The beliefs you formed before you were seven are still running your life
-here’s how to change them.
There’s an invisible force shaping almost everything — how you feel about yourself, what you allow yourself to have, how you respond when things go well and when they don’t. It’s not your personality. It’s not fate. It’s your core beliefs.
Core beliefs are the deep, often unconscious assumptions we hold about ourselves, other people, and the world. They feel like facts. They’re not. They’re stories — formed early, reinforced over time, and running quietly in the background of everything we do.
How core beliefs are formed
Most core beliefs are established in the first seven years of life. Children are meaning-making machines — they observe what happens around them and draw conclusions. The problem is that a child’s conclusions are often wrong. They don’t yet have the context, the language, or the emotional maturity to interpret experience accurately.
A parent who was emotionally unavailable because they were struggling — the child doesn’t understand that. They conclude: ‘I’m not worth their attention. Something is wrong with me.’ A teacher who dismissed an idea in front of the class — the child concludes: ‘My thoughts aren’t worth saying.’ A family where love felt conditional — the child concludes: ‘I have to earn my place.’
Those conclusions become the operating system. And unlike a computer, the subconscious doesn’t automatically update — it keeps running the same programme until something actively changes it.
How core beliefs show up in adult life
The woman who consistently undercharges for her work — not because she doesn’t know her value logically, but because a part of her doesn’t believe she’s allowed to have it. The woman who keeps attracting emotionally unavailable partners — not because she’s choosing badly, but because unavailability feels like the blueprint for love. The woman who can’t accept a compliment without deflecting it — because receiving feels unsafe.
These aren’t rational problems. Rational strategies won’t fix them. They’re belief problems — and they respond to work done at the level where beliefs actually live.
Why willpower and positive thinking aren’t enough
Affirmations, journalling, reframing — all of these work at the conscious level. They can shift the surface. But the core belief lives in the subconscious — the 95% that runs automatically, beneath awareness. The conscious mind is working to say ‘I am enough’ while the subconscious is quietly, reliably contradicting it with a belief formed thirty years ago.
Emotions always overpower logic. Which is why knowing something intellectually and feeling it in your bones can be so far apart — and why surface-level approaches often don’t create lasting change.
What actually changes a core belief
To change a belief held in the subconscious, you need to access the subconscious directly. That’s what RTT Hypnotherapy does.
In a deeply relaxed state, we go back to where the belief was formed. Not to analyse it, not to relive it — but to see it clearly, as an adult, with the understanding the child didn’t have at the time. When we update the meaning made of that original experience, the belief built on it shifts. And when the belief shifts, the patterns driven by it shift too.
The process doesn’t require months of work. Because we’re going directly to the source rather than managing the symptoms, the change tends to be both faster and more lasting.
If you’d like to explore how this works in practice, a first call is the right place to start.
