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What are core beliefs? (And how they run you)

By · Last updated

Core beliefs, in the sense used here, are unconscious rules: the conditions your worth or safety seems to depend on. People often call this core wounds. It is not a thought you think. It is the thing you act as if were true.

A rule is an if-then your nervous system runs on.

If I am not producing, I do not matter. If everyone is okay, I am okay. If I ask, I owe. It was learned in a situation where it was accurate, usually early, and it has not been updated. You would not say it out loud because, out loud, it sounds obviously untrue. Your body does not care how it sounds.

01

How a rule drives behavior

The rule sets the condition. A trigger threatens the condition. The body responds. A protective strategy fires to restore the condition. The strategy produces the visible behavior and, over time, the cost. Every step after the rule is downstream of it, which is why working on the behavior without finding the rule is slow and often fails. Rule vs. strategy.

02

The 9 we test for

Project Gina tracks 9 rules of worth and safety: Output, Chosen, Needed, Right, Burden, Peace, Ahead, Strong and Approval. They are not personality types and they are not a quiz. They are hypotheses that come up often enough to test, and the test has to be allowed to conclude that none of them fit.

Output

What it says will happen

If I stop producing, I'll find out I was never worth anything on my own.

Peace

What it says will happen

If I let someone be upset, it falls apart.

Burden

What it says will happen

If I ask for anything, I'll owe them, and I'll have become a weight.

03

How to find yours

  1. Take three moments that cost you something, from different parts of life.
  2. In each, ask what would have happened if you had not done the protective thing.
  3. The answer your body gives, before your head edits it, is the rule talking.
  4. Check it against all three. If it only explains one, keep looking.

04

What changes a rule

Not insight. Disconfirming experience: the condition is violated and the catastrophe does not arrive, enough times, with enough attention, that the system updates. Each rule page lists what would make that rule less likely. That is the experiment.

05

Caveat

These are conceptual tools used inside a subtraction process, not clinical constructs. Behavior alone does not establish a rule. Most people run more than one.

Your next step

Read this one page next.

Just one. You don't have to read them all.

More like this (2)What is an unconscious pattern?Rule vs. protective strategy

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When this may need professional support. If what you are dealing with includes self-harm, severe depression or anxiety, substance dependence, or trauma symptoms that disrupt daily life, licensed mental-health care is the right door. Project Gina does not replace it. In the US, call or text 988.
Next stepThe 9 rules of worth and safety →