Core Beliefs: My Massage Therapist is Probably Going to Ruin Me

I was sitting on our couch talking to Cassidy and Gabe. They were basically comparing notes about counseling resources because they both see Jay. They were chatting about the different and similar tools they'd been given, how they've been applying them, what kind of successes they've had, etc. Cassidy mentioned that she and Jay were beginning to investigate what her "core belief" might be.

"What is that?" I asked.

"It's a deep-held, usually negative belief that you hold, sometimes without even knowing it, that shapes how you view the world," Cassidy said. "Like maybe 'I'm not worthy,' 'I'm a bad person,' 'I don't deserve love,' that kind of thing."

She gave me a Core Belief sheet with a chart that shows how a core belief acts as a lens that shapes the messages you get from your circumstances and interactions. For example, if you think about asking someone for coffee and your core belief is "I'm not worthy," then the message you hear from yourself is "Why would this person ever go out with me?" and so you don't ask him/her.

"Did you figure out what your core belief is?" I asked.

"Not really, not yet," she said. "He suggested a few for me to think about, like 'I'm not worthy,' or 'something bad is going to happen to me,' but none of them completely fit."

She and Gabe continued having a conversation, but I was having a Phoebe Moment.



Something bad is going to happen to me. That was it. That was my core belief.

I always think something bad is going to happen to me, and not because bad things happen, quite the opposite, in fact. I've led an extremely blessed life. I have amazing luck. My life has been one happy coincidence/fluke after another. The world seems to go out of its way to defy the laws of probability and bring me good things.

And yet every second of every day, I am deeply convinced that something bad is on the horizon for me. Every twinge is probably the beginning stages of cancer. Every late arrival is probably my husband dead in a car crash.

When "bad" things do happen to me, I feel vindicated. "See?! I knew it. I told you it was too good to be true/wouldn't work/would fall through."

I told Cassidy and Gabe my thoughts: "I feel my life has been so good that all the bad stuff must be waiting for me, like I've used up all the good and now comes the bad, or like now I 'deserve' bad stuff to even out the good."

"That's not how life—or God—works," Gabe said. "People make the same mistakes about dice rolling, thinking that if a die has rolled bad numbers a bunch, it has to start rolling better soon. But the probability is the exact same every time you roll."

"Yeah," I admitted. "And I know that, but I just know that the time I let my guard down or expect good things is gonna be the time it all goes bad."

"And that's like the Eight's worst nightmare," Cassidy pointed out. "Being blindsided."

The thing is, as we went on to discuss, my brand of anticipating the worst has no effect on reality. I don't plan for the worst. I do absolutely nothing differently in my life. Now that I'm thinking it through, it is actually pretty ridiculous (and a sore trial to Gabe). I soldier on the exact same way, taking zero precautions and preparing none at all for the worst I feel looming on the horizon.

I considered changing my perspective. I mentally feigned taking off my armor of cynicism to see what that would feel like.

I felt totally exposed. I resisted the urge to physically cross my arms. I felt exactly like I always had: like if I let my guard down, THAT'S gonna be the end of me. THAT'S the moment the universe has been waiting for and it's going to slit my throat and throw me in a blender.

I cannot explain this. I know that that's not how life works. I know that the only thing I'm doing is making myself stressed and worried and miserable for absolutely no reason. I know that if I were to stop believing that bad things are going to happen to me, the main effects would be more happiness and more peace.

I experimented in a concrete way when I got a massage a few weeks ago. I enjoy getting massages, but there's always a part of me that believes the therapist is going to ruin my body, that she's going to rub a muscle the wrong way and it's going to snap out of alignment and my body will never, ever recover. (Yes, I know I'm insane.) I tried actually relaxing and trusting the therapist. It was terrifying and I could only do it in tiny bursts before I went back to my safety blanket of "You're probably going to ruin me."

It was a very interesting experiment to me. I'm going to keep trying this whenever I feel like I can. I need to replace the core belief of "something bad is going to happen to me" with "God loves me and I can ultimately trust him," or something.

What is your core belief?

~Stephanie

In Which I Realize I'm Basically a Cactus

*she's

Man, last year was great. Remember last year? I started Becoming Me. I was feeling more alive and connected—to myself, my friends, the Earth, the Lord—than ever before. I felt like a garden beginning to become lush and beautiful and ready to bear fruit. I felt joyful. I felt all the fruits of the spirit, really.

Summer has always been my season. I love hot weather. I love lakes and pools and summer clothes. I love dusty, red, Southern dirt. I love those really loud frogs at night. For some reason I love that intense, hot, tingly, tummy-tightening feeling of the sun hitting you and just, like, frying into you. I love thunderstorms.

Summer is intense, and I love intense. It ignites my imagination. It makes me write and grow.

I'm basically a cactus, I guess? Some people find me cute and cool; some people are like "why would you want that in your house"; definitely don't touch me; loves heat and the sun; has very specific needs, but the main one is To Be Left Alone; sometimes produces pretty flowers but they look kind of unnatural and out of character.

Long story short: I am a cactus and apparently summertime is when I do my most growing and thinking and Becoming. However, lately, in sharp contrast to this time last year, I have not been feeling "one hundred," as the kids say. I've been feeling decidedly worse.

I don't think I lost any quantifiable "progress" I may have made last year. I'm still a quasi-minimalist, I still use reusable bags, I'm still mega into the Enneagram, etc. I just feel worse.

I have too much going on inside, and I can't sort it out until I organize it on the outside. About forty seconds ago, I thought this was going to be one colossal, disorganized post. However, in simply siting down to write, my brain was able to get its crap together long enough to tell me what seven or so things are festering inside me, and each thing is definitely a post on its own.

I know that personal growth isn't ever linear, so I'm not worried and I don't feel like I'm regressing as a human. It's just ironic that this time last year, I was feeling so good and so new, and a year later I'm sitting here feeling so cluttered and so stressed.

But I know of two things will help:

1) Jesus

2) Writing it down

So brace yourself for Season 2 of Becoming Me:

- Core Beliefs

- Centering Prayer

- Anxiety as a Body Type

- Vulnerability Thoughts Part...4?

- How DnD Might Be Helping Me Grow

- Southern Pride

- Politics and Christianity

~Stephanie

Things I "Hate"

These are the items that I had a visceral reaction against putting on the Things I Don't Like list because I feel like I more than "dislike" them.

Things I "Hate"
1) When people stop at parking lot intersections when they aren't the ones who have the stop sign

2) Physical touch when I'm frustrated. If I'm in pain or mad, the WORST thing you can do is put a "reassuring" hand on my arm.

3) When people try to "type" other people with the Enneagram. That's like the #1 Enneagram faux pas. You do not type other people. You tell them that the Enneagram exists and point them to resources if they're interested and THEY figure out their type for themselves.

4) When people take an online quiz and think they know their Enneagram type. Nope. It takes some research and reading and soul-searching. For the people I know who already know their Enneagram type, online quizzes guess wrong like 95% of the time.

5) Spoilers. I don't care how long the movie/show/book has been out. Spoilers are never okay. I can tell you the names of people who have spoiled things for me. I don't care for them a whole lot.

6) When people say "the reason being is." You don't use both forms of the verb "to be." The whole point of using the first is to avoid the second (e.g., "reason being, he was late").

7) The word "utilize." About 1% of the time is this what you mean. Ninety-nine percent of the time you mean "use" and you are trying to sound smarter. You know what you actually sound like? Someone who is worried he needs to sound smarter.

8) Having to repeat myself

9) Spelling and pronouncing the word for determination as "perseRverance." There are only two Rs, people. Stop slipping in a third.

10) The word "mansplain." There was already a word for that. It's "patronize," and it even comes from the masculine word "pater" for all the feminists.

11) "So-and-so and I's." You do realize that there's a possessive form of "I," right? IT'S "MY."

~Stephanie

10 Things I Don't Like

a lighthearted post inspired by the Facebook "challenge" asking friends to comment with something I don't like

Things I Don't Like (in no particular order)*

1) Pesto

2) Quotes from other things at the beginning of book chapters

3) When people don't understand when to "answer like Jeopardy." If you're playing a question-and-answer game and you're asked a question, like "What is 2 + 2?" you don't say, "What is 4!" The only reason you have to give the answer backwards in Jeopardy is because they are giving you the answer  and you're giving the question: "This simple addition problem feature two of the same number to equal four." Response: "What is 2 + 2?"

4) Wearing "real pants" (i.e., any pants that aren't athletic or sweatpants)

5) Most female characters**

6) When people pronounce the plural of process as "processeez." To me, that is only the correct pronunciation when the "eez" is the only indication of the word's being plural. Thesis/theses. Parenthesis/parentheses. Hypothesis/hypotheses. You can add "es" to the word "process" and we know it's plural because it already sounds like it's plural. Stop it with your pretentious eez.***

7) When drivers slow down before putting their turn signals on. It goes signal, slow down, turn.

8) The smell of flowers

9) Stepping in water when I'm wearing socks

10) Lists with a number of items that is one away from a multiple of 5

~Stephanie

* This list is NOT to be confused with the list of Things I Hate, which is far, far longer and more impassioned.

** Recently realized that what I might actually dislike is "poorly written female characters," which is, unfortunately, most of them these days.

*** There's a chance this should've been moved to the Things I Hate list, but see #10.

Racism: The First Step

For some reason I've been attempting to process all that has been happening in my head instead of in writing, which we all know doesn't work for me.

I care deeply and I've been wanting to say more, but I'm exhausted. I only know two ways to feel: all or nothing. The "all" was keeping me awake at night, giving me chest pains, and making me shaky. Every day is something new. Every day is some difference injustice, some other constitutional violation, some new threat to freedom.

But this morning, a couple of things hit me:

1) This may be how people of color feel 100% of the time.
2) If God gave me a love and ability for writing, then the worst thing I can do is sit on it when real things come up.

I'm not here to defend my character or be sure that you know my opinions on every facet of this issue. >deleted sentences that amounted to exactly that< If you want to go in-depth, let's get coffee and chat sometime. You know discussion is my love language.

It has taken me an embarrassingly long time to begin to see the racism situation for what it might be.

Do you remember Formspring? It was around when I was like a freshman and sophomore in high school, and it was a platform where your Facebook friends could anonymously ask you questions, you'd answer them, and they'd appear on like a rolling profile page. It was mostly used for trying to get your crush to think about you Differently, but one question and answer by a white "friend" has stuck with me for a decade:

Q: Would you ever date a black guy?
A: No, sorry, I'm not racist, it's just the way I was raised.

I remember thinking, "Wait, that is absolutely racist. What does that even mean? How can you think that's not racist? Are people raising their children not to date black people?!"

That, at age fifteen, was my first recognized brush with racism. A decade and a half on the earth, and the first time I experienced racism was as the most passive of passive observers.

And somehow I still didn't think racism was a real problem.

Some people have said that while personal racism, like the above, is disgusting and may exist, institutional racism is a myth. I can't speak to this from experience, but I think that on paper, that may be true; there may be no racist laws anymore.

Here's the thing though: as long as there is personal racism, there will be institutional racism, because people run the institutions. There ARE racist teachers. There ARE racist politicians. There ARE racist cops. It's not so much that we need to work on racist laws anymore, but racist people.

I can tell you the real turning point in my opinion of racism, and it is both ridiculous and profound.

It was walking in on Gabe watching the TV show Luke Cage a couple of years ago. I remember passing through the living room and watching for a few minutes. I kind of frowned and an absentminded thought floated through my head:

Why is everyone black?

The thought exploded into my consciousness and I made Gabe pause the show.

"They're all black," I said to him. He stared at me.

"Yeah?"

"And it struck me as weird," I continued. "My knee jerk reaction was, 'Why aren't there some white characters?'" I couldn't believe was was unfolding inside my head. "Do you know how many TV shows I've watched where everyone was white and it never even occurred to me? It didn't seem weird. It didn't seem anything. It was just the default. I see ten minutes of Luke Cage and..."

That was when it started to make sense.

The world IS different for me because I'm white. That's not my fault and I don't need to feel personal guilt for being born into this skin or what my ancestors may have done. However it IS my fault that I refused to see this sooner, and I SHOULD feel guilty if I don't fight for real equality.

I said REAL equality. Not just equality under the law, but equality that extends to dating, media, institutions, and everything in between.

Was the murder of George Floyd "racist," or just cruel? We can all have opinions on that, and the truth is, we will probably never know. But I think that might be just the disgusting, tragic tip of the iceberg.

There IS a problem. You might disagree about what it is exactly, but there IS a problem.

I'm sorry it took me so long to admit it, but I'm really glad that first step is over.

~ Stephanie

P.S. I know this can be really obnoxious and I AM trying to work on it, but the way I naturally understand things better is to challenge them and play devil's advocate. If we end up talking and I push on your ideas in a way that seems "wrong," just push back (logically). I want to understand.