Consider something that you are absolutely certain of regarding your life. Is it something related to money, love, happiness, or morality? How did this conviction arise?
Very few people tend to consider the origin of their ideas. Most of them live their lives based on their convictions. However, there is one very important fact. Most of these beliefs do not belong to you; you acquired them from somewhere else. They originate from the surrounding people who influenced your life.
This is what we mean by human belief systems. These are your belief systems concerning what you perceive to be truths about the world. And the strange thing is that these beliefs had been fed into your brain without your consent or approval before you could ever speak up and say otherwise. That’s early childhood conditioning psychology in action.
To know your beliefs, you must know their origins. This will take you one step closer to knowing yourself, and, possibly, choosing what you believe.
Your Beliefs Came From Somewhere
The Beliefs You Never Chose
Think for a moment about your parents or guardians. What were their views on money? Were they always stressed or always sure? Did they use expressions such as “we cannot afford that” or “money doesn’t come to me”? Or perhaps were they of the mind that money could be obtained by simply going after it?
This is all that your childish mind heard at the time. This was not someone in a classroom making notes. No, the information was being soaked into your mind. Each time the parent was talking about money in a certain way, your mind was getting used to something. It was creating a belief system about what money meant.
Come forward into today. Now you are an adult, and you have a different perspective on finances. But guess what? Your childhood lessons haven’t gone anywhere. They’re still influencing your decisions. They affect how anxious or confident you feel about seeing your bank account. They probably influence whether or not you ever attempt to increase your earnings.
But here’s the kicker: most people spend their whole lives without knowing that. They think that they’re being practical, but in actuality, it’s early childhood conditioning psychology.
The Invisible Teacher
Your first teachers did not teach you in a school. Your first teachers taught you at home. They could have been your mom and dad, brothers and sisters, anyone you interacted with in those days. But they did not teach on purpose; they were just living.
And yet, all that you observed was part of your education. Words did not play any big role here; actions were the major teacher. In case you felt protected at home, you would learn how to feel protected. In case you sensed that the environment was unstable, you would accept chaos as the norm. In case someone paid attention to your views, you knew how valuable you were.
This is a belief system formation, an actual event that occurred to you without your consent. This took place from the ages of zero to seven, although it actually continued for several years after. Each message counted. Each pattern turned into a belief.
How Childhood Moments Build Your Mental World
The Power of Repetition
As you know, rivers can dig out canyons, but that is not because they are very strong; rather, it is because of their consistency. They keep flowing in one direction continuously, year after year. This way, they wear away even the hardest rocks.
That’s what human behavior development is like. It’s often not just one defining experience that makes you who you are. It’s the same message, repeatedly. The same experience, repeatedly. The same pattern, repeatedly.
Perhaps every single time you got something wrong as a child, someone screamed at you. Perhaps not all the time. Perhaps not with grand drama. But regularly. This repetition has done something to your mind. It has formed a belief within you. Perhaps this belief is that “I am not good enough.” Or “When I screw up, I should try to cover it up.” Or even that “Making mistakes is dangerous.”
Now, as an adult, you freeze when you do something wrong in the workplace. Shame overtakes you whenever you make a mistake. And yet you cannot let it roll off you like water off a duck’s back. Others may think you’re strange or overly sensitive, but you’re really just following a pattern that has been ingrained in you for years.
Small Moments, Big Impact
It was sometimes something so unimportant as the way your parent looked at you, talked to you, never played with you, but worked all the time, or favored or mistreated your siblings. But a child’s brain is not able to understand the context of these actions. It does not understand that his parent was suffering because of work or an unhappy marriage.
All it understands is how it felt and concludes that this is the way the world works, or maybe even how they are as human beings.
This is environmental influence on mind invisible influences that come from your upbringing, your background, the things that you saw and heard. Nothing was tagged to show that this was important. No one told you, “This is going to influence your life forever.” But it did.
The Family Blueprint That Still Runs Your Life
Your Family as a Template
Your family has instilled in you all the knowledge of how people behave. How should you act like a male or a female? How should you deal with your anger? How should you express your love, if at all? How should you fight? How do you forgive? How do you view yourself, your body, mind, and place in the scheme of things?
All this has been imparted to you by your family. They have created a template for you. But although you claim to be free and independent now that you have come of age, you still adhere to the template.
The psychology of identity formation isn’t something that happens once, and then you’re done. Something that is rooted within your family and then continues for the remainder of your life. Something that makes you into the likeness of your parents without realizing it. This is not a result of your choice. This is because this has become what is normal for you.
You might swear that you will be the complete opposite of your parents. And maybe you do end up being the complete opposite of your parents in certain ways. But you still remain a part of the model.
Breaking the Pattern Starts With Seeing It
The crazy thing is that most people don’t bother looking at the template. They don’t think to themselves, “Hey, wait a minute. I was taught this by my family, but it’s not necessarily the truth; it’s just something I learned.”
They operate on the assumption that what their family did is the only way of living. They raise children like they were raised, make the same decisions, face the same difficulties that their parents faced, and yet they don’t understand why their lives resemble their parents’ lives so much.
This is why understanding early childhood conditioning psychology matters. That is because once you see the pattern, you are able to challenge it. Once you challenge it, you are able to break it. However, if you don’t see it, you are merely going to be on autopilot all of your life.
Why Society’s Messages Stick So Deep
More Than Just Your Family
The influence did not stop with just your family. You also heard from society. There were also cultural views that mattered. There were religious views that played a part. You learned about what you should learn at school. The media helped shape your wants and needs.
This was all going on while your family was educating you. Before you reached an age where you could make independent decisions, you had received countless messages about how to act, what you could desire, and what you could do.
This is an environmental influence on mind on a massive scale. It is not about your parents, but every commercial that has ever been shown to you, every successful person you have ever heard of, every stereotypical description of someone like you, and all those descriptions of your worth and value.
The Beliefs You Didn’t Know You Had
The tricky part is that a lot of these messages were never said out loud. They were just… the way things were. The way your neighborhood looked. The way people talked about certain groups. The jobs your parents thought were “good” jobs. The way bodies were discussed. The way money was discussed. The way emotions were handled.
You absorbed all of it without anyone sitting you down and saying, “I’m going to teach you these specific human belief systems now.” It just seeped in. It was accepted. It went unnoticed. It was, for you, reality.
Now you live by it. You make decisions based upon it. You raise children based on it. You shy away from some things and pursue others, all because of things you can no longer recall learning.
When You Start Questioning What You’ve Always Known
The Uncomfortable Beginning
Eventually, at one point, whether it be now, if you are reading this, you begin to think. You begin to realize that your life resembles a pattern. This is true about your relationships, finances, and happiness levels; they are exactly similar to those of your parents or are their complete opposites, as you vowed not to have.
You begin to question yourself whether it is indeed your life or whether it is the life that was instilled in you.
The thought makes you very uncomfortable. Because if what you believe isn’t your own, then who are you? And if your values were imparted by your culture and family, do you have any at all? Are you nothing but an automaton running someone else’s software?
To ask such questions makes you very uncomfortable, which is why most people never bother to ask.
The Psychology of Identity Formation is Ongoing
But here’s the good news. You’re not stuck. The psychology of identity formation didn’t end when you were seven. It’s still happening. You’re in the process of developing an identity. You’re in the process of creating your own beliefs, even if you aren’t aware of doing so.
With each decision you make that defies everything you were taught, you’re transforming who you are. With each doubt you have about a belief you’ve held for years, you’re opening up a chance for something better. When you say to yourself, “My parents did this, but I’m going to do something different,” you’re literally growing into yourself.
It’s not happening fast enough. It’s not easy enough. But it’s achievable. You can reflect on what you’ve been taught and decide whether those beliefs are working for or against you. You can build your own human belief systems, not by rebelling against everything, but by being conscious and intentional.
The Truth About Changing Your Beliefs
It’s Not About Positive Thinking
Most self-help literature tells you that you should just think positively and believe in yourself. And that would be nice if it worked. But human behavior development doesn’t work like that.
One cannot simply talk oneself out of an issue that one has believed all one’s life. It is not just a thought but something rooted in the body. It’s the nervous system, the automatic reaction when faced with certain situations, the gut feeling of what is possible for him.
Therefore, if one tells someone with deeply-rooted beliefs because he was born poor, “just believe that you can be rich,” then it’s the same as throwing someone in the ocean without knowing how to swim and asking him to do just that.
What Actually Works
Change is slow and gradual. Change is the process of experiencing something new repeatedly. Change can happen with the help of therapy at times. It happens through education and exposure to different human belief systems.
However, this usually takes place through being patient with yourself. This occurs by becoming aware of the fact that you are operating under an old belief and opting for a new path gently. It takes place through making mistakes and learning.
You can change your human belief systems. Yet one must realize that one is not merely changing one’s mind; one is changing one’s entire system. That requires something more than merely contemplating the idea; it requires living it, over and over again.
Conclusion
You’re not broken. You’re not damaged. You’re not weird. You’re just a person who was shaped by your life, just like everyone else.
Your human belief systems are real. These beliefs are strong; they influence all your choices, relationships, and dreams, or lack thereof. They’re based on your past: your upbringing, family, surroundings, culture. You received them without your consent, before you were mature enough to be aware of anything around you.
What makes all the difference is that now you know. You recognize the belief for what it is. And once you realize that, you are able to change that.
This does not necessarily mean denying everything you were brought up with. Your upbringing was never wrong. This is about examining the beliefs you’ve been given and making an active choice: Is this belief serving me? Is this true?
Early childhood conditioning psychology explains where you came from. But it doesn’t have to determine where you go.
If you want to go deeper into understanding your own psychology of identity formation and how to change what’s not working, that’s what “Taming the Fetal Tyrant” is about. It’s not just a matter of awareness. It is a matter of changing your beliefs for good. Your beliefs created you, but now it is time to recreate your beliefs. This is where true freedom lies.
FAQs
Q1: How much of my human belief systems come from my childhood?
Research suggests that most of your core human belief systems are formed by age seven, though they continue to develop through adulthood. These things shape you during your childhood, but that doesn’t mean that they will continue to have this effect on you forever. Although early childhood conditioning psychology may be quite strong, there is nothing stopping you from reconsidering these views and making some changes in your adulthood. These are more like a point where you begin from rather than where you end up.
Q2: What is the difference between early childhood conditioning psychology and just having preferences?
A preference is something you actively choose. You love chocolate ice cream; hence, you go for chocolate ice cream. However, there is a psychological belief from conditioned childhood psychology that works involuntarily. This is not something that is chosen by you. You simply follow the belief. In the case of one who was conditioned at his/her childhood to think that “they are not good with money,” such people will not consider any opportunity concerning finances because that belief will not be consciously made.
Q3: Can belief system formation happen to adults, or is it only a childhood thing?
Belief system formation continues throughout your life. It gets difficult. Once the belief is formed by way of experience, it becomes an automated thing, making it difficult to modify the belief. Nevertheless, you can always have experiences that will change your beliefs. Adults do change, albeit with more effort than children, because once the patterns are formed, they cannot be modified easily.
Q4: How does environmental influence on the mind compare to genetics in shaping who I am?
This is the classic nature-versus-nurture question. The honest answer is that both matter, and they interact. You’re born with certain tendencies and temperament (nature), but environmental influence on mind shapes how those traits develop and express themselves. If you have been naturally sensitive and your environment is violent, you might develop anxiety. If you have been naturally sensitive and your environment is safe and nurturing, you might become empathic and creative. Neither genes nor environment will solely determine who you become.
Q5: If my human belief systems were installed without my permission, how can I even trust my own mind to change them?
This is quite a profound question. And my response is that there is a lot more room for transformation within you than you might think. Sure, your programming was put in place without your consent. But once you’re an adult, you have the ability to see these belief systems, question them, and respond differently. No, we don’t have to trust our old minds – we create a new capacity through which change becomes possible. You begin to observe your own belief systems rather than being fully immersed in them. This is why working with a therapist or coach, reading, and being in communities with different human belief systems helps so much.