• I get easily frustrated. I have a hard time controlling my impulses to do certain things.

Children with enmeshed (overly close) relationships with a parent, in which their judgment is undermined, or who come from overprotective homes, may develop one of these beliefs:

• I can’t take care of myself. I feel incompetent.
• I don’t feel safe in the world.
• I don’t have any direction. I feel like I’m floundering in my life.
• I feel like a failure. I feel inadequate.

Children from explosive, detached, abusive, or unpredictable homes may have one (or more) of the following beliefs:

• I can’t count on others to be there for me, and I will always lose the ones I love.
• Others will take advantage of me.
• I don’t belong. I’m an outsider.
• Something is wrong with me, and no one will love me if they really get to know me.
• I haven’t lived up to my potential, so why try?

Homes in which children are taught to put aside their own needs and emotions to gain attention, approval, or love may develop these core beliefs:

• I feel my needs are not as important as pleasing others. I am afraid to express my emotions for fear someone will get angry or upset at me.
• I feel guilty if I put my needs before others’.
• Status, money, and achievement are very important to me.

Children who grow up in a home with too many rules may learn to suppress, control, or ignore their feelings to avoid making mistakes or breaking the rules and may develop core beliefs such as:

• I believe that what can go wrong, will. I try my hardest not to make mistakes.
• I fear that my emotions will harm others or that I will be embarrassed or abandoned if I let people know how I feel.
• No matter what I do, it’s never good enough.
• If people don’t meet my expectations or I don’t meet my own expectations, I feel they or I should be punished.

Where do core beliefs come from?

Sometimes core beliefs can come from a perception you have about what someone else thinks about you or from a statement made by a family member or friend that, for whatever reason, stuck with you.

Another type of experience that can lead to the formation of negative core beliefs is childhood neglect. Childhood neglect is defined as the failure of a parent or caregiver to provide needed food, clothing, shelter, medical care, or supervision to the degree that the child’s health, safety, and well-being are threatened with harm.

What are the effects of core beliefs?

Core beliefs represent patterns that are formed in childhood but then are repeated (usually unconsciously) over and over. You’ll know you are in one of your core belief patterns because you’ll have the same emotions, thoughts, judgments, body sensations, and behaviors every time you find yourself behaving from one of these beliefs. You may repeat the pattern of childhood emotional abuse in a clear way by being in relationships with partners who are emotionally abusive. Or you may try to fight the pattern by doing just the opposite of what your belief tells you to do. For example, a person who feels inadequate and fears failure may work 80 hours a week in an attempt to avoid failure. Often the overworking will backfire, and she will get sick or become depressed and be unable to work, thereby increasing her sense of failure.

Almost always, it’s a core belief that is in the way of achieving what you desire. Whatever your core belief, if it is in opposition to your current goals and desires, it will benefit you to identify this belief and decide to change it if it is no longer in your best interest.

How can I change a core belief?

Being under the influence of core beliefs is like living in a dream. When you’re asleep and you have a vivid dream, the dream seems completely real.

In order to change a core belief, you have to change your perspective (wake up from the dream). For example, David’s belief that “bigger is better” affected his marriage and his work. His perspective that he was not safe, that he didn’t have enough power unless he was bigger, was a child's or teen’s view of his life situation. When he became aware of this core belief and its effect on his adult life, he could shift his perspective and see the belief from an adult viewpoint.

His new core belief was motivated by his desire to be there for his kids: “When I take care of my body in a healthy way, I am able to do more things with my kids.”

When you become aware of your core beliefs, you can decide to honor their place in your life and the earlier benefit you received. For example, David’s belief, “Bigger is better,” made him feel safe against his older brother. You can also recognize that you are no longer the frightened, sad, or rebellious child or teen who first developed this belief, and become aware of the fact that you have more skills for dealing with life’s problems than you did as a child. Finally, now that you are an adult, your current needs and challenges may be different from those of your younger self, and therefore, your core beliefs may no longer apply.