(This is a continuation of my last article, on a mental health technique I discovered a few months ago. It’s not the “much larger side” that I mentioned at the end of that post though; that will posted as a third part, soon.)

It may sound strange that I’m talking about getting rid of beliefs. Some of the beliefs I mentioned, for instance, are patently ridiculous — “life is hard” is logically meaningless, “happiness hurts” is utter nonsense, and others I’ve discovered were true at one time but haven’t been for decades. But the human mind seems to be more like a computer than most people have imagined… once a belief program is running in your head, it generally stays running. Many beliefs are self-sustaining — once you’ve got them, and start reacting as if they were true, your mind will get plenty of evidence that they are true. At that point you can’t get rid of them by the same route you adopted them, even if the situations that led you to that conclusion no longer apply, or the conclusion itself was wrong.

In other words, you can believe something that you consciously know is wrong or outright ridiculous. You can even know what the belief is and where it came from, without that knowledge having any effect on the belief itself, or the way you react to it. Once your subconscious mind has adopted a belief, the only way to eliminate it is to prove, in a way that the subconscious mind will accept, that the things that led it to that belief are no longer true, or never were.

To make the situation worse, your subconscious mind doesn’t respond to the same forms of logic that your conscious mind does. That’s why it can believe something that your conscious mind knows is wrong or ridiculous.

And the final crap condiment on this turd sandwich is that many of the most damaging false beliefs, including most of the ones relating to self-esteem, are formed before the age of six, when you don’t have the knowledge or experience to see the real reasons for things.

The thing is, you can get rid of false beliefs, permanently. You just have to know the general outline of the experiences that caused you to form the belief, and how to show your subconscious that your original conclusions about them were mistaken or no longer apply. The Lefkoe Belief Method provides the latter, and those who practice it have an arsenal of methods to locate the former as well. The results are comparable to those of one of the best treatment methods known to mainstream psychology today (Cognitive Behavior Therapy, or CBT), but this method provides those results in far less time (it only takes about half an hour per belief).

I’m not medically qualified to say this, but I suspect that many (perhaps even most) depression and anxiety disorders could be permanently solved using this method, and likely several other conditions as well. When you see how and how often these problematic beliefs are formed, and the effects — everything from subtle to catastrophic — they can have on a person’s life, you’ll start to understand why I think this will eventually be used by most practitioners of psychology. It has been subjected to three scientific studies to date, and its proven success suggests that the model of the mind it offers is not only true, but is at the root of many of the problems we have, both as individuals and as a race.

As I mentioned at the end of the first part, there’s a larger subject hiding behind all this as well. I plan to write about that next.