Why We Can't Feel Loved For Who We Are
Hello there.
The human Ego is essentially
the sense of yourself being a separate self.
When you learn to call yourself by your name,
you learn that you are an it, or a thing.
And the minute that you conceptualize of yourself as an it or a thing,
you become different from every other it
and every other thing
in the universe.
When you are born,
you do not have a solid ego yet,
because you do not have this sense of yourself
as a separate self.
As we grow, we begin to identify with things.
Whenever we associate something with ourselves, we identify with it.
It becomes part of us.
We make it the same as us.
This is what attachment really is.
Its identification.
And if that thing we identify with is ever threatened,
we experience it as a threat to our own survival.
If you want to know more about disidentification and identification,
watch my video on YouTube titled:
Disidentification (The Practice of Non-Attachment)
I would love to be able to tell you
that your ego is made up of authentic self initiated associations.
But this isn't the case.
The majority of your ego
is in fact made up
from associations that are initiated by other people.
In other words,
other people become the mirror
through which we learn to identify ourselves
as who we think we are.
This means if someone in your childhood
begins to associate you with artistic ability,
then you begin to perceive yourself as an artist.
You identify with being an artist and that becomes part of your ego.
This means if someone in your childhood
associates you with darkness or badness,
than you begin to perceive yourself in that way.
You identify with being dark or bad
and this becomes part of your own ego.
Part of why identity becomes so confusing for us,
is that so many people associate us,
with different things.
And many of those things contradictory.
As you can probably tell without me spelling it out for you,
it's a real crapshoot whether you're going to end up with somebody
who is going to associate you with things
that are an authentic thing to associate you with,
or whether they are just going to associate you
with whatever they want to associate you with.
Mostly total projections of themselves.
Most people are not conscious.
When you're dealing with a person who is not conscious,
they don't really see children
as authentic expressions
with a unique purpose,
with unique desires.
More so, they think of children, kind of like animated dolls.
Essentially believing the child is whoever they want the child to be.
They associate the child with whatever they decide
they want the child to be associated with.
And if the child ever begins to act in a way
that defies who they want them to be,
they feel personally threatened and begin to associate the child
with negative traits.
Either way the child takes on any associations
that the parent decides to make with that child.
That child's identity and life then become
either nothing but an exact replica of what the parents decided for them,
or a perpetual attempt to try to figure out who they really are,
despite their parents.
We live in an emotional dark age.
People do not know how to emotionally relate
and people have not developed intimacy.
For those of you who don't understand what intimacy is already,
It's essentially being able to see into someone,
feel into someone,
listen to someone
and fully understand them.
It is to get into their internal world.
Now ideally parents would have a high degree
of intimacy with their children.
They would see into their children,
they would feel into their children,
they would listen to them,
they would understand their children.
And so, those parents would be an accurate mirror
of what is authentically part of that child.
For example, when the truth of a child is:
"I really love to dance",
the parent would acknowledge and validate that for the child
and thus strengthen the child's sense of self by doing so.
The association the child forms between himself and dance,
would be authentic,
because it came from the child first,
and was then mirrored by the parent.
Positive mirroring is essentially the process
of reflecting back to somebody,
anything that is true about them,
that they express verbally or non-verbally.
Essentially we want to let them know
that we hear them, see them, feel them and understand them.
Positive mirroring,
is to make their sense of how they're feeling and thinking
and who they are, valid.
An example of positive mirroring
is that a child who's going to a new school feels afraid
and may go silent or start whining or act resistant to everything.
A parent who positively mirrors,
would come down to the child's level,
feel into the child and try to understand the child enough
to figure out what the problem is,
and then mirror their reality by saying something like:
I know that you must feel really afraid about going to a new school,
and because you're afraid you may not want to go to school.
And anyone who's afraid of going to a new school would feel that way.
It's okay to be afraid.
And then potentially the parent could help the child
brainstorm ways to feel better about going to a new school.
But let's face it,
positive mirroring is not exactly a "forte"
in today's day and age,
when it comes to parents and children.
So most likely that's not going to be the reaction.
The most common reaction would be something like:
"What are you crying for? Every kid has to go to school?
You're lucky you even get to go to school,
because there are kids across the world that don't even get that."
~ Laughter ~
Oh my God.
That's an example of a negative mirror.
Not only did it not mirror
what was authentically inside the child,
instead, what it mirrored was
the perception that the parent had of the child,
which is that "you're wrong".
So the child comes to believe
that there's something wrong with the way that they feel.
More than that,
that they have to distrust themselves.
And more than that,
they develop an identity around being wrong or being bad.
This is the beginning of shame.
So this turns into an adult
that not only has a baseline of shame for their personality structure,
this is also an adult that cannot self reference.
The parent has taught them they can't trust the way they feel,
they can't trust their own sense of reality,
and so they have to outsource their reality to other people.
Obviously, if you begin to develop awareness enough
to figure out who you really are,
in other words, what you really associate with,
that's going to fly directly in the face
of who your parents think you are
or wanted you to be
(what they associate you with).
As a result,
they're going to reject you.
They reject you because they reject what you're associated with,
which is the very thing you're identified with.
and like I said, when you're identified,
any rejection of something you're identified with,
comes across as a personal rejection.
As a result, you cannot feel loved by them.
For example if a boy grows up to realize that he's gay
and the parents do not want him to be gay,
they will reject gayness and therefore reject their son,
because their son is identified with being gay.
So we can say that the son cannot be loved for who he is.
Because the people who do not love him for who he is,
are his parents,
he will develop a belief that no one
can love him for who he is.
Essentially, with most parents,
the child has to develop attributes
that the parent will positively mirror,
in order to get any love.
So their identity is a perfect reflection
of their parents agenda.
So, if you're interested in figuring out how to develop intimacy
and how to positively mirror,
I suggest you watch two of my youtube videos.
The first is:
The Emotional Wakeup Call
and the second is:
How to Connect With Someone
But what if I told you
that the reason that we can't feel loved for who we are,
actually goes even deeper than that?
We don't live in a world where most people understand
that they can have intimacy
with their child.
As a result, the child is not actually acknowledge
for being any certain way.
They are only acknowledged when they are doing something.
Especially, when they are doing something
that benefits the parent.
A parent and child normally cannot be together,
they have to be doing something together.
And then the mirroring in that scenario
or when a child is acknowledged,
is when they are doing that thing.
So here's an example
let's say that you're playing a game of catch,
and the child throws a ball,
the parent goes:
"Wow. That was amazing that you threw that ball."
The child now starts to identify
with the action, the doing,
which is throwing the ball.
So I'm going to sum this up in a lovely little nutshell.
It's basically me answering your question
to why we can't feel loved for who we are, in one paragraph:
Because most parents only mirror a child when they are doing something
and thus only associate a child with what they do,
we only associate ourselves with what we do.
Our entire identity becomes about what we do.
That becomes a sense of who we are.
As a result,
it isn't even that we believe we are what we do,
it is that we don't feel like we exist
separate from what we do.
In an extreme case,
something like extreme childhood neglect,
what we see is that when a child gets no mirroring,
they have no sense of self.
Now, that's an extreme example.
However, if a child grows up under a parent
who does not acknowledge them for anything other than what they do,
This child has no sense of self,
no sense of identity,
separate from what they do.
They've had no mirroring.
Obviously, we can't be loved for who we are,
instead of what we do,
if who we are does not exist.
How can you love something that doesn't exist?
If we...
Now, try this for yourself right now,
just to see whether you've got this kind of mirroring in childhood.
And it's pretty easy, just think of who you are,
separate of what you do.
Most of you are going to identify yourself
by virtue of what?
"I am a spiritual teacher",
that's a doing, right?
~ Laughter ~
So what happens if you've been raised in an environment
where all that's mirrored is what you do,
is that when you try to think about who you are separate of what you do,
you draw a big blank space.
It's kind of like ----
This is the real reason we can't feel loved for who we are.
Because who we are does not even exist.
Because we have an identity only by virtue of what we do.
So now you know why it is
that you can't feel loved for who you are.
Plain and simply, it's because your entire identity,
that which we call the ego,
is formed completely
out of the things
that made you exist for your parents.
Have a good week.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com