Can beliefs harm someone?

[elder lake]

An example:
Your partner tells you that they believe you'd cheat on them if you could while you feel like you'd never do such a thing.

If that happened to me, I'd feel like I was harmed but I'm not sure why. It made me ask some questions like:
Is it their belief, the way they act based on the belief or something else entirely?
What might make a belief or actions based on a belief bad or harmful?
And if them believing in something like that is bad or harmful, why?
If it seems true to them, then would they really even have a choice in believing it?
If in the example they had never told you they believed this, would them having this belief still harm you?

How would you go about this problem?

Also, this thread is inspired by the one Pete made on speech and harm.

[pastel beacon]

This is an interesting one, thanks for posting~
I'm going to take this from a psychological perspective.

Your partner tells you that they believe you'd cheat on them if you could

On a side note, in my experience this is a relatively common cognitive distortion among couples. It certainly touches on the topic of trust and values.

If that happened to me, I'd feel like I was harmed but I'm not sure why.

This can go from a couple of angles. First, it seems to be that the initial belief suggests "Partner A" (the belief holder) distrusts "Partner B" (the other one lol). From that angle, it would make sense to me that if Partner B trusts Partner A, they would feel upset that this is not reciprocal. Second, it could be that Partner A is attempting to normalize cheating, which is against Partner B's values and thus creating negative feelings. There's likely more angles, but I'll stop there for now.

What might make a belief or actions based on a belief bad or harmful?

Heavily depends on the context, I would say. I find that generally speaking making critical assumptions/beliefs about the other in your romantic/intimate relationship as harm-inducing.

And if them believing in something like that is bad or harmful, why?

I'd go back to it undermining trust and potentially challenging an important/non-negotiable value.

If it seems true to them, then would they really even have a choice in believing it?

Yes. In my view, all beliefs can be changed, if one is willing and open-minded enough. I think holding too hard to a single belief can be detrimental to one's overall mental health.. though I suppose it really does depend on the belief.

[lime ore]

Yes, of course they can. Anything that can affect someone else can potentially affect them negatively, and we can definitely get affected by the beliefs of those around us. If we couldn't, then for example we wouldn't feel uncomfortable around people from wildly different cultures, or who have wildly different beliefs about things we consider important.

Why is belief potentially harmful? It depends on the belief, and the situation. But for example it can cause loss of confidence, uncertainty, fear, trust, all of which can be harmful at times.
Do people have a choice in what they believe in? Only in fairly small ways. Nobody fully controls the information they receive at any point, and during the most influential period of your life when it comes to establishing values and fundamental building blocks of the way you think, our early childhood, we have almost zero ability to affect what we experience.

[elder lake]

I appreciate the perspectives and I wasn't going to reply until tomorrow and it didn't occur to me, but I feel like I should have also asked something about whether the someone having a belief would harm me even if I didn't know about it. Like, if I found out someone's beliefs later, I feel like I would have still been harmed despite not originally knowing. I might actually edit the message and add that in there.

[lime ore]

That question entered my mind as well, while considering this topic. The answer I have come to, is that yes it can, because belief also leads to actions, and anything that leads to harm being caused can be said to be harmful.

Harm can cascade down through various actions that each cause something else, before causing harm to a person. If you roll a big rock off the top of a mountain, it doesn't mean it's not a harmful action just because it doesn't hit anything important in the first 10 metres.

There would still need to be some series of interactions that led from the person with the belief to you, though. Some way for you to be affected in some negative way that can be traced back to being caused by a person believing that thing. The simplest way if for them to tell you about it. They could also indicate it to you through their actions. Or their actions that come as a result of their beliefs might harm you in other ways, for example a belief in a divine mission to 'cleanse the infidels' might cause a person to kill someone else, even though that other person didn't know about the belief. In that case, that belief would certainly be harmful, because it caused harm to be suffered.

[pastel beacon]

Reminds me of the ol' proverb "what you don't know can't hurt you".

A situation came up recently in which a person presented to a therapist and stated that they had been happily married for some long amount of time, 40 years or whatever. However, they had just found out that their husband had a 40 year old child in another country (the timeline of when the child came to be is murky, but the husband claimed it was after they got married). The wife was extremely distraught, and basically presented to the therapist wanting support to file a divorce.

In that situation, the husband held the belief that the wife should not know he had a son, which ultimately caused a lot of harm to her and their relationship as a whole. However, the wife not knowing that belief had previously resulted in a happy marriage.

This is just one example, and I think it can easily go the other way as Arklar pointed out.