The Worst Belief in the World

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
Recorded and first published in 2009

The “worst belief in the world” is: “The most dangerous thing I can do is assume that I am safe,” or, “It’s bad if I think things are going to be good.”

There are many variations: “The most dangerous thing I can do is assume that something (or someone) might not be dangerous.” “It’s not safe if things are safe.” “It’s not safe if things are OK.” “It’s not OK to think that things will be OK.” “If things aren’t bad, this isn’t good, because then things will be bad.” “The only way it can be OK is when I know how bad it will be.” “If I have things get better, then something bad will happen.” “If things are good, then the good things will be taken away.” Basically, the belief is, “Expecting to be safe and well will actually cause me to be powerlessly surprised by bad events.”

This “worst belief” structure is heart-breakingly painful. It almost eliminates positive meanings and good feelings from one’s Approved List of Survivable States. (This falls under a heading called Highly Valued States, topic for a future article). Anyone whose life is organized around this rule-for-reality must either perceive or imagine threat in order to be safe. The presence of threat is threatening, and the absence of threat is threatening. The absence of information about future negatives means that the future is threatening and negative. Of course, the presence of information and expectations about future negatives also means that the future is negative. So, the future is negative.

The awful thing about this “worst belief” is that it seems to help. It sets up and sustains a “reality squeal” similar to the familiar audio feedback in a PA system. The future is known to be negative, but this offers some hope for things to be controllably negative, and that is more positive, although it is still threatening and negative, which means it less negative than it would have been—and so forth.

When the future is negative, the present—the “place” in time from which that future appears to be perceived—offers little in the way of security. And the past just confirms the entire construction, the whole arrangement. After all, the undeniable fact of having survived a more-or-less permanently negative future is self-evident confirmation that the key to survival, and to having hope for something better, is to never expect something to be better. Thus, the only way to have any real hope is to be hopeless. The arrival of hope—bidden and unbidden—cancels the hope for hope, which can then open a pathway to hope, as long as there really isn’t any hope.

This is both torture and intrepid incarnational entertainment.

My experience is that almost everyone has some form of this “worst belief.” It organizes just about everyone’s experience to some extent, in some context(s). (I am sure that there are humans who are untouched by this completely binding belief structure, but they almost never make an appointment to come tell me about it.) The people I have met with the strongest, purest, most fervent expression of this “worst belief” were tortured when they were children. There weren’t “tortured,” in the sense that all 15 year olds are said to be “tortured.” They were actually tortured—physically, emotionally, mentally, or psychically—in the way that prisoners are tortured. However, very often the torturers had no conscious knowledge that this was happening for the torturees, who were their children. (This remarkable arrangement will also be the subject or a future article, or two.)

The “worst belief” stabilizes and is stabilized by fear, obviously. When fear becomes necessary for well-being, this is the belief that does the job, providing a steady flow of “things to be fearful about.” There are both “human brain” and “creature brain” components within the mechanisms of the “worst belief.” To understand how this belief is installed, we will begin with the critter side of things. So, we have to talk about…“The Three Pigeons.”

There was research, probably done in the ‘40s or ‘50s, that involved the then conventional torturing of pigeons. There was Pigeon #1, Pigeon #2, and Pigeon #3, and some sort of reference pigeons, or control pigeons, which were not tortured. To gauge the happiness and general well-being of pigeons, apparently researchers measure two things: the pigeons’ desire to eat, and the pigeons’ overall interest in making baby pigeons. This part is important.

Pigeon #1 lived in a cage lined with electrically conductive wire mesh, through which the researchers would occasionally and randomly send a highly painful but non-lethal current. Within the cage of this Pigeon #1 there was also an insulated perch—a place to which the pigeon could hop when things got painful everywhere else in its world. Pigeon #1 discovered this safe place very quickly in the research process. It could hop there whenever it needed to. Pigeon #1 did almost as well as the non-tormented birds, in terms of continuing to be interested in eating and making baby pigeons.

Then there was Pigeon #2. Pigeon #2 lived in mesh-lined cage just like that of Pigeon#1, but without the safe place, the insulated perch. There was no place Pigeon #2 could go, not way to escape the pain. Pigeon #2 did not do well at all. It soon ceased to thrive, and lost interest in basics of pigeon happiness. In fact, Pigeon #2 perished.

Pigeon #3 was the really important part of the experiment. Pigeon #3 lived in a cage almost exactly like that of #2. There was no insulated perch, no safe place, and no action that could make things better. But there was one key difference. In Pigeon #3’s cage, the researchers placed a little light—a little light bulb of some kind. The researcher on duty would flash this light a few times, just before sending through the painful electric shock. The remarkable thing was that Pigeon #3 did almost as well as Pigeon #1, who, as you will recall, was doing almost as well as the non-tortured pigeons on the scale of Pigeon Well-Being.

By being able to anticipate the pain, Pigeon #3’s little pigeon brain was able to keep going in life. So, apparently, even at this creature level, being able to know with certainty that a bad event is coming has great survival value. It lets us keep going. The warning, the flashing light, is a difference that makes the difference.

So, some of us humans just keep our lights flashing. Of course, by predicting negative futures, we more-or-less require future negativity. In fact, once we develop a permanent flasher (a painful but treatable condition called PF), we had better have bad things going on in our lives, otherwise we are stuck with being wrong or crazy. No one wants to be wrong or crazy. It seems much more bearable—even dignified—to be miserable. Misery we endure indefinitely; wrongness and craziness we flee immediately.

Like everything else, this can all be revised. But revising the “worst belief” is not about simply changing the belief to its complete opposite—something along the lines of: “Everything and everyone in the world is safe all the time and everywhere.” Most PF sufferers scoff at this idea, and sensibly so, since it is such a distortion—a willful caricature—of what is actually useful. In addition to being the “worst belief” turns out to be rude. It is rude because it insults and accuses everyone. When we experience being unsafe, we are insulting Life Itself. Life Itself must be used to this by now, given how unsafe most of us are, most of the time. Of course, in evolutionary terms, it was Life Itself that provided us with the neurological legacy that is necessary to be so insulting. This is part of the charm and adventure of being very human.

To revise “the worst belief” we must do at least two things. We have to create and install updates to our stimulus-response survival patterning. This is Behavior-level change, in NLP terms. Those pigeon brains may tell us a lot about how “The Worst Belief in the World” works at the critter level, but our human Identity is in on all of this too. So, creating the change, allowing the healing, also requires that we give Life Itself another chance, at least one other chance, with us. These revisions are more in the territory we call Belief and Identity-level change. This is the second of the two necessary revisions—changing our minds about Life Itself and Us Ourselves. To change the belief properly, it is necessary to know what we do want to believe, and to teach ourselves to forego the consolations of childhood anger.

That part is for next time: “The Magic of Malicious Compliance.”

© 2009 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin