Your System Isn't Broken. It's Running Old Code - How childhood installs beliefs you never agreed to and how to rewrite them.

There's a part of your brain called the Reticular Activating System - the RAS. Think of it as your internal filter. It decides what gets your attention and what gets ignored. Your RAS doesn't just filter what you notice now, it was shaped by what you absorbed as a child. And most of that absorption happened without your knowledge or consent.

You weren't sitting in a classroom learning "beliefs about money" or "beliefs about love." You were just... there. In the kitchen while your parents argued about bills. In the back seat while your mom said "your father never helps with anything." At the dinner table where the tension was so thick you learned to shrink yourself just to get through the meal.

You were a small human with a wide-open nervous system, and everything was going in.

The installs you didn't choose

A child doesn't hear "we can't afford that" and think "ah, interesting - my parents are experiencing a temporary cashflow issue." A child hears "we can't afford that" and stores it as: money is scary. Money runs out. Wanting things is dangerous.

Twenty years later, that same child is now an adult who earns well but can't hold onto money. Or who chronically undercharges. Or who feels a wave of guilt every time they buy something for themselves. And they think it's a personality flaw. It's not. It's an old install still running in the background.

Here are some of the ones I see in my sessions:

"Men don't show up" - Maybe it was something your mum said under her breath. Maybe it was just what you watched — her doing everything while he checked out. Nobody sat you down and taught you that men are unreliable. But your RAS filed it anyway. Now you're an adult who either picks partners who confirm the pattern or pushes away the ones who actually try. You test people before you trust them. You keep score without realising it. And somewhere underneath all of it, the belief is still running: don't rely on anyone. They'll let you down.

"Love means conflict" - You grew up in a house where arguing was the baseline. Doors slamming, voices raised, then someone making tea and carrying on like nothing happened. Your nervous system mapped that as normal. So now, when a relationship is calm and stable, something in you gets suspicious. You might even start arguments without knowing why, because your system equates friction with connection. No friction? Must mean no love.

"You're lazy" - A teacher said it once. Maybe twice. Maybe it was a parent. Doesn't matter. Your RAS filed it and your system has been referencing that file ever since. Now you're 35, running a business, doing more than most people around you, and you still feel like you're not doing enough. Still hearing that voice. Still trying to outrun a label someone stuck on you before you were old enough to challenge it.

So how do we debug this?

This is what my sessions are actually about. Not mindset hacks. Not affirmations on a mirror. We go looking for the original install, the moment or pattern that wrote the code, and we bring it into conscious awareness.

Because here's what changes everything: these beliefs only have power while they're invisible. The second you can see the programme running, you get to ask a different question. Not "what's wrong with me?" but "where did this come from, and do I want to keep running it?"

Most of the time, the answer is no. And that's where the rewrite begins.

A debug session with me is direct. We identify the pattern, trace it back to the source, and recode it. Not in six months. Not after twelve sessions of talking about your childhood. In one focused session, we find the line of code and we change it.

You're not broken. You never were. You're just running a system that was programmed before you had any say in it.

And now you do.

Gail Weiner is a Trust Architect and pattern engineer working at the intersection of human behaviour and systems thinking. If you're ready to stop looping and start rewriting, book a debug session at gailweiner.com