“I Am Crazy” — A Core Limiting Belief

🧨 Common Emotional Triggers

This belief doesn’t just undermine self-confidence—it actively distorts your trust in yourself:

• Being Gaslit or Dismissed: Even mild invalidation can trigger a spiral of doubt

• Emotional Intensity: Strong emotions—yours or others’—can feel overwhelming or dangerous

• Memory Gaps or Uncertainty: Difficulty recalling events clearly fuels fear of losing control

• Conflict or Confrontation: Fear that disagreements prove you’re irrational or unstable

• Mental Health Labels: Even casual use of words like “crazy” or “unstable” trigger shame or panic

What Therapy Does to Break the Cycle

At ShiftGrit, we don’t just restore emotional balance—we rebuild internal self-trust.

• Understand: Identify experiences where your reality was chronically invalidated or your emotions pathologized

• Shift: Disrupt the learned self-mistrust and fear of emotional intensity

• Recondition: Establish a new internal framework that validates your emotions, perceptions, and experiences
  
  

You’re not losing control. You’re learning to trust yourself again.

👉 Book a session today →

Related Belief Expressions

• “I’m irrational.”

• “My feelings aren’t valid.”

• “I’m out of control.”

• “People can’t trust my judgment.”
  
  

Closely linked to beliefs like “I’m defective,” “I can’t trust myself,” and “I’m too much.”

🧩 Belief Progression Loop

Non-Nurturing Element:

Environments where emotional expressions were shamed, invalidated, or labeled as unstable or irrational.

Evidence Pile:

• Being repeatedly told you’re “too sensitive” or “overreacting”

• Chronic invalidation or gaslighting experiences

• History of emotional outbursts that were criticized or punished harshly

• Experiencing stigma around mental health or emotional struggles
  
  

The Loop:

• Limiting Belief: I am crazy

• Internal Rule: If I express my true feelings, I’ll be rejected or labeled unstable

• Protective Conclusion: I suppress, question, or deny my emotional reality

• Opt-Out Pattern: I isolate, become overly dependent on others’ validation, or lose trust in myself further
  
  

This loop creates a self-fulfilling prophecy—making you doubt your reality until you lose confidence entirely.

Emotional Regulation: The Key to Rewiring the Loop

You’re not irrational—you’ve internalized a narrative of emotional mistrust.

When your nervous system learns that intensity ≠ instability, self-validation returns, and clarity follows.

Explore the Therapy Path for This Belief

Want to see how this belief shows up in real life — and how we treat it at ShiftGrit?

👉 View the Core Belief page →

← Back to the Belief Library

Want to Break Free from “I Am Crazy”?

Therapy helps dismantle the belief that your inner experience can’t be trusted—giving you back the right to feel, perceive, and express yourself fully.

You’re not crazy. You’re just patterned.

👉 Book a Therapy Session →