The 4 Stages of Belief Development

Epigenetic beliefs are firmly rooted in the body-mind. “The Body Keeps The Score” by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, articulates how trauma modifies gene expression. If you suffer from PTSD or Complex PTSD (me), you’ll learn how trauma has affected your beliefs and thus your overall lack of health.

I’ve extended Dr. Lipton’s work to create four stages of self-reinforcements. Behavior and beliefs are interchangeable terms.

The Physical stage, from birth to age 7, is when epigenetic beliefs are 90% developed (Lipton), the other 10% is presumed to be environmental influences which exacerbate or ameliorate epigenetic beliefs. This stage is purely physical, a child feels it with their entire body and expresses it via various emotional states. This is the beginning of behavior.

Epigenetic beliefs are firmly rooted in the body-mind. “The Body Keeps The Score” by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, articulates how trauma modifies gene expression. If you suffer from PTSD or Complex PTSD (me), you’ll learn how trauma has affected your beliefs and thus your overall lack of health.

How a child is treated the first 7 years of its life determines its health and how they will treat others throughout their life. Subconscious states have a singularly profound impact on one’s development that cannot be overstated.

The Emotional stage, age 7-14, is when a person learns juvenile identification of their epigenetic responses and triggers. Thought patterns self-reinforce in new ways tied directly to new ways of articulating emotions.

The Intellectual stage, age 14-21, is where one begins to concretely articulate their emotions, associated thought patterns, and actions. From here on out the interconnected self-reinforcing feelings, thoughts, actions and their reinforcements grow stronger and more tightly connected intrapersonally and inter-relationally.

Your beliefs are intrapersonal, inter-relating with all other external beliefs. Anything outside of you is external, especially family.

Maturation is the final stage. It happens primarily in a person’s 20s–40s or whenever a person leaves their family for an extended period of time. This stage is when all of the reinforcements and values challenge the young adult as they navigate the world, career paths, and meet others with similar beliefs and start families of their own.

During the Maturation stage, one’s epigenetic beliefs align and/or conflict with contemporary external modalities, creating sophisticated ‘beliefs about beliefs’, which becomes one’s intrapersonal belief modality. You think, therefore you are.

Regardless of age, one’s emotional states are the single most important indicator of one’s beliefs, and thus health. We feel every single moment because we are believing every single moment. Every thought is tied to subconscious feelings, every feeling produces thoughts and actions which in turn creates more self-reinforcing feelings, thoughts, and actions in perpetuity, directly determining one’s physical and spiritual health.

Epigenetics is an excellent predictor of how a person responds to adversity. Each person adds in a little more ‘flavor’ from their experience, but the basic blueprint doesn’t change (Lipton).

Whatever you feel and think right now as you read this are your beliefs’ reinforcements that everything is perceived through. The various reinforcing modalities unique to you either liberates you or enslaves you to all of your beliefs’ self-reinforcing modalities.

Most of us are completely unaware of what our actual beliefs are, but we’re totally aware of the reinforcements because they are omnipresent physically in our feelings, thoughts and actions. You’ve got a few epigenetic beliefs—I have two—and billions of self-reinforcements obscuring your beliefs.

Your beliefs were formed hundreds of years before your birth.