Why Certain Limiting Beliefs Won’t Change
Where logic and emotion fall short and what works instead
Introduction: How Limiting Beliefs Hold Us Back
As I was preparing to head off to college and a family friend asked what I was going to study, I answered, “I’m going to learn how to change the brain and mind!”
Unfortunately, my neuroscience degree taught me a great deal, but almost nothing about how the mind works or how to change it.
Years later, I stumbled on Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), which promised the type of magical transformation I had been searching for. I dove into learning everything possible about how we construct our mental maps, strategies, and most fascinating, beliefs.
I was determined to learn how beliefs form and change because mine had a profound impact on my life. After experiencing a number of betrayals as a teenager and six years of chronic illness as an adult, I had made it to the present with an old mental tape repeating I can’t trust other women and I’m unattractive. No matter how much evidence I had to the contrary, how happy I was looking in the mirror, the old voice seemed to run in the background.
At first, the results I saw using NLP techniques were remarkable. I saw clients who had been scared and stuck leave sessions calm and excited to take on their goals. But in other sessions, the process simply didn’t reach them. The most fundamental beliefs like “I’m not enough” or “If I get angry, something bad will happen” seemed immune.
So I kept digging. I returned to neuroscience, attachment theory, and trauma research, determined to understand what was missing. What I discovered changed how I see belief change entirely: not all beliefs are encoded at the same level. That’s why they require different approaches to shift.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the three main ways beliefs form, why some are surprisingly resistant to change, and what actually helps shift even the most stubborn beliefs.
The Cognitive Approach to Belief Change: When Evidence Is Enough
At their core, beliefs are generalizations: they are formed by picking and choosing certain experiences from our lives and discarding others. For example, if you believe I’m not good at my job, you can easily bring to mind all the times you’ve done subpar work or made mistakes and easily forget the times you’ve received praise or helped your team through a challenge.
For many beliefs, one of the fastest ways to shift them is to find as many counter-examples as possible. If you want to believe I am good at my job - and improving, start by listing out all the things you’ve done well and how you’re investing in growth. This makes your brain shift attention to a different set of memories and loosen its grip on the old belief. If you start tracking your wins and keep attention focused on what you’re doing well, you can shift the belief even more rapidly.
This approach works very well when the belief is inaccurate and non-emotional such as:
“I’m bad with money”
“I’m not good at my job”
“I can’t learn X”
Unfortunately, emotionally charged beliefs require deeper work.
Emotional Reimprinting: Beliefs Formed in a Single Event
Many of our strongest beliefs are formed in emotionally charged moments. A belief that I held for many years was “I’m not a good friend,” despite years of long-term friendships and loyalty. When I began studying NLP and learned the process of reimprinting, I suddenly understood why.
Reimprinting involves noticing the physical sensation (e.g. a knot in the chest) that a belief triggers and following this physical sensation back in time to the event when a belief formed. In my case, reimprinting brought me back to a long ago event in Kindergarten, when I broke a toy and then lied and blamed it on another girl, who later looked me in the eye and said, “You’re not a good friend!”
Because of how much guilt I felt in that moment, that belief I formed was like a black hole that pulled my attention back to itself no matter how many other positive experiences I had over the years.
The good news is that reimprinting not only involves going back to a past memory, but using your present day awareness and emotional resources to re-write it. It allowed me to step back into that younger self, give her the courage to own her mistakes, and to see that one mistake didn’t make her a bad friend. Reimprinting works because emotional memories are not fixed; they can be updated with new emotional information.
This process of re-writing emotional events and past beliefs works incredibly well when a belief has formed after a particular event. For many of my clients, reimprinting beliefs that began in high school or as children can change their outlook on life in a single session. In my case, when I shifted my belief to “I am a good friend,” I suddenly felt a huge weight of guilt come off my shoulders and friends reported that I seemed more relaxed and was no longer over-compensating.
Yet even there are some beliefs that reimprinting can’t quite reach.
Relational Reimprinting: Changing Beliefs Through Felt Safety
For a long time, I held the belief, “I need to impress someone to earn love.”
When I was dating, I would cook for my boyfriends, go to the gym, and over-give in every way to earn my place in the relationship. Ironically, though I enjoyed doing those things, they took on a feeling of urgency when I was dating.
As soon as I learned reimprinting, I was excited to reimprint this fundamental and exhausting belief. The only problem was, I couldn’t find when I formed it. There was no particular event or moment, just a feeling of fear when I didn’t over-compensate.
Even worse, clients came to me with similarly big beliefs I couldn’t help them shift: I’m not enough, I can’t relax, and it’s not safe to show anger.
What finally helped me understand this stuckness wasn’t another belief technique — it was understanding attachment.
They are beliefs formed through our attachment patterns to keep us safe. These are words later put to the implicit experience of young children whose nervous systems learned through experience: I need to impress / do something / stay calm in order to stay connected.
They often form over years, often before we can speak, rather than through a single incident. They are part of our procedural memory, our attachment system, and our autonomic nervous system.
Most importantly, they aren’t shifted through cognition or even bringing in new emotional wisdom: they shift at the same level they form: through felt relationship dynamics.
One of the best ways I’ve found to shift these beliefs is through a newer approach called Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) therapy, which involves imagining ideal care givers (not your actual parents) who provide the relational experiences you needed as a child. For some, that may be parents who could tolerate their anger, or their self-expression, or even their not doing anything, and stay connected and caring.
The key is not in changing the story, but in shifting the nervous system’s experience and expectation of a relationship.
Growing up in a family where attention and connection was mostly tied to achievement, I was able to imagine myself as three years old once again receiving attention simply for being. I let my body relax, even imagined making mistakes, and let myself feel the constant and caring attention of two parents staying connected and letting me be. After 5-10 minutes over a few nights, I felt my body soften and reorganize and my responses to other people relax. Unlike the other two approaches, there were no words in the process - just a felt experience to teach my nervous system a new lesson.
How to Know Which Level Your Limiting Belief Lives At
If you’re struggling to shift a limiting belief, ask yourself at which level it lives:
Does evidence already help shift the belief? If so, consider using the Cognitive Approach (e.g. reframing, counter-examples, listing evidence)
Does this belief immediately bring up a strong emotion or memory? If so, consider using Reimprinting.
Does letting go of, or acting against, this belief feel dangerous? If so, consider Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) work or attachment-based work.
