Hello Friends!
Alright, if you haven't done so already, please go check out:
Of this series of posts.
Today we are going to dive into how to move BEYOND the false, approval based self, so that you can figure out who you REALLY are and what REALLY serves you.
You're worthy of a real life, not based on being 'good enough' by the standards of society, but based on what actually works for YOU as an individual.
Let's dive in.
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Real Reality:
In real reality, freedom is found in learning how REALITY works, how we work and fit within it. We have to drop the core program that when we are finally GOOD ENOUGH - we will finally be FREE.
Free to live in this imperfect, often unknown to us reality where external stability will never exist. We will be free to stop seeking that safe haven we wanted in childhood and realize that there will always be pain in our reality sometimes, and that this isn't a sign of things going WRONG or something we're TRAPPED in. It's something we can learn from and that we can develop actual agency within! We will be free to work towards meeting our needs the best we can within the reality that actually exists - the messy, complex and ever shifting reality that we CAN learn to navigate.
Free to express and become our true selves even in the face of opposition and antagonism.
We will be able to realize that now, the freedom we seek can only come from the inside. Us approving of ourselves, then learning how to provide for ourselves even when others can’t/don’t. Learning that self expression is the key and that shutting that down for approval is akin to a slow, painful death. We will still work WITH others - as we are interdependent - but we are not dependent on any one person or group. We will work to change societal systems that don't work for us. We will problem solve the natural challenges we face and develop technologies and other ways of being that allow us to thrive WITHIN what exists. We will be COMPLEX in our problem solving capacity - more able to understand what we need, what hurts, what needs to shift when we're in pain and we will have the tools to figure out HOW to make those shifts. It's not about becoming totally INDEPENDENT or asking ourselves to just adapt to what is - it's learning how to work where necessary and where we have to work alone in order to create systems that WORK. We will find our strength. We will find our capacity. We will find new groups that DO accept us for who we are. We will find a new community. We will be able to be truly ourselves within our social structures. We can be rejected and find something else.
THIS is actual liberation.
I can be me, I can figure it out, I can navigate this life as those around me remain ever unstable and unpredictable. I can figure it out.
THIS is liberation.
We work through all the stories we had to come up with in childhood to explain our caregivers behaviors so that we can separate what actually does need to change in our way of being in order to get the results we want, and what is just reality working how it does.
Shame And Guilt Need To Be Unlearned:
Remember, in our childhood experience, we developed ever more complex stories around WHY we have to be a certain way, why our caregivers/society are/is right, why we are being rejected and denied love - and these stories form the basis of our guilt and shame.
We had to come up with GOOD REASONS for why *we* are not right, and the world around us is right, in order to MOTIVATE ourselves to do what wouldn’t have felt good to us authentically or to not do what did feel good - in order that we fit in. This was also how we made ourselves feel SAFE. Because if our caregivers were wrong, if their rules and expectations weren't correct - this would make us, their dependents, totally vulnerable. We needed to believe that what they were teaching us was right, that their reasons for rejecting us were sound, because this meant that we were safe with them. If we realized that we were actually good, that our behavior was ok, that they didn't know what they were doing - this wouldn't have been liberating at the time. This would have been deeply threatening, because we couldn't go off on our own, provide for ourselves, be safe without them. We needed to believe WE were wrong, in order to stabilize and give ourselves hope of one day feeling good/getting what we needed. If they were wrong, the only option then was us not being safe.
Again our bodies perceived that fitting in = survival - so any part of self that wanted to go outside of our conditioning was a threat to us. We had to come up with stories to justify shutting our true nature down - because again this would NOT have felt good. These guilt and shame stories serve to ‘keep us in line’ - they keep us from doing what is natural (and thus would feel good to us) but gets us rejected (and is thus and existential threat) and keeps us doing things that aren’t natural to us (feel terrible) but get us love and approval (and thus feel like safety).
Our pain and pleasure signals get crossed - and for some of us this is where we lose touch with our true selves, our capacity to feel, our sense of joy and purpose. We lose our capacity to emotionally express and process. We lose our sense of right and wrong. We can’t tell why life feels so bad when we seem to be doing what’s ‘right.’ We can’t tell why we cope, numb and have addictions because our truth is so buried we don’t even know what we’re denying anymore. We don’t have an awareness of what we TRULY feel and TRULY think and are just consciously doing what the world around us tells us to do. We generally don’t even KNOW what we want/think/feel because we HAD to detach from these things in order to learn the ropes of culture.
This is where we take on the identity that is expected of us and spiral into people pleasing, depression, constant anxiety, coping, numbing, self-sabotage and a whole host of addictive and seemingly abusive behaviors. We’re trying to be who we were trained to be, and the farther this is from who we actually ARE - the more pain we’re going to be in - the more we have to suppress, the more we have to cope, numb, stimulate and distract. The more we will be disconnected from our bodies and capacity to feel. The more we lose the ability to discern right from wrong in REAL reality, because we lose touch with the parts of self that help us to do that. We become more and more singularly focused on being what’s approved of, and this comes at the cost of our humanity. We lose the ability to use our emotional and physical guidance system, because we are SO caught in trying to please.
Again, because even into our adulthood we don’t really SEE that we can be disapproved of and still get our needs met on our own. We don’t see that we can get GOOD results even when we’re rejected. We don’t see that there are OTHER people beyond those with our same conditioning who may feel totally differently about what’s right and wrong. We don’t realize that there are people out there who WILL like us for who we really are. We only see our conditioning. Our minds filter out others as irrelevant or even evil/wrong/bad when they don’t have our same core values. We see the world as a place where we HAVE to be what we were conditioned to be, and we truly FEEL like if we aren’t, we will be doomed in some way.
On top of all of this, we aren’t seeing that our minds are also doing an amazing job at filtering out any information, point of view, way of life or other possibility that contradicts our conditioning.
We don’t see that our minds WANT to solidify the world view we were raised in, because no matter how painful or out of alignment with real reality it may be, it’s our source of SAFETY/PROVISION. It’s our foundation for how we make sense of the world and ourselves. It provides us with the groundwork for making all the choices we have to make in this life, for feeling that sense of knowing what we’re supposed to/not supposed to be doing - again no matter how painful or hard this is.
We were taught to demonize any alternative viewpoint because that muddies the waters.
We will have a natural impulse to reject anything that counters our current worldview, because this causes us to feel less stable in our foundations. Alternative views cloud our capacity to feel like we can make meaning out of what’s happening to us. It removes the security that we know what we’re supposed to be doing, how we’re supposed to be living, what the ‘rules’ are, and therefore know how to get our needs met and how to achieve happiness even if it’s seemingly elusive right now - and this is something we DON’T want.
We want to believe we know what’s right, what the rules are, as this gives us the hope that if we follow those rules perfectly, one day we will finally be approved of, and again, will then get that safety.
We are all living like our conditioning is FACT because this gives us the sense of hope that security is attainable. We all believe in our conditioning. Most of us don’t even see that we are conditioned - we just see that how we see the world - the things we accept and reject, the things we think are truth vs. lies, the things we think are worthy and those that aren’t - as obvious FACTS. We’ve been seeing anyone who lives in a different way as ‘other’ and ‘wrong’ for our entire lives. Our minds/social structures have made sure of it.
Again this is because we have that base program that LOVE = SAFETY.
We all LONG for that safety, which will then lead to us being able to get our needs met and express on our growth path. That’s the safety we crave - the safety that creates the container for self actualization. We’re all trying to achieve security. That’s what we want. And due to our conditioning, we believe it’s going to come from being loved perfectly. We believe that this perfect love is attainable through following the ‘rules’ properly. We’ve been solidifying this point of view ever since we were children who started to develop storytelling and pattern recognition capacity. Every time we were rejected/not cared for, we looked for what WE DID that caused it. When we were provided for and loved, again we looked for what WE DID to cause it. We’ve been unconsciously reinforcing these two ideas - love = safety and our behavior = our outcomes since we could tell stories. So anything that contradicts our conditioning is something we reject - because that would mess with our feeling of security. That would mess with our capacity to feel like we have the answers to our problems, we just need to figure out how to get ourselves to DO the answer.
This Is Why We Chase The Ever Elusive 'Ideal Self'
This is why we all chase that ‘ideal self’, never seemingly able to arrive, and always feeling that it’s because of some flaw in ‘US’ that we can’t feel safe/be successful.
This is why we all blame ourselves so much.
This is also why we don’t see that there are a million ways to live, and that there may even be ways of being that would serve us BETTER than the ones we were raised in - because that would require that we question our whole foundation.
That would require that we question the very rules we’ve been building our whole lives around. That would require questioning the people we were DEPENDENT upon for everything. This is another part of the reason we all buy our conditioning so much that we would rather hate ourselves for our entire lives, work to try to change who we are, work to try to fit in, why we beat ourselves up and continually shame and berate ourselves - because the other option is to realize that our caregivers were WRONG. That those who held our lives in their hands didn’t know what they were doing. We have to let go of believing our pain is always rooted in a moral failing of ours, in others disapproval, in our lack of capacity to measure up - and see that this is the carrot on the stick we'll never get a bite of. Because this isn't why we're hurting.
No matter how socially accepted we become, we will never, ever be safe enough to self actualize. Which is what we want. The more we have to contort ourselves to fit in, the more we're going to suffer and think we need to change ourselves. you get this now.
Fitting into culture/conditioning isn't the answer. Fixing ourselves isn't the answer. Perfect love and approval isn't the answer. Your caregivers didn't have the right answers. Culture doesn't have the right answers. Pain will always be a part of this reality. There is no true security in the outside world. We are going to have to learn to problem solve and in order to do that we have to have access to our bodies and emotions, and the ability to see where our conditioning isn't giving us the results we want and the capacity to change and figure things out for ourselves.
THAT is the devastating news.
This means again, questioning what we were taught as a foundational understanding of how to live a good life. How to achieve happiness itself.
It can’t be overstated how devastating this questioning work will be when we start to do it.
Our bodies are going to feel so, so deeply vulnerable and scared. Even if we are adults who don’t have anything to do with our caregivers anymore, those patterns of our dependency on them and the TRAUMA that was created by having to reject ourselves to be what they wanted us to be is deep. It’s present.
When we start to really question our conditioning, it’s going to feel like every ounce of security we thought we had melts away.
We’re going to connect with the deeply vulnerable aspects of ourselves that were being cared for by people who didn’t know what they were doing. We would rather blame ourselves for our entire lives, than have to go through the deeply disturbing process of realizing we WEREN’T safe with our caregivers (no matter how much they loved us) and that no matter how well we live up to our conditioning, it’s never going to work to make us happy and safe. We are going to have to figure things out on our own, and most of us don’t FEEL like we can do that. We resist this ego death at all costs, because it’s going to plunge us into the darkest, most painful kind of existential dread/feeling of vulnerability possible. Those we depended upon didn’t know everything. Weren’t right. Accepting that we don’t have to hate ourselves or reject who we really are to fit the conditioning we were given may feel good for a moment, but that then opens a whole can of worms where we have to grieve the very real pain of having been unsupported and unsafe growing up. Where we have to grieve the fact that we are now adults and don’t know what’s right and wrong, what reality is, or how to find the happiness we seek.
This is a BIG deal, and that inner child is going to come up and we are going to FEEL like we are back in our childhoods. This is scary. It’s big to fully admit to the self that our conditioning was wrong and that our caregivers had it wrong. It’s the existential crisis of a lifetime.
This work requires allowing ourselves to be rejected by those in our current model of conditioning, and that’s going to feel like death. It requires rejecting what we were taught, and that’s going to feel like death. It requires realizing those we were dependent upon for everything didn’t know what they were doing and that’s going to feel like death. It’s going to require connecting with our bodies and emotions that have stored all that trauma, and having to process it a little before we are going to be able to start figuring out what IS true and what IS right.
We aren’t going to jump from realizing our conditioning is wrong to seeing the truth. We are going to have to wade through the murky waters of our traumatized brains and bodies first.
And that is HARD. We have to let go of what we thought was right, and start embracing all the parts of self we’ve been fighting with our entire lives. That’s going to feel like we have no idea what the other options are. That’s going to feel like we’re allowing ourselves to become EVIL - that we will fully ruin our lives. No matter how painful it is to try to conform to what we were raised in, the alternative of actually questioning it and seeking out alternative ways of life, will at first, feel even worse. But generally, we won’t even see this as an option because our minds will be protecting us from the complexity of life through simply filtering all other ways of life out. We won’t even be able to conceptualize or recognize other options. It will feel like what we know is all there is, and if there is something else, it’s terrible and unsafe.
We are trapped in our perception and don’t even know it.
We Are Trapped In A Life We Don't See That We're Trapped In:
With this, we won’t even SEE that we are trying to live as something we aren’t. We will usually have bought our conditioning so solidly, that any option of NOT being what is expected of us, will have been ingrained in us as being EVIL. Wrong. Bad. Shameful. Our bodies and minds will REBEL STRONGLY from any attempt at straying from our conditioning, because again, to our BODIES, to our NERVOUS SYSTEMS this will be like committing suicide. Our adult brains and bodies won’t realize we’re living for someone and something else. We won’t see that we can be rejected and be ok. We won’t FEEL safe to change. And even if we DO change - this usually just leads to a LOT of anxiety, constant fear, even darker depression, a constant running FROM what we were trained to be, without a direction of what we’re running TOWARDS.
THIS is where true ego death comes in.
In true ego death, what’s happening is we are coming face to face with all the parts of self we have believed for our ENTIRE LIVES we MUST be/become before we will be worthy of that love and safety we have craved our entire lives. And we realize we aren’t these people. That we are never going to be what we were taught we must be. We have to come face to face with accepting the evil inside of us - the parts of self that will NEVER be what we were conditioned to be, the parts of self that are what we were conditioned we must never become.
We DIE to the self that we thought we had to become to be loved, thinking this would make us safe. We die to the ideas of success, safety and goodness we thought we had to reach in order to be safe. We lose the happily ever after we’ve been striving for our entire lives, and in its place there will be nothing but trauma and confusion for a while.
This is why most of us never do it.
It does feel like actual death. To our bodies, embracing that we aren’t who we were taught to be, embracing that we ARE who we were taught we mustn't be, will feel to our bodies like walking off a plank. It will be an acceptance of our fate of being rejected - and until we cross that barrier into adulthood where we realize we can be rejected and still survive - we will live lives that aren’t ours. We will feel hollow, ever searching, never finding. We will be depressed and wonder why all of our accomplishments mean nothing, why all the love means nothing, why we CAN’T accomplish what we think we should. We will feel like weak failures or strong robots. We will wonder when life is going to start. We will rebel with no real direction.
Until we die to who we were trained we must be to be good, we aren’t going to be free in this life.
Ego death is real. It’s the death of what we think will lead us to ultimate freedom.
We are going to feel like letting go of this conditioned self is letting go of ever being happy.
Ever being free.
Ever being able to have a life we want.
We must let it go. Let it die. Let ourselves not know who or what we are for a while. Let ourselves grieve and be sad and angry. Allow ourselves to explore the depression and why we can’t get on in this society - not looking for what’s wrong with ‘US’ but looking for what’s wrong with society.
We have to die to the dream of being loved by another and that love leading to self actualization.
We have to learn to love who and what we are, even if it means no one else ever will.
THIS is ego death.
THIS is how we jailbreak ourselves.
We embrace what is ‘evil’ within us, so we can find the innocence, and the truth.
From there, we will be able to problem solve. Provide for ourselves. Make a life that is no longer dependent upon codependency.
THIS is breaking out of the matrix.
Realizing who you never were, who you’ve always been, and the fact that you can survive without the approval of anyone but yourself now. Showing your body this truth, over and over, little by little.
The death of the ego will feel like real death, and then it will lead to a birth to the life you’ve actually always wanted.
<3
