Belief Systems RAF-T Support for families and friends of transsexuals.

When a child is born his or her brain contains only subconscious mind and imagination and is for all intents and purposes like a blank slate. A few beliefs are formed while in the womb, but for the most part a child's mind is like Figure 1 below. A child’s brain is like a computer hard drive it is a clear space containing only memory and imagination functions. It is only as good as the information it receives and the interpretations and misinformed or uninformed decisions the child makes.

Until a child reaches 8 to 12 years of age he or she lives almost exclusively in a subconscious state of mind and has no serious analytical or discerning ability. He or she cannot tell the difference between truth and lies, fantasy, jokes, or make believe; for a child, everything is true.

A child's mind is a great receiver, and a very poor interpreter. When a parent or other person loves or abuses a child, punishes or praises them, says positive or negative things to them, sets a good or bad example, or when a child has an experience of any type, the message or experience goes directly to the imagination, free of analysis or understanding. As far as the child is concerned what he or she thinks they saw or heard is truth, regardless how far off base they are and regardless of later denials by adults. Once they have received the information and it has entered their imagination, it is true. Example: A child has no ability to rationalize that when another person has lost it and that they will be OK in a few minutes, when mom, dad, a sibling, or a friend screams "I hate you" the child believes the message. Both positive and negative messages streak to the imagination where the creation of thought, emotion, behavior, belief, and results begins. The imagination's sole purpose is to create.

The child’s mind creates emotional responses. Thoughts, messages, and experiences racing to a child's imagination are blown out of proportion over 2,500 times their importance. This out of proportion response results in emotional responses which very often serve only to invite more messages from the sender or feelings about the situation that are again sent to the imagination and subsequently become even more emotional. The most devastating messages a child can receive are negative messages. Negative messages stay with a person into adulthood because a child is rarely allowed to express all the emotion they have regarding the situation or the decision they have made about their experience.
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Every time a child has an experience they create a decision or the beginning of a belief about self and the people around them. If a child continues to receive corroborating messages similar to the original decision situation this additional input solidifies the original decision about their position in life. When an uninformed decision is made the child begins to subconsciously accept the repeated messages as evidence that their decision or belief is true. As evidence continues to build a fixed belief is built which is followed by fixed behaviors that often create devastating results. When the situation is either misinterpreted, or misunderstood fixed beliefs are stored in the subconscious mind and become the basis for all life decisions, actions, and results. belief 4 copy.png

The subconscious mind will manifest results according to the fixed beliefs stored within, without regard to outside input or conscious attempts to change the beliefs. The important thing to remember is that all decisions and belief building happens at the subconscious level of thought and is the result of either misunderstood messages, events, or misinformation. Sometimes small children are intentionally misinformed by siblings or unstable adults, but more often the misinformation is also misinformation to the older sibling or adult giving the message. Somewhere between the ages of 8 and 12 years a child begins to develop discerning ability and can begin to analyze their surroundings and situations. At this time they stop accepting absolutely everything as truth and a function known as the critical faculty is created. As this faculty is developed the conscious or discerning mind is born.

Even though the conscious mind is now wakening the subconscious is already littered with beliefs created and accepted when the child could not discern the difference between truth and fiction. The function of the subconscious mind is to maintain stored beliefs without revealing them directly to the conscious mind, and to manifest emotions and behaviors consistent with the stored beliefs regardless if they are true or not. The subconscious is so good at its job and so committed to being right that it rejects all incoming messages that conflict with the stored beliefs. If negative messages are stored, the subconscious rejects conflicting positive messages, and vice versa. The two ways messages are rejected are outright rejection, they just bounce off the critical faculty and are never allowed into the subconscious, or they are subverted by the subconscious to provide more evidence of beliefs being right. This is most often seen when a person attempts to compliment someone for a job well done or for an exceptional talent. A person with low self-esteem and harboring negative beliefs about self will either discredit their accomplishment to subconsciously reject the compliment or will think something like, “he or she doesn't know me, they don't know this is just a fluke event I could never repeat." In this way the compliment is accepted but perverted to be more evidence to support a negative belief.

Whenever positive input is fed to a person they must have a corresponding positive belief in order to automatically accept the input. For most of us we must consciously work to accept all positive feed-back and deny our automatic response to reject or pervert positive messages.

For the transsexual who has deeply held fixed beliefs about their gender identity the work to overcome those beliefs can be long, challenging, uncomfortable, and often feel devastating.

The mental health profession as a whole has not helped because they have become lazy and bought into the politically correct attitude that a pronouncement that one is a transsexual must be accepted at face value rather than insisting on one or two years of intense therapy to discover and unravel dysfunctional belief systems.