How Our Childhood Can Form Lifelong Limiting Beliefs - and How to Overcome Them

Updated September 1st 2024

In private practice, whenever I use regression therapy to get to the root cause of an issue, most clients recall a memory of their childhood before 9 years of age. But why is this so common?

Learn why the first 8 years of life have such an impact on your beliefs, and how you can overcome the beliefs that no longer serve you.

Childhood: A Brain Still in Development

At birth, a baby's brain is still in development. Each human is born equipped only with the essential parts of the brain, the most primitive components designed to help us survive.

The most sophisticated parts of the brain, such as the cortex, are the last components to develop.

The Child's Mind is Wide Open to Learning

As adults, the higher executive functions of the brain allow us to assess the value of information received, filtering out what is true vs. false, or helpful vs. unhelpful.

But as children we do not have that filter in place, so the child's mind is wide open and absorbs all experiences and information like a sponge.

It is the absence of these key components that leaves us so vulnerable to early childhood experiences.

But why are we born with a brain that is so open and vulnerable?

The Race to Survive

The missing cortex allows the brain to absorb information and learn at an accelerated rate. Beyond the basics of learning to walk, eat and speak, think of how easily children can learn two or more languages with ease, in a way that adults cannot.

This rapid learning ability encompasses not just skills but also beliefs.

During the first few years of life, we are forming our world reference system. As we build an inner library of information, we begin automating responses to speed up response time to keep us safe. This is a survival mechanism.

But for each of us, safety is more than just staying alive.  

Social Learning and Survival

During this crucial time, each of us also learns how to survive socially.

We humans are wired to connect. And for social survival, we use the examples and behaviour modelled by immediate family and caregivers.

These early social interactions become the reference system for our own relationships. They are the raw matter that we use to build the inner library of beliefs.

Your Brain Sacrifices Happiness for Survival

This is the fundamental flaw of the child's brain: it does not evaluate the truth or the usefulness of all that is experienced in the first 8 years.

What happens in those first 8 years can truly last a lifetime. Both good and bad early childhood experiences set patterns that may persist into adulthood. They are vulnerable years in more ways than one.

Here are a couple of examples of adverse experiences to illustrate the impact.

Examples of the Impact of Childhood on Limiting Beliefs

As one example, imagine that your first ever experience with a dog scared you in some way. No physical harm may have taken place.

It is the perception of the experience, not the events themselves that matters most.

If your response was acute enough, you may have subconsciously embedded a lifelong fear in your library of beliefs, a phobia even, and you may continue to replicate that first fearful response to this day.

And now, it doesn't matter how friendly any future dog looks and behaves. Rather than take time to evaluate each dog individually, the subconscious tries to protect you by evoking an automatic response to keep you safe.

This is a design flaw in all of our minds. The subconscious does not evaluate: it simply remembers and replicates learned beliefs and behaviours.

In the same way, if you experienced neglectful caregivers as a child and did not receive basic physical and emotional nourishment, you might have learned to cope by withdrawing.

You may subconsciously repeat this as an adult. You may overreact to any perception of disapproval by ending a relationship early, subconsciously sabotaging your own happiness in the process.

And we operate subconsciously most of the time.

95% of Beliefs are Formed by the Age of 8 Years Old

By 8 years old, you already have at least 95% of your belief system in place, all stored in the subconscious.

Your library of beliefs encompasses your identity, your reference models for relationships and your broader world perspective. 

It is estimated that we operate on subconscious beliefs and stored responses 80 to 95% of the time.

But if we can absorb information at such a rapid rate, why can we not update our beliefs just as easily?

Once the Brain Learns, it Resists Re-Learning

By the age of 8 years old, children are forming the critical mind. This acts as the gatekeeper to our library of beliefs, making it harder to directly access the subconscious in an everyday waking state.

Because of these changes to both brain structure and also brainwave state, the subconscious brain reverts to a read-only state.

As an adult, you can look up your core beliefs but you cannot edit them, similar to a read-only folder or drive on your computer. By our mid-20s the brain structure is fully formed. So the older you get, the more difficult it is to update your belief system.

Inner Conflict Comes From Outdated Beliefs

And as we get older, we may start to notice the signs of beliefs or learned behaviour that do not serve us.

Perhaps you can recall a pattern in your own life. Just some signs of limiting beliefs can show up as self-sabotage, deep-seated feelings of unworthiness, or avoidant or excessive people pleasing behaviour in relationships.

Think for a moment of a way in which you habitually behave that is not helpful to you. You may feel that you want to change but are unable to do so.

That sense of inner struggle is a sign of conflict between the conscious wanting to change and the subconscious resisting change.

But surely we can make any change through willpower? Unfortunately, this is not entirely true.

Willpower is Not Enough to Overcome Limiting Beliefs

We can perform an intervention of our behaviour through willpower. We can consciously change some of our behaviour by choosing a new action and consciously creating new thoughts.

But willpower resides in the conscious part of the brain, whereas deep-seated emotional responses, habits, and beliefs are all stored in your subconscious.

And while the conscious mind can imagine the future and decide what is best for us, the subconscious simply refers to the beliefs created in the past. We do not have a harmonious brain.

And in the battle of wills, the subconscious will always win.

The Subconscious: Larger, Faster, More Powerful

The subconscious is always first to respond, up to one second faster than the conscious brain processes.

The subconscious is not only faster but more powerful, dominating total brain power. 80% to 95% of your total brain's processes are subconscious.

And the more deep-seated the belief, the more powerful the emotional attachment to the response, the harder it is to persuade the subconscious to change.

The subconscious often overrides conscious intentions, leading to repeated patterns of behaviour.

This is how and why the past repeats in the present day. And these are the times you may feel stuck.

Ask anyone who has tried to use willpower to overcome insomnia, to stop blushing, or silence intrusive thoughts, to end OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) or to cope with flashbacks triggered by post traumatic stress. The emotional charge is so high; it is simply overwhelming.

But you can change your brain.

Hypnotherapy: A Second Chance in Life to Heal and Release Limiting Beliefs

In a normal waking state, the subconscious is in read-only mode. But with the power of hypnosis, the subconscious becomes open to updating beliefs.

While many know that hypnotherapy can help with smoking cessation or weight loss, I believe one of the overlooked superpowers of hypnotherapy is this very ability to give you access to your own subconscious to update your library of beliefs.

Through the power of hypnotherapy, you can bypass the critical mind, the gatekeeper to the subconscious, and evoke a state in which the brain is open to change, in which you can heal and release limiting beliefs.

Support to Help You Release Limiting Beliefs

If you have felt repeated patterns of inner conflict and want to change, but feel unable to do so alone, you may find one or more of my sessions useful in my Release Limiting Beliefs Playlist. You can also explore over 200 hypnotherapy sessions, guided meditations, and affirmations at no cost to you on the Unlock Your Life YouTube Channel.

As the subconscious has no concept of time, no matter how long you have lived with an issue, you can retrain your brain, and unlock your life.

About the Author: Sarah Dresser, Clinical Hypnotherapist and Coach

Thank you for reading. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Sarah Dresser and I love my work as a Clinical Hypnotherapist (M.H., C.CHT).

I quit a 17-year corporate career to create a role for myself that aligns with my passions, interests, and values. You can read more about my journey and background here. ​ I chose hypnotherapy over all other therapy types because of its incredible power to retrain the subconscious brain in a way most therapies cannot. I believe that low-cost and no-cost therapy and social support should be available to all as a right, not a privilege. I now support a community of over 400K subscribers on my YouTube channel Unlock Your Life.

You can access over 200 hypnotherapy sessions, guided meditations, and affirmations to deal with everything from anxiety, insomnia, emotional eating, low self-esteem, and more on my channel at Unlock Your Life. If you wish to help me continue to provide low-cost and no-cost support for all, you can donate at https://www.paypal.me/unlockyourlife. I look forward to supporting you and many others on your journey to unlock your life.