CORE BELIEFS FIT WITH VDLG

Where does core belief work fit in with voice dialogue?

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GROWING AWARENESS focuses directly on maintaining a conscious and active awareness of the inner children within us. We find voice dialogue the ideal way to access our inner children, their vulnerable feelings and unbalanced or negative core beliefs. We agree with Hal and Sidra Stone that inner children are not just another kind of self but the basic core of our true personality. We emphasise and honour that the reason each inner self was created was to protect our vulnerable inner children especially our 'wounded child'. (We don't agree with what might be called the 'safe' voice dialogue approach taken by some facilitators who avoid working with peoples' vulnerable selves or negative core beliefs.)

Latest news - it is 2008 and the notes here which go back to around 2000 are still valid but we now have a much more up to date website devoted just to Core belief work and Core belief balancing. There you will find all these pages (updated) plus many more new articles, new worksheets and more explanations and it is being up dated every week. Go to http://core-beliefs-balance.com/

We recognise that the false core beliefs held by an inner child are the source of many of the errors the inner selves make, trying to help deal with issues that are not real. In past articles on this site (hyperlinks listed below) I explain how an unconscious belief "I am not good enough" even though it is not true can keep most of the selves so busy trying to offset it that they don't have enough time or energy to focus on real issues.
Much of the success we have in our group involves using voice dialogue to balance an old negative belief with an equally strong polar opposite positive belief. For example "I am not good enough" with "I am worthwhile all the time." We have more success dealing with a core belief as such rather than treating it as just another inner self who holds that belief because so many of the primary selves seem to be under the influence of the one same false belief. Inner selves as we know them are not usually as profoundly influenced by what another self believes.(See (See also other articles on Core Beliefs also How and why your inner selves react when a core belief is triggered and List of typical negative core beliefs )

We also place a deep emphasis on ‘validating’ the inner child’s early traumatic experiences, acknowledging that these things really happened, that they were wrong, and that above all, the child was not responsible nor to blame for those events. Until the child receives this validation (from the aware adult/ aware ego or inner parent) there seem to be deeper problems that basic voice dialogue by itself cannot solve because the selves are incapable of giving this level of validation. Some selves like the inner critic and inner patriarch even tend to go to the polar opposite side, validating false beliefs for example, that the abuse didn't really happen or if it did happen it really wasn’t that bad, or worse that if it happened it was the child's fault!

Examples of typical negative core beliefs

The Dual Aware adult- Aware ego energy state

In Queensland we also acknowledge that there is a dual energy state that moves between what we call the "aware adult" and the more generally acknowledged "aware ego". Both states appear to have a place in inner self work. The aware adult is more like what Richard Schwartz describes as the "Higher self" and Pia Melody describes as the "Functional Adult" It acts like a leader of the ordinary selves but you notice that as you work with it it seems unlike any self in several important ways.

The aware adult energy appears on the scene much earlier than the aware ego, something like a germinating seed of the aware ego. It is similar in some ways to an inner parent but more effective at balancing opposite selves. It also plays a major role in the validating process described above. For additional notes see The Aware Adult

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