We have to have a foundation of beliefs that we live by whether we are aware of them or not, and unless we have done years of self surveying we probably are not aware of most of them. This foundation of beliefs often leads to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as the saying goes.
A long time ago I read The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck and completely connected with it, which provided me with some hope and solidified some of my foundation of beliefs and what I was trying to do because it helped me trust or believe more strongly in the ways I was trying to change my life. Shortly afterward I read the The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. In that book Alice Miller addressed something from The Road Less Traveled and contradicted what The Road Less Traveled said. My reaction was that I could no longer bring myself to even read the Drama of the Gifted Child because I no longer trusted that anything it said was right or had value, and I could not handle something challenging The Road Less Traveled, which was a core part of my foundation at the time.
My point is I missed out on a lot of great stuff in The Drama of the Gifted Child for a long time because I could not tolerate this one contradiction, and I am trying to suggest that if you find something completely abhorrent to your current foundation of beliefs try to just set it aside for now. I may be wrong on that issue or what I am saying might not be applicable to you or you might just not be ready to hear it. Any which way see if you can find other things that might be helpful, and if you do run with those for a while, then repeat.
We can only do so much and change so much at any particular time anyway. So when you find something that seems beneficial throw yourself into it and see where it takes you. Be careful and try not to necessarily make it a solution for everything, which I and most people are prone to do, but nonetheless try it and see where it takes you. You will likely be better off and it might lead you to the next thing to try or you can always come back here or millions of other places to find other good ideas to try.
Sometimes when big changes do occur in us it can be very unsettling and even big healthy changes can sometimes cause significant negative feelings or even physical manifestations. One example of this is when I made a decision to give up a career that I had spent a lot of time, money, and effort preparing myself for because I realized that my main reason for doing it was to feel important and have other people think I was really something. To me this represented the whole paradigm of my value coming from what I was able to achieve and do, and giving up this career was clearly giving up on this paradigm within me. I knew it was the right decision, and after knowing that it would have been almost impossible to continue the career, but actually giving it up came with a big sense of being rudderless and losing a big piece of my identity and foundation. I have only had maybe 6 migraine headaches in my life and I think 3 of them were in the month I was carrying out my decision to change careers. (BTW I already had another job that paid about as much and I could do without much mental or physical strain, and I knew the career change was what I wanted and needed.)
Another similar example occurred when I realized I was not going to turn back in trying to improve (at least from my perspective) my relationships with my parents and brothers. I had already done most of the work and had most of the interactions to make the changes, which consisted primarily of having mature and candid conversations about some of our underlying family dynamics, before I realized deep down that I was past the point of no return. However, when I realized there was no going back I had the longest migraine headache of my life. I knew this was what I wanted and needed and the candid conversations had gone fairly well from my perspective, but family had always been my biggest foundational pillar and forever changing that and making it less certain, while necessary, was very unnerving. Again I felt rudderless and like I was no longer tethered to anything. Honestly, I am pretty sure my family would still be there for me when I need them, but they might not take my extreme dysfunction or shitty behavior with nearly as much acceptance and forgiveness as they always had. Which would probably be a good thing, but awfully scary for me. You see I was the one who finally initiated the mature and candid conversations about family dynamics, but I was also the one who in the past had probably taken advantage of the dysfunctional family dynamics the most.
Again my point with the migraine stories is that even very necessary and healthy changes can have both negative feelings associated with them and even negative physical manifestations. This is one of the great many reasons that it is absolutely necessary for most of us on this type of journey to have trusted friends and hopefully mentors on the journey with us.
I will close with something that I think is funny. I have a very good friend in a 12 step program that says he thought when he started to come to the 12 step program that he would be brain washed. Then over the years he learned that his brain needed a good scrubbing. That has certainly been true for myself also.
Quick summary of this post - We all have a foundation of beliefs that dictates how we view the world and what we do. Knowing this and understanding how it makes us view and react to certain things can prevent us from completely discarding inconsistent views and being stuck with our current foundation of beliefs forever.
