Why Am I Not Sure What I Actually Believe?
The Pattern
Someone asks what you believe about something and you notice, as you answer, that you are not entirely sure whether the belief you are expressing is yours. It may be the belief you were raised with. It may be the belief of someone you have been close to. It may be the belief that felt safest to hold in the environment you were in. When you look for the bedrock of your own perspective, independently formed and genuinely owned, the footing is less certain than you expected. Belief colonization happens when the environments you have moved through, family, religion, partnerships, communities, have been strong enough in their convictions that your own perspective was absorbed into theirs rather than developing alongside them. This is not weakness. In systems that required consensus as the price of belonging, holding a genuinely different view was a social risk. The child who learned that their perspective was unwelcome, wrong, or dangerous adapted by adopting the available perspective. Not dishonestly. They genuinely absorbed it, as the most efficient available path to belonging. The loss of personal truth in systems that required compliance is a specific and understudied wound. Religious families, politically homogeneous communities, enmeshed family systems, and controlling relationships all share this characteristic: they have a strong internal consensus that does not easily accommodate dissent. The person who grew up inside these systems, or spent significant years within them, may have genuine difficulty, after leaving, locating what they actually think and feel versus what they have been told to think and feel. The return to your own mind is one of the stranger journeys available. Because you cannot always tell, from the inside, which beliefs are colonized and which are genuinely yours. Some of the inherited beliefs are ones you endorse on reflection. Some are not. The discernment requires a kind of internal inquiry that was not practiced in systems that discouraged it.
Origins & Context
Carl Rogers' theory of organismic valuing describes the innate capacity of every person to value experiences that are genuinely growth-promoting and to devalue those that are not. This capacity develops in environments that allow authentic self-expression and genuine exploration. In environments that require compliance with external value systems, the organismic valuing process is overridden by the internalised external values, which then operate as if they were one's own.
Murray Bowen's differentiation theory describes intellectual and emotional differentiation as related but distinct: the capacity to think and feel from one's own position rather than from the position of the emotional field. Many people have strong intellectual capacities and still operate from a belief system that is largely borrowed because the emotional differentiation that would allow genuine intellectual independence was not developed in an environment that required consensus.
Judith Herman's work on coercive control describes how total environments, those that control information, social contact, and the expression of dissent, produce in individuals a specific loss of access to autonomous thought. Her analysis of thought reform processes in political prisoners applies in modified form to anyone who has spent years in a system that required them to suppress or disguise their genuine perspective as the cost of membership.
The inherited beliefs operate as if they are yours, and the discovery that some of them are not is one of the stranger liberations available to a person who has been inside a system that required consensus.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
It shows up as the opinion that changes depending on who you are with. With certain people you hold one view. With others, the same question produces a different answer. Not because you are dishonest but because your views are genuinely more responsive to the relational context than to a stable internal position.
You feel it as the uncertainty that arrives when someone challenges a belief you have held for a long time. You cannot easily defend it because it was never truly examined. You accepted it. And now that it is being questioned, you are not sure whether you believe it because you have genuinely evaluated it or because it was simply the available belief in your environment.
It shows up as the difficulty answering the question: what do you believe about this? When asked directly, you produce an answer. But there is often a quality of reaching, of checking what is available, rather than accessing something that feels solidly yours.
It shows up in the process of leaving a belief system, whether a religion, a relationship's worldview, or a family's ideological framework, and finding that the exit leaves a terrain that is surprisingly uncertain. You know what you have left. You are less sure what you actually think instead.
Named in the Literature As
Named in the Literature As:
1. Organismic Valuing Process (Carl Rogers) — the innate evaluative capacity that is suppressed when external value systems are imposed, leaving the person with an internalized set of values that may not accurately reflect their genuine organismic responses. 2. Intellectual Fusion vs. Differentiation (Murray Bowen) — the state in which one's beliefs and perspectives are fused with those of the surrounding emotional field rather than genuinely self-generated and independently held. 3. Belief Colonization (philosophy of mind, extended to relational trauma) — the process by which the strong belief systems of surrounding others are absorbed as one's own without genuine evaluation, particularly in systems that discourage dissent. 4. Thought Reform and Autonomous Cognition (Judith Herman, extended from Robert Lifton) — the impact of total environments that require compliance with an official reality on an individual's capacity to access and trust autonomous thought. 5. The Return to Organismic Experiencing (Carl Rogers, person-centered therapy) — the therapeutic process of learning to identify and trust one's own felt responses as the basis for genuine belief formation, as distinct from the internalized opinions of others.
Related entries in this library: shadow-self, identity-diffusion, self-trust, why-i-change-depending-on-who-i-am-with, authentic-desire
Nikita's Note
Finding my own beliefs after years inside systems with very clear ideas about what I was supposed to believe was one of the most disorienting and most liberating processes I have experienced. Because the uncertainty is real. You genuinely cannot always tell which thoughts are yours and which were installed.
The practice that helped was not looking for the correct beliefs but paying attention to how different ideas feel in the body. Not what I have been told is true, but what resonates with something I actually recognize. That recognition is not perfect and not infallible. But it is a more reliable guide to genuine personal truth than anything a system of required compliance ever produced.
From the work
The inherited beliefs operate as if they are yours, and the discovery that some of them are not is one of the stranger liberations available to a person who has been inside a system that required consensus.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.