Can You Really Believe "I Am Good"?

Healing from trauma when you can't quite believe you can

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Hello all! It has been a wild and busy week. It was amazing — traveling to Indy (where I used to live) with my mom, seeing Hamilton with her, spontaneously running a race (because “I AM NOT THROWING AWAY MY SHOT!!” 😂), and then diving straight into 3 days of EMDR training and then two full days of work. And today I’m doing a training on gaslighting and narcissistic abuse (hopefully writing on that + evangelicalism next week?!). My brain is tiiiiiiired. But I’m so excited that I still want to share something I was thinking about with you all!

When I get excited about something, I want to tell everyone about it, so hi, here’s me sharing about EMDR. I wrote about EMDR in a previous post, but the elevator pitch is that EMDR is a therapy modality that targets traumatic memories and helps your brain reconsolidate them so that instead of feeling scary and activating, the memories neutralize, getting properly stored in the prefrontal cortex instead of stuck in the limbic/emotional system. I was once skeptical about EMDR… then became completely convinced once I experienced it myself.

Part of EMDR involves recognizing the negative cognition (belief about self) that has formed as a result of the traumatic event, and then working towards replacing that with a positive cognition about the self. This happens (approximately) by letting your nervous system process traumatic memories that have created maladaptive beliefs. So for instance, one cognition that might form as a result of abuse or neglect or other experiences is the belief “I am bad.”

In my training, one of my practice partners was working through something where she wanted to replace the cognition “I am bad” with the cognition “I am good.”

Hold the phone. You can just decide to believe that you are good???

Noticing my own reaction about this, I had the abrupt realization that my religious programming has not actually left me. It wasn’t my practice session (I was her therapist, actually) but I found my body resisting, deep deep down, the idea that I could just claim the idea that I am good.

Furthermore, it “clunked” into place even further that religious programming like this IS indeed traumatic. To be incapable of really, truly believing about oneself that you are good is a sign of trauma.

It turns out that sometimes there are beliefs that get in the way of further processing the trauma at hand; these are called “blocking beliefs.” They can include ideas like “I have to be perfect” or “I can’t show my emotions” or “My [insert issue here] is my identity.” And guess what? Religious and spiritual teachings can also create blocking beliefs!

Say we were working on something related to being worthy or deserving of good things or good treatment by others. And we were getting stuck because it turns out, the client truly doesn’t believe they can be worthy or deserving. (It’s me. This would be me, in an imagined session that hasn’t yet occurred).

The way to work through that is to target the actual blocking belief itself. The “block” must be removed to get to the next, deeper level of work.

One reason I would struggle with Christian counseling, or doing counseling with people who are firmly entrenched in “traditional” or conservative theology that holds tightly to original sin, is that this belief about the self being bad is essential to the theology. If the person is willing to examine that belief or hold it loosely, that’s one thing, but if they feel like they have to hold tightly lest everything falls apart…well, it gets pretty challenging to get to the deepest level of healing work.

And for those of us who do want to get to that deepest level of healing, it’s clarifying to recognize that some of those very beliefs that were considered foundational to our old theology are indeed traumatizing, and can quite literally get in the way of continued healing. But also, it is possible to work through those beliefs! This is some really engrained shit so it might take a long time and a lot of attempts toward healing. But when you can clearly identify the problem — and see it as an actual issue instead of “just how things have to be” — it becomes a little more doable to address it.

Hopefully I’ll write even more on this later as I continue my healing journey. Lately I’ve been feeling really drawn to growing — professionally as a therapist and concurrently as a human being. And letting whatever can spill over into my writing, in some open and honest sharing with you fine people. Thanks for being part of my journey!

What thoughts and feelings does this stir up for you as you read this? Have you noticed any particular beliefs that get in the way of your growth as a person? What ways have you seen yourself grow as you recover from religious trauma? Feel free to join me in the comments, press the “heart” button if you liked this post, and/or share it with a friend!