Programmed with Beliefs That Were Never Yours: The brainwave science of why you repeat your family story – and how to rewrite it
Trigger Warning: This piece discusses childhood neglect and childhood sexual assault. Take what you need, leave the rest — including this article, if that's what your body's asking for today.
“So I didn’t have a choice.”
This realization changed everything for me. From birth, you believed everything you were exposed to as Truth. Not by choice. Not because you agreed. Because you literally hadn’t seen anything different yet. You didn’t know that anything else exists.
You learned whether humans come when you cry. You learned how people treat each other. You learned what love looks like, what safety feels like, and how much you mattered to the people in that room.
And it all got stored as belief. Beliefs that get coded inside you. But you don’t remember why.
Understanding our brainwave patterns explains this. Because up until approximately 7 years of age, it’s all getting programmed into you – beliefs in how the world works.
Delta brainwaves: Birth to Age 2
(0.5–4 Hz)
Humans are born in Delta — the slowest, deepest brainwave state where the subconscious mind is wide open – absorbing, storing, and receiving.
Babies have no filter yet. They can’t question or edit what they see.
They just receive. They take it all in and assume it all as Truth. Of course they do - they just got here. They have nothing to compare it to.
While many assume babies aren't aware of what's happening around them, that's not accurate. "They don't know what's going on" is one of the most costly myths we carry. Babies are absorbing everything happening around them – as pure Truth. They're building an understanding of the world, one experience at a time, and then they are storing it — all of it — for later use. This is the most crucial time in a human’s life. And many of us moved through it completely unprotected.
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Theta brainwaves: Ages 2–7
(4–8 Hz)
Around age 2, brainwaves shift from Delta into Theta — and stay there until approximately age 7. Theta is associated with creativity, intuition, and deep learning. It's where memories, emotions, and sensations are stored in our subconscious.
It's also where we are most programmable.
During these years, everything we observe gets absorbed as Truth. Not sometimes. Not mostly. Everything. Because we have no prior experience to compare it to. No frame of reference that would allow us to question what we see and hear.
We didn't know to push back. We didn't even know there was something to push back against.
This is the window where our foundational beliefs about the world are formed — beliefs about safety, love, worth, and belonging. And they get stored – quietly, permanently.
Core beliefs. Emotional responses. Identity. All of it — imprinted here, as pure Truth.
Some of what got programmed was true. Some of it wasn’t. But your brain stored it all the same – you had no way to sort truth from fiction yet.
If you were exposed to neglect, you learned that people who love you aren’t reliable.
If you were told you are a very bad girl, you stored it as fact: there is something bad about me.
And if you were told to be a good girl – don’t tell our secrets, you learned that love has a price. That keeping secrets is how you earn it. You trade love for silence. And you call it loyalty.
Beliefs that were never yours. Stored as if they were.
For those of us with CPTSD, limiting beliefs hold us back – telling us we are unworthy, unlovable, “bad”. Sometimes, teaching us that people who love us sometimes hurt us. Sometimes, teaching us that someone else is allowed access to my body, without consent.
Up until this point (approx. 7 years), your subconscious mind has been wide open – absorbing, storing, filing everything away as Truth. In Alpha, that begins to change.
Alpha brainwaves: Ages 7-12
(8-13 Hz)
Around ages 7-12, the conscious mind becomes more dominant. The wide-open receptivity of early childhood starts to close – not completely, but significantly. Like a door that’s still there, but no longer standing open.
You begin analyzing. Connecting dots. Making meaning from everything you absorbed. Rather than taking in the world as pure Truth, you start filtering it through what you already believe.
This is also why so many early memories are hard to access. Once the subconscious door mostly closes, it becomes harder to reach. What’s stored there doesn’t disappear – it just goes deeper.
Alpha is the bridge between the conscious and subconscious mind. It’s the dominant brainwave state in a relaxed, alert adult – present whenever you’re calm but not actively focused. Relaxed. Comfortable. At ease.
In Alpha, you're leaning heavily on what’s already been learned and programmed: the beliefs in your subconscious. Everything is running underneath your awareness. Your automatic reactions. Your stored beliefs. The emotional patterns you didn’t consciously choose.
The brain’s Default Mode is understood to be the default mode of brain function during passive states.[2] When you are at rest, your brain goes back to those beliefs already installed in your brain. The Default Mode Network runs the programs that were installed in those early years. Living from the foundation that was built before you had any say in the blueprints.
For some people, that foundation is relatively solid. Imperfect, but workable.
For others — those who experienced neglect, inconsistency, or early childhood trauma — that foundation is built on beliefs that were never accurate. Not truths.
If what got stored in your DMN was inaccurate — and for many of us, it was — you may find yourself living on autopilot, repeating patterns you never consciously chose, wondering why nothing quite feels like solid ground.
The beliefs are still there. Still running. Still being treated as Truth.
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Beta brainwaves: Ages 12+
(13-32 Hz)
Beta is the brainwave state most adults live in.
Beta is the mode of productivity, logic, and action. It’s the state you’re in when you’re “on” – doing, planning, deciding, driving to work without remembering how you got there (thank you Default Mode Network). Analytical. Goal-oriented. Outward-facing.
And in our culture, it’s treated as the gold standard.
Beta runs fast (13-32 Hz) – and it becomes a lot to carry. High Beta is the brainwave state of stress and survival. Overfocused on the outside world. Braced. Vigilant. Associated with anger, fear, anxiety, and pain.
Many of us live here without realizing it.
And underneath all that busyness? The subconscious is still running. The DMN is still referencing those early programs. The limiting beliefs installed in Theta are still quietly shaping every decision, reaction, relationship – while the conscious Beta mind stays too busy to notice.
We were taught that this is the right way to be. Always on. Always productive. Always moving.
Rest wasn't valued. Slowing down felt like falling behind. And so many adults became fluent in Beta — and completely disconnected from everything running beneath it.
Here's what that costs: when you live exclusively in Beta, you lose access to the subconscious. The very place where your programming lives. Where your limiting beliefs are stored. Where the patterns you keep repeating were first written.
You can't think your way into the subconscious. Beta won't get you there.
To access what was stored in Theta, you have to return to Theta.
Living From Mostly Limiting Beliefs and Good Girl Programming
I thought about my own beliefs, the norms my parents had exposed me to before 7 years of age. What was it like for my smaller parts, and what were the limiting beliefs I still held on to?
“We didn’t know Lauren!” My father told me about the harms of smoking. It wasn’t understood yet, he said. That it might hurt you. His parents smoked, his grandparents smoked, and all his friends smoked. He had no reason to believe it wasn’t good for him.
That was an easy one to understand. Here’s the one that wasn’t:
My mom told me, “Good men do bad things. And we keep their secrets.” I struggled with this and argued with her at length – if he cared about me, why would he hurt me so badly? But my feelings about it didn’t matter. “It was so much worse for me,” my mother told me, “try to be grateful.”
Try to be grateful after being assaulted? “It’s been this way a long time.” My mother told me.
That doesn’t make it OK.
But with the programming my mother endured and passed to me, I had no way to know that assault was not acceptable – in my family, it was very acceptable. “It’s been this way a long time, Lauren,” my mother told me again, “and we’ve all been ok with it. Don’t be selfish. Why do you think it’s going to be better for you?”
And just like that, the expectation becomes clear: don’t change the Default Mode Network. This is the way we do it. People who love you will hurt you, and your feelings about it don’t matter.
I knew that I hated how my experience or feelings didn’t matter and weren’t important. I was expected to “get over it” daily. “You are so selfish,” my parents both told me, and I believed them. Expecting my feelings to matter or having needs was not in the cards for me.
So I stopped listening to my own feelings; it wasn’t in the cards for me to matter enough in this life. I lived in my father’s world and should feel lucky to be here.
Welcome to my Limiting Beliefs: beliefs I inherited regardless of my own opinion.
“I don’t matter”, “I’m not important,” and “I must be pretty selfish” became deeply ingrained in my brain – inside my Default Mode Network.
How Can We Change Our Limiting Beliefs?
How could I start to change these limiting beliefs I carried that lived in my subconscious? How could I gain access to it and make real changes?
I decided to try three things:
1. Conversations with my inner child, Little Lauren – I needed to understand her beliefs if I wanted to change them
2. Meditation, which I started to read, was helping so many and
3. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which was gaining recognition among trauma doctors worldwide
Talking to My Inner Child
The first time I spoke to my inner child, she scoffed angrily. “You’ve been ignoring me for over 50 years, just like your mother told you to. I don’t trust you,” she said to me.
Did I hear that right? I thought. I don’t trust myself. That’s not a good place to be. But I didn’t blame her, really.
“I’m not giving up on us,” I told Little Lauren. “I’m not going away.” I continued to talk to her every day, regardless of any response. Little Lauren’s feelings were key to my trauma, and I needed to know what they were.
I was ready to know how these smaller parts, my Little Laurens, felt. There were parts of me that had become frozen in time, completely lost to me. I felt grief, but I didn’t feel betrayal – because that part of me still felt like it was my fault. My fault that I was neglected in childhood. I was a bad girl.
It took months before that part of me responded, and deep reflection just to hear her. That’s where meditation came in.
Meditation
Through meditation, where the body is deeply at rest but your mind is awake, we can shift our brainwaves from Beta to Alpha to Theta (and sometimes gamma). When we reach Theta, we bypass the analytical mind and enter the body’s operating system: the Default Mode Network.[4] Could I learn to meditate and reach Theta? Could I find my Limiting Beliefs?
I decided to learn to meditate with Dr. Joe Dispenza, who reviews the brainwave science behind meditation – and reaching Theta to rewrite our limiting beliefs.
As new meditators, we all come across that moment where we feel like we can’t possibly stand it – sitting or lying still, awake – for one more second. Discomfort in my body, annoyance that it seemed like a complete waste of time, and it was hard to believe that sitting here quietly was going to change anything. But it did. Even advanced, experienced meditators find themselves at this moment. And when you overcome yourself and achieve getting your body to sit still with your mind awake, it’s a win. So I tried to look at it in this way, as a healing moment and stay despite the discomfort.
And I wondered, by sitting through the discomfort, if I was forced to feel the feelings in my body. We all know ‘Feel it to heal it’. I wondered, had I been thinking about my emotions rather than paying attention to the physical sensations? If trauma lives in the body, not the brain, is there a corresponding sensation for each feeling?
At Dr. Joe’s retreat, I saw people achieve deep meditation, relaxing their bodies and sinking fully into a chair or the earth. As advanced meditators took the stage to show us how it’s done, many of their bodies were shaking - people’s jaws would chatter, or their bodies would shake. I was very curious – would this happen to me? What exactly was happening here? Was the shaking the expression of trauma long held in the body? The body releasing it, right in front of me?
I powered through my own uncomfortable moments of impatience and aggravation, and eventually, I also found my body shaking – mostly through my jaw (many find it happens through the hands and feet). Afterwards, I’d feel lighter and freer.
But what about my Limiting Beliefs? Was meditation helping me reach Little Lauren? At first, nothing seemed to change, but then, a few months into meditating regularly, I suddenly heard this small part of me clearly tell me something I had long forgotten: “I thought mom was going to help me.”
“Oh, honey “ I replied to Little Lauren, “I remember that now. I know, I did too.”
“I’m such a bad girl. I wasn’t good.” I heard Little Lauren tell me.
Bingo – I just reached my Limiting Belief.
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy
Psilocybin, MDMA, and Ketamine have become increasingly popular for those healing from CPTSD, PTSD, depression, and anxiety. And the research makes it clear why: these entheogenic compounds raise our consciousness, allow us to reach Theta brainwaves, and gain access to the Default Mode Network.[5]
And my experience proved this to be true for me too. During a psychedelic assisted journey, Little Lauren can suddenly see a new perspective otherwise unavailable to date.
For me, the experience is very visual, as if Little Lauren and I are sitting side-by-side. Memories would appear to us both, and with the help of my guide, we’d discuss and see what we think. Early on, a giant Sword appeared to me, cartoon-like. “I’m the Sword of Truth,” he told me, “and I live in your spine. Your body knows your Truth, even if you forgot it.” The Sword of Truth took us on journeys into my memories and then asked Little Lauren and me to evaluate what we thought now – not what we were told. “Can you see your Truth, Little Lauren?” The Sword of Truth turned into a magic carpet and took us around. And now that I was side-by-side with Little Lauren and she was starting to trust me, when she saw what happened to us, it became hard for her to disagree: she wasn’t the bad one here.
“Be a good girl, Lauren. Don’t tell our secrets.”
Little Lauren was so confused, wanting to please her parents but not feeling right about keeping secrets that seemed wrong in her body.
“I was with you,” the Sword of Truth reminded her. “You were right to question that. It’s not ok to keep secrets when bad things are happening.”
“I had no one to tell,” she told us, climbing on my lap for the first time and telling me about her experience, “I thought that they were right and I was a bad girl.”
Of course she did – she had nothing else to compare it to.
It’s impossible to force yourself to believe something; it takes time for your mind and body to integrate the new belief. I patiently waited as Little Lauren asked questions and made up her own mind. I’d spent enough time trying to tell my body what to feel by bossing it around, and that doesn’t work. You can’t demand that you believe something – it doesn’t work that way. Beliefs are stored in your body early on in life, before your subconscious door mostly closes around age 7. My smaller part, Little Lauren, had to decide she no longer believed in that belief.
Psychedelic Journeys do in one session what hours of meditation could achieve. Faster, harder, and it gets to the source, deep in the Default Mode Network. I was a fan and so happy to have finally reached my Little Lauren, the part of me that carried beliefs I wanted to change.
Next Steps
Armed with two ways to access Little Laurens Limiting Beliefs, I kept going, doing over 25 psychedelic-assisted journeys over three years and meditating almost daily. In addition, I was talking to Little Lauren every day now and patiently waiting to hear the answer.
How did I know when I heard her? I called it the Without A Doubt Moment. I waited until it was without a doubt for me. If I wasn’t sure, I asked for clarity and waited. Our bodies hold a natural intelligence – a Sword of Truth for what’s true for each of us – and if you ask, it will answer. My answers were becoming clear.
Little Lauren used to think it was ok to keep secrets for people, even if she thought what they were doing was very wrong. Now she knows, no more secrets. We don’t hide things for people. That’s not our responsibility. Their behavior is on them; clarity repels confusion. We live in clarity, not in secret-town.
and
She used to think she was not important. Her feelings didn’t matter. Now she knows I’m waiting to hear those feelings. They matter to me a lot.
Beliefs installed way before I had a say, uninstalled. New program.