Sonia Samtani on Why the Beliefs Holding You Back Aren't Even Yours

A few years ago I walked into Sonia Samtani's All About you Wellness Centre in Sheung Wan with a specific problem. I would stand in front of a room to speak and my mind would go completely blank. Not nervous-blank. Gone-blank. Twenty years of working on myself, and standing at a podium still scrambled me. She identified it quickly: this wasn't my body fleeing the room. This was fight-or-flight at the level of the mind.

I sat back down with her recently, this time to talk about what sits underneath all of the presenting problems I see in my practice. Beliefs. Not thoughts, not habits, not coping strategies. Beliefs. Because everything that shows up on the surface traces back there eventually.

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Beliefs are the crux of what I do. Because beliefs influence behaviour.

Sonia Samtani, Clinical Hypnotherapist

Watch Video26:51

The Four That Run Everything

Sonia named four core limiting beliefs that she says sit underneath virtually every problem she works with.

I'm not safe. I don't belong. I'm not enough. I'm not loved.

Those four. Everything else is an expression of one or more of them. Fear of flying. Social anxiety. The public speaking terror I walked into her office with. The woman who hasn't stated a preference in her marriage in six years because she long ago concluded that making herself small was the price of being kept. The man who turns down help on every project because his nervous system equates asking with proof he can't cut it. Four roots, hundreds of presenting problems.

The mechanism is direct: beliefs shape behaviour. When your body locks up at a podium or your mind whites out before a presentation, the nervous system isn't malfunctioning. It's executing a belief: I'm not safe here, and if I'm rejected I'll be alone, and if I'm alone I won't survive. That logic was written early, before you had the language to question it.

The reason public speaking ranks ahead of death in most fear surveys is that Sonia's explanation is exactly right. It isn't about speaking. It's about the group. In ancestral terms, being rejected by the community was a death sentence. The mind doesn't know you're presenting a budget in a boardroom in Central. It reads the audience as a tribe and runs the same cascade it did when getting it wrong meant the predator found you alone.

Rigid Beliefs Break Where Flexible Ideas Bend

Sonia makes a distinction I've used in my own practice: beliefs aren't the same as ideas.

An idea is flexible. You can hold it up, look at it from a different angle, update it when new information arrives. A belief has fused with your identity. Attack the idea and you're just updating your model. Attack the belief and you're attacking the person.

This rigidity is what makes them dangerous. Rigid systems break where flexible ones bend. Most of the limiting beliefs driving anxiety, imposter syndrome, and the particular kind of self-sabotage I see in high-performing Hong Kong men were formed in childhood. Not as an idea but as emergency responses. Something happened that felt unmanageable, and the mind snapped shut into a conclusion. I will never trust again. I don't deserve good things. I have to do this alone.

The conclusion protected you once. It probably doesn't now. But the part of you that formed it doesn't know that, and trying to logic your way out rarely works because the belief isn't stored in the part of the brain that processes logic. You can know you're competent and still freeze at a podium. The knowing and the believing aren't in the same room.

That gap is worth sitting with. I wrote about the difference between beliefs and ideas in more depth here.

The Beliefs You Were Given Without Consent

Most of what you believe about yourself and your world, you were handed without being asked.

Sonia's example stays with me: a client in Hong Kong who couldn't walk through the open atrium at Pacific Place without going rigid. Trace it back and you get to a grandmother who lived through wartime conditions where open space really did mean exposure and death. That belief was real and necessary for her. It passed down, consciously or otherwise. The grandchild is living in 2026 with a shopping mall phobia rooted in a war that ended before they were born.

This is the mechanism of intergenerational transmission. Not metaphor. This is how nervous systems actually work.

The gender versions are what Sonia sees most in her practice and I see most in mine. Women arrive carrying the belief that to be lovable, to be a good enough woman, they need to be adjustable, accommodating, uncomplaining, easy. They've spent years caretaking everyone else's comfort while treating their own preferences as optional. The result is a kind of invisibility they didn't choose. Sonia describes her own version of this: at a restaurant as a younger woman, she would say "whatever you want to eat" without even registering she had a preference. Good girl. No bother. Completely invisible to herself.

Men carry the inverse. The inherited belief is independence so complete it becomes isolation. I have to do everything on my own. I can't ask for help. Even when I do ask, I still have to depend on me because no one else will come through. I recognise that one personally.

Sonia's observation about what happens in relationships when both patterns meet is accurate and not comfortable: one person pursues connection, the other shuts down; the more she pursues, the further he goes in; neither of them is wrong, they're both running old programming in a new context. It doesn't end well.

How to Actually Start Shifting This

Sonia's clinical process runs through two phases: catharsis first, then reframing.

Catharsis is releasing the unprocessed emotion that has been stored in the nervous system since the belief formed. Not talking about it conceptually. Actually feeling the sadness or anger attached to it and letting that move through the body. Once that charge starts to clear, the belief can be looked at differently. Reframing follows: return to the same memory or conclusion with the emotional pressure reduced, and offer the part of you that created it something it may never have received. Understanding. Compassion. A reason the belief formed that doesn't require self-judgment.

Her three practical steps:

Step 1. Write down the limiting beliefs that are keeping you stuck. Not typed. Written, by hand, with a pen. There's something about externalising what lives only in your head that changes your relationship to it.

Step 2. Write down what you'd like to believe instead. "I'd like to believe I'm safe. I'd like to believe I can handle what comes my way." The gap between the two columns is the map.

Step 3. Without judging it, look at the part of you holding the old belief. That part doesn't need to be fixed or shamed. It was formed when you didn't know any better, or when someone you trusted installed it in you. Sonia's actual words for this step: "I see you. I acknowledge you. I'm so sorry you felt that way. You're safe now."

If you get a flash of where the belief came from, that's the inner child underneath it. Say to that part what Sonia says all four of those core beliefs ultimately ask for: "you're safe, you're loved, you're enough, you belong."

For the new beliefs you want to cultivate, say them before you sleep. Sonia's reasoning is precise: just before sleep the brain shifts from beta into alpha and theta before dropping into delta. That threshold is as close to a natural hypnotic state as you get without clinical intervention. The subconscious is receptive in a way it isn't during the day. Old neural pathways deactivate, new ones imprint. That's the neuroplasticity angle and it's the same mechanism hypnotherapy works with.

The work isn't fast. Sonia has been doing her own version of it for twenty years. I've been in my own process for roughly as long. The point isn't arrival. The point is that the beliefs running your behaviour are ones you've chosen rather than ones that were installed before you knew what was happening.

Sonia Samtani is a clinical hypnotherapist and the founder of All About You Center in Sheung Wan. She can be reached at www.allaboutyoucentre.com and soniasamtani.com. The full conversation is in the video at the top of this post.

If what Sonia describes sounds familiar and you want to look at what's underneath the patterns you keep repeating, book a session with me.

Two related reads: nothing is wrong with you and Ask an Expert with Valentina Tudose on identity and relationships.