April 2019 – Tool of the Month – The Desert Island Test

The “Tool of the Month” for April is a simple test for a complex problem: is the belief that we hold as ours, actually ours, or is it being held because we either inherited it, or had to believe it for safety reasons? The answer is a very important one, because if a belief is congruent with who we actually are, if it truly is our belief, then it doesn’t cause friction. But if it is incongruent, then the friction between our self and our received belief cause stress, at some level, even though initially we may not be aware of that stress. So the Desert Island Test is a little thought experiment to help discriminate which belief belongs to whom.

The Desert Island Test:  A tool for telling whose belief you’re holding

We are not simple creatures. If we were, psychotherapists would not exist, as there would be no complexity to unpack, and no intricate self to get to know. What we would say would simply be what there was. As much as one might long for that, it’s not the case, making our self-assessments of our own beliefs open for questioning.

For example, when I say, “I believe I am responsible for others not feeling scared,” on the surface we might think, “Well, sure enough, that’s reasonable.” But when we start questioning it, we get into a lot of particulars—Can you make a mugger scared? Can you scare someone at a horror movie, for shared fun? Can someone be scared and it be useful for them?—as well as a central question about where that belief came from. I.e., is it a belief that I arrived at through my own process of inquiry? Or is it a belief I inherited from my family or my culture? Or is it a belief I had to learn in order to feel safe as a child (say, with a father who, when scared, became angry)?

This is a very important discrimination; whether a belief is “ours” is core to what it means to be oneself, or whether it belongs to “them,” and therefore is at some divergence from who we are. The more of the former, then the less toxicity to our self—our belief is congruent with who we are, rather than being false to our self, and therefore acting as an abrasive, or suppressant. Which, while probably helpful in some survival context, will be deleterious to our growth as a person.

So a quick tool one can use to start to discriminate whether a belief we hold is actually ours or not is the Desert Island Test. Pick a belief, and then imagine you are on a desert island, but a nice one, not one that puts a lot of survival stress on you. There’s abundant food and shelter, and no smoke monsters in the forest, but no people. You’re alone there. The point is to strip away the life elements that relate to both survival and society.

Then really imagine yourself there, as you state your belief to yourself and see what is the internal response. Does it still ring true? Does your body wince, or tighten, or relax? Does your mind think, “Well, in that case, that’s a silly belief,” or something similar? Or, does the response internally come back as, “People don’t matter—this is a core belief of mine that exists in a city and an island equally”?

It doesn’t matter if your belief lines up exactly with social norms, but rather that, extracted from society, it still feels like yours. Again, the importance of this is that holding beliefs which are not actually “of the substance” of who you are is a bit like wearing clothes saturated with beach sand. They may not cause your demise, but they are sure unpleasant, and take a lot of attention away from just the growth and enjoyment of life.