How Early Experiences Shape Your Beliefs: Understanding the Foundation of Your Inner World

The Story You May Not Remember Writing

There's something you carry with you every day that shapes how you see yourself, interpret other people's actions, respond to challenges, and what feels possible in your life. You probably aren't even aware of it most of the time. It operates quietly in the background, influencing your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours before you consciously realize what's happening.

These are your beliefs. The foundational stories about yourself, others, and the world that formed when you were younger, trying to make sense of your experiences.

Maybe you recognize yourself in these patterns. You hold back in relationships even though you want connection. You overwork yourself trying to prove something you can't quite name. You avoid opportunities that excite you because some part of you believes you'll fail, even though consciously you know you're capable.

This isn't weakness or character flaw. This is how human beings develop beliefs from their experiences, and how those beliefs continue shaping life long after the original circumstances have passed.

Emotional Archaeology: The EIMBTEF Sequence

Understanding how experiences become beliefs requires what we call "emotional archaeology." This is the process of discovering how we arrive at our beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and feelings by tracing them back to their origins.

The human system follows a standard sequence - EIMBTEF:

Experience → Interpretation → Meaning → Beliefs → Thoughts → Emotions → Feelings

Here's how it works with any experience, whether it's positive, negative, or neutral:

Experience: Something happens. A child is praised for sharing their toys. A teenager makes the winning goal. A young person's parent listens attentively when they talk. Or: a child is criticized for making a mistake. A teenager is rejected by peers. A young person's needs are ignored.

Interpretation: The person interprets what happened. "My parent smiled because what I did was good." "I succeeded because I worked hard." Or: "My parent yelled because I did something wrong." "Those kids rejected me because something is wrong with me."

Meaning: The interpretation gets assigned meaning. "Being generous makes people happy with me." "Effort leads to success." Or: "Making mistakes is dangerous." "I'm not acceptable as I am."

Beliefs: Especially after repeated similar experiences or particularly impactful ones, that meaning crystallizes into something we take forward. A belief. "I'm capable when I try." "People value me." Or: "I must be perfect or I'll be rejected." "There's something fundamentally flawed about me."

Thoughts: Your beliefs about yourself and the world determine what thoughts you have. If you believe you're capable, you'll have thoughts about how to approach challenges. If you believe you're inadequate, you'll have thoughts about failing and being judged.

Emotions: Your thoughts generate emotions. Thoughts of capability create confidence and motivation. Thoughts of inadequacy create anxiety and shame.

Feelings: You experience those emotions as physical feelings in your body. The openness in your chest or the tightness. The sense of ease or the knot in your stomach.

This is the Psycho-Emotional Complex Formation. It's how experiences, positive and negative, become patterns that shape your entire internal and external world.

The Research: How Early Experiences Create Schemas

The scientific literature robustly supports this understanding. Research shows that trauma and neglect in childhood lead to "early maladaptive schemas" (deeply held patterns of thinking about self, others, and the world) that persist into adulthood and contribute to psychological difficulties.

A comprehensive meta-analysis found strong associations between childhood adversity and these maladaptive schemas in adulthood, with particularly strong connections between emotional abuse, emotional neglect, and schemas involving feelings of defectiveness, shame, and social isolation.

More specifically, research demonstrates that it's how the child perceives and remembers family experiences, not just the parents' behaviour itself, that becomes critical for how these schemas develop and persist across generations.

The meaning we make of our experiences shapes us more than the bare facts of what happened.

Studies show that these early maladaptive schemas develop from unmet core emotional needs in childhood relationships with primary caregivers, and these schemas then go on to affect not just mental health, but how people approach relationships, work, parenting, and every aspect of life.

Why Beliefs Form From All Experiences

Psycho-Emotional Complex Formation happens with all experiences, not just negative ones. We form beliefs from positive experiences, neutral experiences, and painful experiences.

When experiences are particularly impactful (whether joyful, painful, or confusing), or when similar experiences repeat, humans naturally do two things:

1. Develop a belief about what happened. We interpret the experience, assign it meaning, and often create a story about what it means. "I succeeded because I'm capable." Or: "I failed because I'm inadequate." Or: "People respond well when I'm helpful." The belief becomes our explanation.

2. Develop strategies based on that belief. Our beliefs guide our strategies for navigating life. If we believe effort leads to success, we try hard. If we believe we're inadequate, we might overcompensate or avoid challenges. If we believe vulnerability leads to rejection, we stay guarded.

   
   

We're not good at hanging out in "not knowing," so we draw conclusions.

A belief is simply a story about our experience that we consistently return to.

Beliefs give us a framework for understanding ourselves and the world. They create predictability. The subconscious likes this because it provides a sense of order and control, whether the beliefs are positive ("I'm capable and people value me") or negative ("I'm flawed and people will reject me").

The problem isn't that we form beliefs. The problem is when limiting or inaccurate beliefs formed under less-than-ideal circumstances continue shaping our lives long after those circumstances have changed.

When Beliefs Are Formed and Why They Persist

Many of the most impactful beliefs you hold on to were formed in the past, when you were less resourceful than you are now. 

Any belief is therefore fair game for re-evaluation given that more resourcefulness is available in the present.

Many limiting beliefs were formed in haste, out of urgency to make sense of confusing or painful experiences. The hastiness combined with limited knowledge at the time you formed the belief sets up conditions for beliefs to be irrational, restrictive, and counter-productive.

A five-year-old who concludes "I'm bad" after being yelled at is working with a five-year-old's resources. That belief made sense given their understanding then. But it's not accurate based on what they know now as an adult. Yet the belief persists, operating below conscious awareness, continuing to shape how they see themselves decades later.

Conscious vs. Subconscious Beliefs

Subconscious beliefs generally inform conscious beliefs. However, people often believe one thing cognitively while believing something contradictory on the deeper subconscious level. Then they experience the dissonance, the stress, between the two.

Research on implicit versus explicit beliefs confirms this. People can hold implicit (subconscious) beliefs that directly contradict their explicit (conscious) beliefs, and these implicit beliefs often drive behaviour more powerfully than conscious intentions.

If on a subconscious level we believe the world is inherently unsafe because of earlier experiences, we may consciously believe the world is relatively safe, yet still find ourselves responding as though it's dangerous. The subconscious belief system sets limits based on old understanding of what's safe.

How Beliefs Shape Perception

Your beliefs don't just sit passively. They actively shape what you notice, how you interpret it, and what you remember.

Research consistently demonstrates that people seek, interpret, and remember information in ways that confirm existing beliefs, while ignoring, dismissing, or forgetting information that contradicts those beliefs.

When you believe "people always leave," you notice every cancelled plan, forget times they showed up reliably, and interpret neutral behaviours as signs of impending abandonment. Your belief filters perception, creating a feedback loop where you keep finding evidence confirming what you already believe.

Core beliefs create what researchers call a positive feedback loop. When someone interprets a situation through their core belief, this biases their experience, providing further evidence for the belief and making it more accessible in the future.

Why Beliefs Persist

Sometimes it seems impossible to convince the subconscious to change a deep-seated belief. But that's generally because we go about it at the conscious level, instead of dropping more deeply in to experience ourselves at the subconscious level and work with those deeper states to heal and let go of old beliefs and patterns.

Research shows beliefs persist even when original evidence is removed or contradicted, and confirmation bias maintains beliefs by leading people to pay more attention to confirming rather than contradicting information.

Conscious efforts to change beliefs often fail because beliefs operate at multiple levels. You can consciously understand a belief is irrational while it continues functioning automatically at the subconscious level, driving emotional responses and behaviours before conscious thought gets involved.

The Subconscious Protection System

Our subconscious is always working to keep us safe and to drive our success, as it understands those two things, which is based on all the old beliefs, patterns, and experiences.

People often talk about being their "own worst enemy." But our subconscious wants to protect us. Many times, on the deeper level, what we want to experience consciously, there is some aspect of that experience that the subconscious may find, whole or in part, to be unsafe or risky.

Risk of rejection. Risk of judgment. Financial risks. Risks of being seen. Risk of failing. Risk of succeeding and then having higher expectations placed on us. The subconscious identifies these risks based on old experiences and old beliefs, and then works to protect us from them, even when consciously we want to move toward the very things it's protecting us from.

This is why we want to work with the subconscious to shift the understandings of risk at the deeper level, so that there is alignment, an integration, between the parts of us that are competing with each other.

Imagine a corporate team that are all working on different aspects of a project. If there isn't clear communication and agreement among all the team members, with the leadership of a good manager, the different members, in the positive intention to make the project successful, can start working at cross purposes. Not because they are in conflict directly, but because each one has a different idea about how to achieve the goal. Then it's time to come back to the table and clarify, integrate, and harmonize all the parts of the team.

The Limitation of Talk Therapy for Changing Beliefs

In talk therapy, people typically just keep revisiting old feelings and thoughts, hoping to exhaust them through repetition. From a hypnotherapy perspective, this can just reinforce the old patterns and the confusion.

The problem is that talk therapy works at the conscious, cognitive level. You gain insight. You understand where beliefs came from. You recognize patterns. All of this is valuable. But insight alone doesn't update the subconscious programming.

You can spend years in therapy talking about how your belief that you're inadequate came from critical parents, understanding intellectually that it's not true, yet still feeling inadequate and behaving in ways that confirm that belief. The conscious understanding hasn't translated into subconscious change.

This is because explicit (conscious) and implicit (subconscious) processes operate through different neural systems and influence behaviour through different mechanisms. Conscious insight activates explicit systems. But the beliefs driving your automatic emotional responses and behaviours are stored in implicit systems that conscious reasoning has limited access to.

How Hypnotherapy Works With Beliefs Differently

Hypnotherapy addresses beliefs where they actually live: at the subconscious level.

In the hypnotic state, we bypass the conscious mind and work directly with the subconscious patterns, beliefs, and stored experiences.

This allows us to:

Access the original formation of the belief. We can go back to when the belief was created, understand what was happening at that time, and see it from the perspective of the person you are now rather than the limited perspective of the child or younger person you were then.

Update subconscious understandings of risk and safety. We work with the subconscious to shift its assessment of what's actually dangerous versus what's safe. When the subconscious updates its understanding, it stops working against your conscious goals and starts supporting them.

Create integration between competing parts. Rather than having one part of you wanting something while another part sabotages it, we facilitate communication and alignment between all aspects of your internal system.

Process unresolved emotional experiences. The painful experiences that formed the beliefs often haven't been fully processed. In hypnosis, we can complete that processing, allowing the subconscious to finally let go of the need to protect against something that's no longer actually present.

Install new patterns at the subconscious level. We don't just remove old beliefs. We help you develop and embody new, more accurate, more supportive beliefs that then generate different thoughts, different emotions, different feelings, and different behaviours.

When a Belief Has Truly Changed

How do you know when a belief has truly changed versus when someone has just developed a new conscious thought about it?

When a belief changes at the subconscious level:

• You don't have to remind yourself of the new belief. It feels natural and automatic.

• Your emotional responses change without effort. Situations that used to trigger anxiety or shame no longer do.

• Your behaviour shifts organically. You're not forcing yourself to act differently; you're naturally drawn to different choices.

• The old belief feels foreign when you think about it. Like "Why did I ever believe that?"

• Evidence for the new belief becomes obvious. You notice things you never saw before that confirm you're actually capable, worthy, safe, or whatever the new belief is.

  
  

When it's just a conscious thought layer over an unchanged subconscious belief:

• You have to keep reminding yourself. "I'm supposed to believe I'm capable."

• Your emotional responses don't match. You tell yourself you're safe but still feel anxious.

• Changing behaviour requires constant willpower and effort. You're fighting against your natural inclinations.

• The old belief still feels true on a gut level, even when you know intellectually it's not accurate.

• You keep finding evidence for the old belief despite trying to look for evidence of the new one.

True change happens when the subconscious itself updates. That's what hypnotherapy facilitates.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can beliefs really change if they've been there for decades?

Absolutely. The length of time you've held a belief doesn't determine your capacity to change it. What matters is addressing it at the level where it's actually operating (the subconscious) rather than just at the conscious level. Many people experience profound shifts in beliefs they've carried their entire lives once they work with them through hypnotherapy.

Won't I lose my protective mechanisms if I change these beliefs?

The beliefs you formed were protective strategies developed by a younger, less resourceful version of you. Changing them doesn't leave you unprotected. It means updating your protection system with strategies that actually serve you now, based on your current resources and understanding. You're not removing protection; you're upgrading it.

How do I know which beliefs are creating problems for me?

Often the beliefs causing the most difficulty are the ones so fundamental you don't even notice them as beliefs. They just feel like reality. Look for patterns in your life. Where do you repeatedly struggle? What do you automatically assume about yourself, others, or how things work? What feels impossible even though logically it shouldn't? These patterns often point to underlying beliefs worth exploring. Sometimes they're beliefs that you're actually very aware of, and in fact even very attached to, that are just not serving you. Those beliefs are addressed too. If there's no way to ever feel good as long as you're walking around believing "X" then we have to get clear on that and let that one go.

Taking the Next Step

If you're recognizing yourself in these patterns, if you're starting to see how beliefs formed in your past are still shaping your present, if you're ready to do the deeper work of actually changing those beliefs at the subconscious level where they operate, then hypnotherapy might be exactly what you need.

This work requires courage. It means engaging with old pain, examining beliefs that feel like truth, and being willing to experience yourself and the world differently. But it also creates the possibility of genuine transformation rather than just understanding why you are the way you are.

At Toronto Hypnotherapy, the frameworks that underpin our work, frameworks like the EIMBTEF sequence and the Psycho-Emotional Complex, are what we use to help people understand how their beliefs formed, to access those beliefs at the subconscious level where they actually function, and then to facilitate true updates that change not just how you think about yourself, but how you feel, respond, and live.

Ready to explore what beliefs are shaping your life and how to change them at their root? 

We offer a free 15-minute call where we can discuss your situation and determine if this approach is right for you.

Book your free consultation call here.

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