The Five Beliefs Behind the Nine Most Common Patterns We See

Written by Victoria Colombato, RTT-trained hypnotherapist and founder of Tabula Rasa Studios

People arrive at any therapy session with a problem that has a name: Anxiety, procrastination, insomnia, binge eating, a fear of being seen. The name is accurate as a description of what is happening and, in my experience of sitting with 67 of these, it is almost never the thing that has to change for the pattern to stop, because that definition is usually a construction of what the person can interpret based on the information they know, and more importantly, it is rooted in the symptom.

In 2024 I registered every intake I have collected over the course of 1 year (67 people) and I started seeing a pattern. These 67 people came in with 67 different problems, that ended up fitting into nine clusters, and those nine clusters run on only 5 core beliefs.

What was analysed, and how?

Sixty-seven intake profiles, collected throughout the course of a year from three sources that ran in sequence as the business developed: 1. Live intake conversations at the start of 1:1 hypnotherapy sessions. 2. Written intake form used to commission personalised audio before Tabula Rasa existed as a product 3. The onboarding questionnaire in the Tabula Rasa app that tailors a session automatically.

Each profile records the same fields in the person's own words: what they came for, what tends to trigger it, what symptoms they experienced, the habits they had, what their main goal was and what life looks like without it. Eighteen presenting categories were offered as prompts, from anxiety and panic to money, sleep, concentration and compulsive behaviour. Most people selected several.

I then analyzed all 67 and grouped them by what was actually driving the request rather than by the label at the top. That grouping is my clinical judgement, not a statistical procedure. One coder, no blinding, no second rater, and everything self-reported. It tells you what a specific 67 people brought to a hypnotherapist throughout the course of the year 2025, which is a smaller and more useful thing than it would be if I dressed it up as research.

Why are anxiety, procrastination and insomnia better read as symptoms?

Because they behave like outputs. They travel together in the same person, they swap places over time, and they respond to the same underlying work despite looking nothing alike from the outside. In this dataset most profiles named more than one presenting problem, and the combinations recurred: anxiety with sleep, procrastination with money, confidence with intimacy.

That clustering is not unique to my intake forms. Following a birth cohort of over 1,000 New Zealanders for two decades, Caspi and colleagues found that psychiatric symptoms were explained better by a single underlying dimension they called the p factor than by the separate categories the symptoms were being sorted into. Their conclusion was that the search for causes and treatments specific to each label had been hampered by the labels themselves.

The everyday version of that finding is what I watch happen in a session. Someone books because they cannot sleep. By the third question we are talking about their father. The insomnia is real, and it is the point where the chain becomes visible rather than the point where it began.

What are the nine patterns?

Nine groupings covered all 67 profiles, and every one of them traces to two or three of the same five beliefs.

Read the left column and the right column together and the shape of the finding is visible. Nine unrelated-looking problems. Five sentences.

Two of those rows need a boundary drawn around them. Compulsive behaviour and disordered eating appear in this data because people brought them to me, and we make no claims about either. UK advertising rules are explicit that addiction and eating disorders should not be presented as treatable outside the supervision of a qualified health professional, and I agree with the reasoning. Our evidence standards set out where we stop.

What are the five beliefs?

Five sentences accounted for every pattern in the set. People phrase them differently and almost never say them in this form out loud until asked directly.

Two of them carry most of the weight. I am not safe and I am not enough each appear in six of the nine patterns, and between them they account for eight of the nine. Money and career is the only grouping where neither is the driver, and there the work sits on deserving instead.

They also travel together. Both appear in motivation, in compulsive behaviour, in visibility and in weight, which are the four patterns people most often bring to me described as a discipline problem. Someone who does not feel safe and does not feel adequate will look, from the outside and often to themselves, exactly like someone who is lazy.

There is a footnote to that finding from a different part of the business. The most-requested track in the Tabula Rasa catalogue is the one called Safety. It was not written to be the flagship and it has no marketing behind it, and people select it anyway, out of a menu where every other option names a more specific outcome.

If “I am not safe” is the one you recognise

Safety is a 15-minute pre-recorded session written on that sentence, and at $8 it is the least expensive thing we make. We put a heart-rate monitor on one tester through a full hour of it. Seated and awake, they averaged 65.5 bpm, which is what their own body did later the same day lying down after lunch. The whole day is plotted here, with the limits of a single measurement set out alongside it.

The other three do real work in the patterns where they appear. What I want is not available to me is the quietest of the five and the hardest to argue with, because it presents itself as realism. Someone convinced they are not enough will usually recognise that thought as a distortion when it is read back to them. Someone convinced that rest, or money, or being loved properly is simply not on the menu for them will nod along and change nothing, because they have filed it as a fact about the world rather than as a belief about themselves.

One note on how this list reached its current form. In an earlier pass I coded not available into seven of the nine patterns. Reading the same profiles again, that over-stated it: in several clusters the sentence was the surface phrasing of something that turned out to be closer to unsafety. Four is the corrected figure, and this piece will carry a note whenever the coding changes again.

Does the research support reading it this way?

Partly, and it is worth being precise about which parts.

The idea that a small number of beliefs about the self sit underneath many different presentations is old and well developed in clinical psychology. In cognitive therapy, negative core beliefs are conventionally sorted into three families concerning helplessness, unlovability and worthlessness. In schema therapy, Jeffrey Young identified 18 early maladaptive schemas, grouped into five domains by the emotional need that went unmet in childhood. His Disconnection and Rejection domain is defined as the expectation that one's needs for affection, safety, empathy, belonging and respect will not be met. Four of my five sentences sit inside that description.

Self-determination theory, developed by Deci and Ryan across four decades of research, arrives from a different direction at a comparable list: competence, relatedness and autonomy as needs whose frustration predicts poorer wellbeing. Not enough is competence frustration wearing everyday clothes. I can't connect is relatedness frustration. And the reason a belief formed early keeps producing the same behaviour is that the brain runs on prediction, continually forecasting your experience from what it already holds on record, which is the account Lisa Feldman Barrett has done most to popularise.

Where my data adds nothing is generalisability. Sixty-seven self-selected people who chose to work with a hypnotherapist are not a population sample. They skew towards those with the money and inclination for private work, and towards people already convinced their problem is internal, which is exactly the belief my method is built around finding. I coded my own data on my own framework, and that is the loudest bias in this piece. What the convergence with schema therapy and self-determination theory offers is not proof, only some reassurance that I did not invent the categories out of nothing.

Why does working on the symptom so often fail to hold?

Because the belief keeps generating the behaviour after the behaviour has been removed. This is the pattern I see most often in people who arrive having already tried a great deal, and the intake data shows it as a trail: someone who has done three diets, two productivity systems, a meditation app and a period of strict sleep hygiene, each of which worked while attention was on it.

Willpower is the conscious mind attempting to overrule a survival system built to outrank it, which is why the override holds until you are tired or under real pressure. Remove smoking from someone running I am not enough and the same relief is sought elsewhere within weeks. Fix the sleep of someone running I am not safe and the vigilance moves into the day. The symptom moves because its cause did not.

This is also why the same person can present differently to different professionals over ten years and be given a different name each time. The names describe the surface accurately. Underneath them, in this set of 67, the same five sentences kept coming back.

How do you find your own?

Write down the sentence you say to yourself in the moment the pattern fires, in your actual vocabulary rather than the tidy version. Then ask what that sentence assumes has to be true about you for it to make sense. The assumption is usually one of the five, and people tend to recognise theirs immediately, which is a useful signal.

Because safety and adequacy account for most of the set, one distinction is worth making early, and the two respond to different work. Safety shows up in the body before it shows up in language: a held breath, a scan of the room, an urge to leave. Adequacy shows up as commentary, a running assessment of whether what you just did was acceptable. If the sentence arrives with a physical signal attached, start with safety. If it arrives as a verdict, start with enough.

Naming it accurately is necessary and, on its own, is not usually enough. Most people who reach me can already describe their pattern in detail and have been describing it that way for years. What changes it is repeated work at the level of the sentence, which is what the TR Method was built to do.

What this analysis does not tell you

It does not tell you that everyone has one of these five beliefs, that a difficult situation is always a belief problem, or that reading this will change anything on its own. Some circumstances are hard for entirely good reasons and require a change of circumstance. Some patterns need a clinician, and if what you recognise here involves risk to you, that takes precedence over anything on this site.

It also does not tell you how long a change lasts without reinforcement. That is the honest gap in our own data and the thing we are working on next.

What Tabula Rasa makes

Tabula Rasa Studios writes personalised hypnotic audio: one session, built around one belief, in the words you used to describe it, listened to daily for 21 days.

Bespoke sessions arrive within three working days of your completed intake form. How it works →

Sources

• Caspi, A., Houts, R. M., Belsky, D. W., et al. (2014). The p Factor: One General Psychopathology Factor in the Structure of Psychiatric Disorders? Clinical Psychological Science, 2(2), 119–137.
• Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema Therapy: A Practitioner's Guide. Guilford Press. Domain summary: Disconnection and Rejection, Psychology Tools.
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness. Guilford Press.
• Beck, J. S. (2020). Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond, 3rd ed. Guilford Press.
• Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Keep reading

• What a Safety session did to one person’s heart rate
• What a limiting belief is
• Self-sabotage and the belief underneath it
• How the TR Method works
• How we handle evidence

Reviewed by [REVIEWER NAME AND CREDENTIAL].

Tabula Rasa supports emotional wellness and personal development. It is not a substitute for medical or psychological care. It does not diagnose or treat mental health conditions, and it is not designed for use in a crisis. For clinical concerns, please consult a licensed professional. Your results depend on your engagement, consistency and intention.