Most of us assume that our beliefs are things we've thought about and arrived at. We might think of ourselves as reasonably rational people who look at the evidence and draw conclusions. But there's a problem with this assumption. A lot of the beliefs that matter most — the ones that actually shape how we feel and what we do — weren't formed that way at all.
This is something that comes up again and again in counselling, and it can be a really important thing to understand. Because if we don't understand where our beliefs came from, we tend to deal with them in ways that don't really work.
Your brain is not a camera
One of the most useful things neuroscience has told us in recent years is that the brain's job isn't to record reality accurately. It's more like a prediction machine. Rather than waiting passively for things to happen and then reacting, the brain is constantly making educated guesses about what's going to happen next, based on what it already knows. When reality matches the prediction, it just carries on. When it doesn't match, it generates what researchers call a prediction error, and it has to decide whether to update its model or find another explanation.¹
What this means in practice is that we don't really perceive the world directly. We perceive it through a filter of what we already expect. And a large part of what we expect is built from the earliest experiences of our lives.
These expectations get organised into patterns that psychologists call schemas — stable, repeating structures of belief, feeling and expectation that we've built up over time.² They run in the background, like operating software. We don't usually notice them. We just experience their output, which feels like reality.
The foundations of beliefs we can't see
It might help to think of the self a bit like a building. The beliefs we form throughout our lives get stacked on top of each other. The higher floors are the things we've developed more recently, such as views about our careers, relationships, abilities, how the world works. These are relatively accessible. We can think about them, talk about them, challenge them.
But the foundations are a different matter. These were built first and they were built early. And because they were built before we had language, before we could reason, before we even had a proper sense of a separate self, they are hidden. We can’t easily access them, think or talk about them, making them harder to challenge as we receive contradictory evidence.
They're usually formed in response to our early relationship with our caregivers, because that relationship was, quite literally, a survival matter. As infants, we were entirely dependent on the adults around us, so our nervous system was focused on one question: am I safe, and will my needs be met?³
The beliefs we formed in answer to questions about whether we are loveable, whether we are acceptable, whether the world is a safe place are some of the most durable and influential beliefs we will ever hold. And they are largely invisible to us.
One reason they're so hard to access is that the part of the brain that handles conscious, language-based memory — what's called declarative or explicit memory — doesn't fully come online until around three years of age.⁴ Before that, our experiences are encoded differently, in what's called implicit memory. This is the kind of memory that doesn't involve recalling anything consciously. It lives in the body, in emotional responses, in automatic reactions. It's "retention without remembering."
The practical implication of this is significant. The beliefs that were formed in those early years can't really be retrieved the way memories normally can. They don't feel like memories. They just feel like the way things are.
Why logic doesn't usually reach early beliefs
This is where a lot of people run into difficulty. Because when we notice something is wrong, when we keep ending up in the same situations, or reacting in ways we don't like, or feeling things that don't seem proportionate to what's happening, our natural instinct is to try to think our way through it.
And for some things, that works. But for the beliefs that are embedded at foundation level, it often doesn't. We tell ourselves that we're being irrational. We list the evidence for why the thing we believe is wrong. We make plans to do it differently next time. And then we find ourselves doing the same thing again.
Jeffrey Young, who developed schema therapy as an extension of cognitive behavioural therapy, noticed exactly this. His clients could identify distorted thinking perfectly well. They could articulate their core beliefs in sophisticated terms. And nothing changed.⁵ That's because understanding a belief at the level of language is not the same thing as reaching it at the level where it actually lives.
Part of the issue is the nature of schemas themselves. Once a belief is established, the brain tends to look for evidence that confirms it and discount evidence that doesn't. A person who believes at some level that they are not worth much will notice criticism more readily than praise, will tend to interpret ambiguous situations in a negative light, and will experience discomfort when positive things happen that don't fit the model. This isn't a choice. It's just how the architecture works.⁶
Starting with the feeling
A more productive approach, rather than asking whether a belief is true, is to start with what the belief makes you do.
There's a simple set of questions that can be useful here, either in therapy or as a personal exercise. When you notice a pattern of behaviour in yourself (e.g. something you keep doing, or keep avoiding, even when part of you doesn't want to) try asking: what do I feel I need to do in this situation? Not what you think you should do, but what the pull feels like. Then ask: what do I feel would happen if I stopped doing that?
I emphasise the word feel because it’s important not to answer logically as that won’t get you to the belief. The answers to what do I need to do and what do I feel I need to do are often quite different.
Confronting what we feel would happen if we stopped is usually quite revealing. It will often be something like: People wouldn't like me. They'd think I was selfish. They'd leave. I wouldn't be able to cope. I'd fall apart.
Notice that these answers aren't really logical conclusions. They're predictions. They're the lower floors of the building, expressing themselves. And once you can hear them, you've got something to work with.
The lens you don't know you're wearing
There's a useful way of thinking about this. Imagine you're wearing a red-tinted lens over your eyes. Everything you see is filtered through red. You don't experience this as "seeing red" you just experience it as seeing. The world looks the way it looks. If someone points to something and says "it's blue," you might argue with them, because through your lens, it doesn't look blue.
This is roughly what it's like to hold a deep belief. It doesn't feel like a belief. It feels like an accurate perception of reality. Which is why being told your belief is wrong, even kindly and clearly and with evidence, often doesn't shift it. The evidence itself gets filtered through the same lens.
What actually helps is becoming aware that there is a lens. Not removing it immediately — that's not usually how it works — but knowing it's there. Because once you know you're wearing a red lens, you can start to look more carefully when someone says there's something blue. You can try a different way of responding in a situation, knowing that your gut feeling about what's going to happen might not be correct. You can hold your prediction more loosely.
What understanding makes possible
It matters to understand all of this because the alternative — not understanding it — has a cost. When people can feel themselves stuck in a pattern and can't see why, the conclusion they often reach is that something is wrong with them. That they're weak, or broken, or not trying hard enough.
This is usually not only unhelpful but actually makes things worse. Because then they'll try to fix the "wrongness" by changing their behaviour, or thinking more positively, or pushing themselves harder. Sometimes they'll adopt new patterns that look different on the surface but are actually built on exactly the same foundations. And when those patterns don't hold up either, the sense of being broken deepens.
Understanding that these patterns were formed for good reasons, by a young mind doing its best to navigate an early environment, and that they are maintained by processes that aren't really accessible to conscious reasoning, changes the relationship to the pattern. It becomes something to get curious about rather than something to fight.
Where therapy fits in
This is exactly the kind of work that therapy is designed for. It offers something that analysis and self-help can't fully replicate: a real relationship that feels safe enough to lower the defences that have been up since those early beliefs were formed.
In that safety, it becomes possible to look at the foundations: to start to understand what they are, where they came from, and what purpose they originally served. Over time, it becomes possible not necessarily to demolish those foundations (that's often neither possible nor the goal) but to build new supporting structure around them. New experiences, new relational evidence, gradually accumulated, that offer the nervous system a different prediction to run on.
The foundations may still be there. But they no longer have to hold the whole weight of the building alone.
¹ Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138; Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty. Oxford University Press.
² Beck, A.T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press; Young, J.E., Klosko, J.S., & Weishaar, M.E. (2003). Schema Therapy: A Practitioner's Guide. Guilford Press.
³ Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1. Basic Books.
⁴ Declarative (explicit) memory is mediated by the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, systems that are not functionally mature until around three years of age. Earlier experience is encoded implicitly — in emotional, somatic, and procedural systems — and is typically inaccessible to conscious verbal recall.
⁵ Young, J.E. (1999). Cognitive Therapy for Personality Disorders: A Schema-Focused Approach. Professional Resource Press.
⁶ Padesky, C.A. (1994). Schema change processes in cognitive therapy. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 1(5), 267–278.
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