Negative & Harmful Core Beliefs
Most of us don’t wake up one day and decide to believe terrible things about ourselves.
No one chooses I am unlovable or I am a burden or I don’t matter the way they choose a coat or a song.
These beliefs arrive quietly.
They slip in through moments of pain.
They take root when we are small, overwhelmed, unheard, or simply trying to survive.
And over time, they stop sounding like thoughts at all.
They start sounding like truth.
Harmful core beliefs are not born inside us.
They are learned.
They are shaped in homes where love was conditional.
In classrooms where curiosity was punished.
In relationships where silence felt safer than honesty.
In systems that rewarded compliance and erased individuality.
They grow when we are told—directly or indirectly—that our feelings are too much, our needs inconvenient, our existence something to earn rather than inhabit.
Sometimes they come from trauma.
Sometimes from repetition.
Sometimes from a single moment that cracked something open and never quite closed.
A child doesn’t think, This environment is unhealthy.
A child thinks, It must be me.
And the crow remembers.
Core beliefs don’t stay in the background.
They shape the way we move through the world.
They whisper when we hesitate to speak.
They tighten our chest when something good comes too easily.
They convince us to accept crumbs because we don’t believe we deserve bread.
They influence:
The relationships we tolerate The boundaries we don’t set The dreams we abandon before trying The rest we deny ourselves
They tell us we are unsafe even when the danger is gone.
They keep us braced for impact long after the storm has passed.
And still—we keep going.
Not because it’s easy.
But because survival taught us how.
Challenging a core belief doesn’t start with affirmations shouted into the mirror.
It starts with noticing.
It starts with pausing when a familiar thought rises and asking:
Who taught me this?
When did I first believe it?
Does this belief protect me—or imprison me?
We don’t rip these beliefs out by the root.
We loosen the soil around them.
We learn to speak to ourselves with curiosity instead of cruelty.
We begin separating what happened to us from who we are.
Sometimes challenging a belief looks like rest.
Sometimes it looks like saying no.
Sometimes it looks like staying when every instinct tells us to disappear.
The flame doesn’t burn away the crow.
It lights the space so the crow can finally see.
You are not broken for having harmful core beliefs.
You are human for developing them.
They were once armor.
They helped you endure.
But armor is heavy.
And you are allowed to set it down.
Healing doesn’t mean becoming someone new.
It means remembering who you were before the world taught you to doubt your worth.
Crow and flame—
both can exist.
Both can guide you home.
Crow and Flame 