A Unique Way to Heal the Great Divide

Why do good ideas so often pop up when you’re taking a shower?
Or while you’re puttering in the garden, washing dishes, or some other occupation that requires minimal focus?

Something about relaxing in a safe space and letting your mind wander allows spontaneous associations to weave themselves together in ways you hadn’t thought of before. Seems like once you stop ordering your brain around, it gets busy rummaging through the cupboards and finding ingredients you forgot you had.

That happens to me in the bathtub

I often start my writing in the bathtub—at least in my mind. The bathtub is apparently my version of a think tank, although the funding never seems to show up.

Of course I don’t take my computer in there and type with wet fingers on a keyboard precariously propped over the water. I just let random connections form from ideas that have been floating around in the outer rings of my consciousness. That often sparks inspirations I can’t wait to write about.

This morning, questions about the plight of our planet, political viewpoints, societal division, and how to heal the world dovetailed with an energy-healing modality I learned many years ago, called Kalos. I realize this is quite a leap—from the state of the world to something I learned from muscle testing—but that’s how my brain works.

It started in a doctor’s office

Valerie Seaman Moreton developed Kalos as a way to heal the core issues underlying chronic diseases when medical options weren’t working. She used muscle testing to help people identify their core limiting belief and guided people through the childhood experiences that triggered their belief in order to unravel it and get to the underlying truth that set them free… which often led to healing.

According to Moreton, there are only two core beliefs that humans buy into, “I’m not lovable” and “I’m not good enough.”

According to Moreton, there are only two core beliefs that humans buy into, “I’m not lovable” and “I’m not good enough.”

In her theory, humanity is roughly divided half-and-half into those camps. I call them the people pleasers and the perfectionists.

In families siblings often alternate between the two core beliefs and friends often share the same type. Married couples tend to be one of each type… which will make more sense when you understand how each type tends to operate in life. Maybe that’s why relationships can be so confusing.

But what does any of that have to do with societal division, politics, and the state of the world? And how can a personal healing modality help heal a divided world? Well, maybe it can’t. Ultimately, healing has to happen individually, but if enough people clear their own limiting beliefs, that healing will be reflected in the world we all share.

What could be more important than that?

But I’m jumping ahead. First, I need to give you a brief overview of the core belief types and how they tend to operate in the world.

Let’s get technical for a few minutes, then we’ll move on to the philosophical and political implications. I asked Perplexity to give me a quick outline of characteristics of each type (I know—AI, but it saved me a couple hours of digging through my old notebooks).

I’m sure you’ll recognize each type… and probably start sorting everyone you know into which type they fit. I did. Of course nobody is 100% one or the other, but we all seem to lean heavily to one side.

Core belief	Implied meaning	Typical strategy
“I am not good enough”	My value depends on achievement, competence, appearance, status, usefulness, or success.	Prove, improve, perform, control, or hide shortcomings.
“I am not lovable”	Even if people know the real me, they will reject, abandon, criticize, or stop loving me.	Seek reassurance, please others, attach, withdraw, defend, or avoid intimacy.

In real life, the “I’m not good enough” perfectionist type might rewrite an email fourteen times (guilty as charged), alphabetize the spice rack because chaos might reveal their inadequacy, buy a fancy car to impress their friends, even if they can’t afford it.

The “not lovable” people-pleaser type might volunteer for a job they really don’t want, apologize when someone bumps into them, try to make themselves indispensable.

These beliefs and compensating behaviors or strategies were formed in early childhood based on false conclusions we made in circumstances we were not yet able to fully understand. Then, layer upon layer of “proof” is piled on top of the original conclusion, each time something happens that seems to validate our core belief.

Daddy left me, so that means I’m not lovable. That conclusion can feed into social behaviors that alienate others who then also leave, “proving” the validity of the original conclusion. But what if Daddy died, or he was taking drugs and lost his grip on life, or so many other possibilities that a small child could not possibly comprehend? That’s what needs to be explored when unravelling the false conclusion.

Unless we do that work, we will keep running that pattern for the rest of our lives, leading to physical or mental disease on a personal level, and societal turmoil on a collective level.

That leads me to the political realm. Have you noticed any turmoil there? Need I ask?

Each of these core beliefs tends to show up wearing different political hats. The “not good enough” crowd often gravitates toward strength, order, achievement, and self-reliance—proving their worth by winning, succeeding, climbing the hierarchy, and defending the tribe or country that makes them feel valuable.

The “not lovable” crowd tends to gravitate toward inclusion, compassion, and belonging—proving their worth by making sure nobody is left out, rejected, or forgotten.

Different strategies, different political bumper stickers, but underneath, the same hungry little question: Am I enough? Am I loved?

That’s not to say you can lump all liberals or conservatives into perfect little piles (in fact, I muscle test as not good enough, but lean toward the progressive end of the scale politically). It’s just one way to understand how our political system got so divided… and maybe how we can heal the divide by understanding why people make the choices they make.

Givers and Takers—the world needs both

My Kalos teacher called the types givers and takers… not a moral judgement. It’s pretty easy to see why. People pleasers give in order to earn the love they believe they don’t deserve, and perfectionists take in order to gather more proof of their value. But these coping mechanisms can never overcome the original false belief.

Despite the oft-quoted religious maxim that it is better to give than to receive, we really can’t have one without the other. We need people who look out for the needs of others and we need people who are driven to prove themselves as scientists, performers, and engineers. The problems come when these tendencies are taken to the extreme.

We can see extreme expressions on both ends of the political spectrum today: on one side, politicians pursuing ever-greater wealth, fame, power, and status as though these might fill an inner sense of inadequacy; on the other end of the spectrum, rigid forms of identity politics and political correctness seeking to repair a world experienced as excluding or unloving.

Different coping mechanisms, different bumper stickers—but underneath, it’s the same very human conclusion: There’s something wrong with me.

The gift of understanding

I don’t know about you, but looking at things this way helps me understand why people do what they do (including myself)—and makes it easier to have compassion for choices I might otherwise find alarming.

Not that I still don’t find the ongoing destruction of our environment and mounting load of toxic chemicals alarming, but it helps me understand how someone extremely invested in their “not good enough” belief could prioritize sacrificing the planet for money, or feel the need to plaster their name in gold wherever possible—or how an extremely invested “not lovable” type could become a wishy-washy politician trying to please everyone to the point of pleasing nobody… with both directions leaving us stuck in the middle in a collective downward spiral.

The tricky part is that our core beliefs are usually invisible to us, because they feel like facts—and we keep proving them to ourselves over and over throughout our lives:

I didn’t get that promotion because I’m not good enough. I try to look perfect on the outside, so nobody will see that I don’t really live up to their expectations, but there’s always more work to do. I failed a test. I broke a fingernail. There’s a scuff on my shoe. My lawn has brown spots. It all adds up to the same conclusion.

Or, on the other side of the spectrum—my wife left me because I’m not lovable. No matter how much I try to help, my boss never seems to appreciate me. My kid didn’t call me back. I didn’t get a birthday card from Aunt Matilda. My dog won’t come when I call it. Someone looked at me funny. It’s all because nobody loves me.

None of those examples really prove anything, but we interpret them according to our underlying false belief, and use them to reinforce it. We usually don’t realize how we are reinforcing our false core belief, though anyone outside of ourselves could probably point it out after knowing us for a few days, or even a few hours.

So, assuming this theory is correct, and based on my years of energy healing work I’ve concluded it has some validity, how can we use it to heal?

That’s what Kalos was all about and I found it very useful for a while. Then, a few years later, I got certified in Matrix Reimprinting, which was a lot less complicated and faster to implement—no need for muscle testing.

Matrix uses EFT (Tapping) in combination with recreating, or re-imprinting past recollections that led to false conclusions. And of course, that can be applied to the recollections that created or reinforced the core limiting belief, even if they are not consciously remembered. You can start with a more recent experience that has re-triggered and reinforced the original belief and work your way back.

What’s love got to do with it?

Perhaps the most important thing I learned from my Kalos training was the idea that everything people do is motivated by the need to give or receive love… which may sound ridiculous until you actually delve into the deeper motivations behind their surface behavior.

This is the key to understanding how we misinterpreted events that led to forming our own core limiting belief in the first place—and how we might learn to understand things in a more constructive way.

Surely, you may be thinking, the business tycoon accumulating billions of dollars, the feminist screaming at a political rally, and the mom baking cookies for the entire neighborhood cannot possibly be doing the same thing.

Or could they?

Maybe that guy ranting about libertards on talk radio and the environmental activist with seventeen hashtags are, deep down, doing the same panicked thing a toddler does when reaching for a parent’s leg.

Both sides are trying to resolve the same ancient human angst: How do I know that I am safe, valued, worthy, connected, and loved?

Questions like that probably can’t be resolved in one sitting. We might have to start by recognizing the scared kid inside the bombastic old guy at the hardware store, or in the woman driving the car with twenty bumper stickers on the back.

We might have to give some attention to our own inner child and clear out misunderstandings that led to feeling unlovable or unworthy, from way back in our early childhood.

Because the truth is so much better.

We are all lovable and deserving of love. We are all good enough… more than just good enough, perfect just the way we are. And we can all have everything we need when we stop grasping for it.

That’s what we realize once we’ve peeled back the false beliefs and discovered the underlying truth that we’ve always been loved and we’ve always been enough. We just forgot for a while.

We don’t need other people to agree with us. We just have to stop looking for other people to reassure us that the limiting story we’ve constructed about ourselves is a lie.

Most of us need a little help getting there. And few of us get there in a day. But the path is laid out for us. We just have to take the steps.

Imagine what might happen if enough people no longer needed to prove their value—to themselves, to each other, or to the world.

Might need to fill up the bathtub again to get into that one.

---

About the healing modalities: In short, Kalos helps us reinterpret the false conclusions we drew from past experiences, while Matrix helps us reimagine the experiences themselves and implant them as new memories. Different routes, similar destination: freedom from limiting beliefs.
I use both approaches where appropriate.

Learn more about Matrix Reimprinting

If you’re interested in learning more about Kalos, check out Moreton’s book, Heal the Cause! (1996)