It’s Never Easy to Unlearn What You’ve Learned
Unlearning takes focused, mindful effort.
One of the most infuriating things about the subconscious mind is its power of absorption. Seriously, it’s like an infinite sponge. Similarly, when you don’t wring it out from time to time, it gets nasty.
This is often most apparent in how your subconscious holds onto ideas, beliefs, and values that are not your own. How does that happen? The indoctrination of life in modern society.
With a few exceptions, people spend the first 20 or so years of their life in some form of formal learning. School, church, sports, friends, family, and more are constant teachers. Some are more relentless than others.
A great deal of what we learn is to believe “X,” place value on “Y,” and accept certain things about the way the world works as true. And when nearly everyone around you is having the same experience, you buy into it.
They teach you how to learn in many ways. Some learn by reading, some by visuals, some by example, and some by doing. I think most utilize a combination of these. Still, you learn how to learn, and you develop skills and abilities, beliefs, values, and more.
However, very little of this accounts for the one and only constant in the Universe: Change. And because change is unstoppable and always happening, it applies to nearly all aspects of life along the way.
Change requires learning new things. But while you have been taught to learn, unlearning is a whole other matter.
How do you unlearn something?
Unlearning something is a combination of learning something new while discarding something old. One important key is that you can’t undo, redo, ignore, or reject that thing previously learned and not have it still impact you.
What does that mean? Let’s say you were raised with a very limiting, negative belief about money. All the examples from your childhood are that money is hard to come by, makes people evil, and leads to abuse and pain. Odds are, that sort of mindset leads to a tricky, probably fraught relationship with money (I speak here from experience).
To change that belief, you can’t pretend that it hasn’t been your lifelong belief or just outright reject it. You need to focus on creating a new attitude about money, abundance, and how it can be a tool for good. You unlearn the belief by learning a new belief and applying that consciously when the belief you no longer desire comes up.
Ergo, you don’t simply reject or ignore that voice in your head telling you that money leads to abuse and pain. You consciously reinforce the notion that money leads to care and freedom (or love and pleasure, empowerment and connectivity, or something equally positive rather than negative). You unlearn a belief, value, habit, or anything else subconscious by applying mindfulness and active conscious awareness to change it.
Which means we need to address that elephant over there.
Applying nontoxic positivity
Too many self-help gurus will suggest that you need to utterly reject, disregard, and wear blinders to negativity. That, however, is bullshit. Because it’s impossible to do. Shit happens. The negative doesn’t go away because you pretend it’s not there. And, truth be told, the negative can be a driving force for genuine, nontoxic positivity.
Again, if you were raised to believe that money is hard to come by, you can’t ignore and reject that. Why? Because that idea has become a deeply embedded subconscious belief and/or value. And, truth be told, in some cases, it IS, in fact, hard to come by. Depending on what you are doing to find, create, make, or earn it.
While many suggest applying an alternative phrase like “money comes easily and frequently,” if you haven’t unlearned your belief about it being hard to come by, you won’t be able to apply nontoxic positivity to it.
Yes, in some circumstances, money is hard to come by. But with the right focus, you can shift this belief via steps. First, start with a phrase like “money is simply a means to an end” or something equally neutral. Then, “money is there for the finding and making” or something like that. These types of adjustments work toward unlearning that belief you no longer desire to hold.
Truth be told, you might not get to “money comes easily and frequently” or the like as your belief. When it comes to working to unlearn anything, the key is to find a new idea you can apply to move the needle from one extreme toward another.
It all comes down to intent, really.
Is this who, what, where, how, and why you desire to be?
The primary reason to unlearn a belief, value, or habit, is because it no longer suits you. Maybe that thing your parents instilled in you when you were 10 is not at all who you are now. And that’s okay. Guess what? Change happens. You can, will, do, and have changed already.
You have the power to unlearn what no longer works in your subconscious by applying active conscious awareness. Mindfulness is a choice you make to recognize and acknowledge, in the here and now, who, what, where, how, and why you are. And if you dislike what that tells you? Now you can apply mindfulness to change it.
To become mindful, you start by making yourself present, here and now. One way to activate this is to begin by taking 2 minutes to deeply breathe in, then let it out, and repeat, while focusing your attention on breathing. Then, after you’ve done that, gauge your 6 senses and note what you see, hear, taste, touch, smell, and can intuit/sense.
Active breathing and getting in touch with your senses makes you consciously aware in the here and now. From there, you can examine your mindset/headspace/psyche self. To do that, you just need to ask yourself questions answerable only in the now, like:
- What am I thinking?
- What am I feeling?
- How am I feeling?
- What is my intent here?
- Is my approach currently positive or negative?
- What am I doing?
The answer to these makes you mindful. And from this place of mindfulness, you can change anything you desire and do what you need to unlearn anything that no longer suits you.
Doing the work to unlearn outdated beliefs and values isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing active conscious awareness (mindfulness) of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and the positivity or negativity of your approach to direct your actions.
Recognizing and acknowledging that you can’t remove, ignore, or somehow undo subconscious beliefs and values, you can utilize mindfulness to unlearn what you’ve learned by taking steps to learn something new. Knowing that nontoxic positivity – applied to unlearning a belief, value, or habit that no longer suits you – is a great way to take action to be who, what, where, how, and why you ultimately desire to be.
This empowers you. When you’re empowered, that can, in turn, empower others around you. That’s why I share these weekly posts with you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity — from the vast cylinder that exists between them — shifts life in ways that open you to more potential, possibility, and the like. From there, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you in the here and now.
The more aware you are of yourself in the present, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you and empower them, too. That is an amazing conduit to help reason overcome fear in the collective consciousness.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the six-hundred-fifty-third (653) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energy for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.
Please visit here to explore all my published fiction and non-fiction.
Follow me here!
