Hello Love!
In case you missed it, please go check out the first part of this most here.
Now onto the birth of the false self!
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The False Self Is Born:
THIS is where we start developing a false self.
The more our natural ways of being are rejected, the more our true learning path isn’t supported but leads to shame, blame and guilt - the more we are programming in that these parts of self are evil - evil in the sense that they literally threaten our very existence.
We weren’t being taught how to meet our own needs even without the help of someone else. We didn’t have the capacity to provide for ourselves if our caregivers withdrew. We didn’t have the ability to accept who we really were and deal with not being liked. We couldn’t be ok. We couldn’t change circumstances that were antagonistic to us. We didn’t yet have that power. As children, we were victims. So we learned that the way to survive was to change the SELF. Blame ourselves. Shame ourselves. Hate ourselves.
To try to alter the one thing we had control over, that would then shift how our caregivers cared for and showed up for us.
Most of us still live this way to this day. We are looking for our agency in self improvement/blaming ourselves all the time - and to a degree this is *correct* in that sometimes in real reality we DO need to shift how we are doing things to find different results. But most of us aren't looking to REALITY for how we can change to get better results. We're not coming from a neutral, self loving space that understands that when we're in pain we aren't being 'punished' but rather we're just bumping up against our limits of understanding/seeing where societal structures and ways of being don't work. Instead, we shame, guilt and berate ourselves, looking to shift who and what we ARE (not what we're DOING) to try to become 'better' so that others will love us more/the Universe/God will approve of us and 'reward' us with the results we want.
We are right that sometimes we need to change our ways of being - but we're seeing this truth from a totally clouded filter. We aren't being punished. We aren't being rewarded. The results we get in real reality don't have anything to do with what society believes is or isn't true, is or isn't right, is or isn't acceptable. The results we get have nothing to do with how much we're being LOVED by God/the universe. Rather, we're just being shown how reality works. It's neutral. Changing our behavior to get different results has nothing to do with goodness or becoming 'better.' It's about observing how reality works, the best way to get needs met, and how we can live in alignment with that reality so that we can express. Reality isn't changing to bless or punish us - it is what it is. We shift not to be 'good' or 'bad' - simply to get different results.
In real reality, there's no shame or guilt. Just pain and pleasure showing us how we are or aren't working in synch with our true nature and the nature of reality. There's no middle man of approval anymore. Not in real reality.
Most of us still exist as though our character is being judged and graded, and as though we're being rewarded and punished. We still think we have to live up to SOCIETAL expectation to get good results and be safe. We still project that concept of our providers and other authority figures basing their choice to provide or not provide for us on their OPINION of our behavior, feeling that God/Reality/The Universe is giving us what we want/punishing us for our character or capacity to live up to our conditioning. We look to blame, shame and punish ourselves when we're in pain, when we don't know how to process emotions, how to be upset about something, how to experience pain and PROBLEM SOLVE - finding our true power - because in our childhoods only changed behavior to live up to expectation was the route to getting what we needed and wanted. The more our caregivers were basing THEIR ideas of right and wrong on things outside of real reality, and the more inconsistent and chaotic the rules of our household were - the more we're going to feel lost and confused in this world. When all we know is behavior modification hoping that this will change how others respond to us - believing our lived experience is dictated by the opinions of others - we will be forever caught in self improvement that goes no where. We won't be able to accurately identify what is and isn't working, how to shift to get better results or where our pain is coming from. We will be in a cloud of consensus reality that never leads to true insight.
We may not even clearly SEE that this is what we're doing as adults. We may just have a constant sense of not being good enough, always blaming and shaming ourselves as soon as we experience pain, getting in loops of continual self improvement, not really knowing specifically what we need to become in order to be safe, but always feeling like we aren't it. We will have a vague sense that life is punishing and judging us. That we are failing someone or something at all times, projecting our lack of feeling good onto those around us. We won't see that we're living for approval thinking this will give us what we want, that won't be a thought we're having. We will rather constantly be questing to change ourselves, constantly searching for being 'good' or believing that when we're in pain there's nothing we can do about it - not seeing where these beliefs and behavior patters actually COME from.
We will be trapped hating ourselves forever, always feeling out of control and at the whim of those around us. At the whim of a reality that's judging us based on our character.
We won't be able to see that reality doesn't judge - it just IS. That pain and pleasure are results of a complex number of things, and that our behavior or morality isn't usually the culprit. We won't see that because that's not what we learned in our bodies when we were growing up.
Adult Reality Is Different From Childhood Reality:
Sometimes how our caregivers were showing up for us had nothing to do with ‘us’ - they were overburdened, tired, under-resourced and conditioned themselves - but still, all we knew was that it was our behavior that was causing their reactions to us. Whether or not this was TRUE in real reality - it didn’t matter. That’s how we perceived it and again, that’s what got recorded into our bodies. Our behavior = how others treated us = us getting our needs met or not. THAT is what we all learned viscerally. We will then expand this out, trying to become who our friends, teachers, religious group and culture at large wants us to become, forever searching for that perfect love that will FINALLY set us free from our suffering.
We got trained in our nervous systems that our pain is not caused by reality - our pain is caused by not being LOVED. This is because in childhood love = our needs being tended to.
LOVE was the avenue through which our suffering was ended and pleasure given.
We were fed when we were loved. Held when we were loved. Soothed when we were loved.
LOVE was the middle man between our pain and our pain being remedied.
Between what we wanted and us having what we wanted.
We are wired here to believe that love = safety = provision.
Ultimately, we want safety so that we can EXPRESS.
SO that we can GROW.
In other words, we want to feel safe, so that we feel like we can then go out and pursue the unknown, develop ourselves, go on the growth journey of making mistakes, bumping up against what we don’t yet understand, having pain and so on. We don’t want safety for safety’s sake. We want safety as a means to an end, a container for self expression! That’s what we REALLY want when we are striving to get ALL of our needs met. Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual - when we get our needs met, we are then being SUPPORTED in growth. Just like a tree that’s watered, fed and given enough sunlight will naturally grow into its fullest expression, so too will humans ‘self actualize’ when we are given what we need.
Getting our needs met is a means to an end - growth.
Expression of our genetic potential.
When we are safe, we feel brave enough to journey into the unknown and grow. When we feel we aren’t going to get our needs met/when we are not getting our needs met, growth is MUCH harder - because we don’t have the foundational ingredients for this to happen. And because we get the program that love = safety - most of us strive our entire lives to find LOVE, without realizing that this is a middle man that’s no longer required for what we really want - growth itself.
We will strive our ENTIRE lives to try to become LOVED, because we truly believe that love is the answer to suffering going away, to getting needs met, and to being given the container to express and grow.
Because it WAS the answer in our childhoods.
We don’t see that in fact, it’s not the answer in our adulthoods. Love and safety in adulthood are important social factors yes - but in adulthood safety and needs being met comes from self understanding, and knowing how to meet our needs in reality. The temporary situation of our childhood is over. Shutting ourselves down to be loved is no longer a survival technique that works.
It WAS better for survival to shut down our true nature to fit in when basic needs were being met from those around us. But as adults, shutting down our true selves for approval is actually WORSE for our survival than being true to ourselves - letting our true nature express and grow - and being rejected.
Now as adults we can be rejected and still get our basic needs met. It’s true that we still live in a society where a relative level of being accepted is necessary, because none of us are fully self-sufficient and none of us ever will be. We are all relying to some extent on the world around us to support us. But this is still a very, very different kind of reliance than what was experienced in childhood. In adulthood, we now have access to SO many different KINDS of people, ways of life, ways of being. The limited scope of the conditioning we were raised in is usually just a tiny fraction of all the possibilities that exist in so far as practical ways to survive and thrive.
Oftentimes, letting go of our conditioning means losing the group of people we grew up around, and finding a whole new group of people with totally different values that are able to support us in BETTER ways. We find that we ARE far more self sufficient than we ever believed, requiring far LESS approval from others to get our needs met than we thought. In adulthood, SO much of the time when we align with real reality as a method of getting our needs met, even when this alignment flies in the face of what everyone around us is doing/believes is good and right, we STILL get better RESULTS than if we were to fit into culture. As adults, we can be far more isolated and rejected and still survive and thrive than most of us believe to be the case. As well as being able to find new groups of people that align with what we really are and reality really is.
In adulthood, aligning with REAL reality is better for survival, even if it gets us rejected, than aligning with consensus reality at the expense of our growth and true expression. In adulthood self actualization becomes more of a factor for our TRUE growth, and thus, this programming of being loved to be safe is now fully NOT true.
If being loved means you have to sacrifice yourself, you are LESS safe.
You can get your base needs met without love.
You can’t get your GROWTH needs met when you’re rejecting yourself to fit in, and in this we actually die more.
Learning how to navigate this complex world - not looking to others to read, understand and then provide for us - this is a part of growing into adulthood that allows us the freedom to actually understand who we are and be that, regardless of what those around us think or feel about it. This is where we all struggle - we all still think that if we can just become loved enough, we will finally be free of suffering. This is what’s driving most of us to do everything we do. To be who we think we have to be. To lives that aren’t authentic to us.
Our BODIES Will Fear Rejection More Than Our Minds:
We will fear straying from our conditioning because to our bodies this will mean NEVER being loved.
And if we are NEVER loved, we FEEL in our BODIES that we can NEVER be safe. We are constantly trying to become who we were trained to become so that we will be ultimately loved - and we want this because we believe in our bodies that LOVE = SAFETY. This is a snake eating its own tail. The reason we want SAFETY is so that we can finally BECOME ourselves. We are looking for the perfect external love that will say ‘I love you for who you ARE’ and in that we will feel like we will get our needs met AND we can be our true selves. This WOULD have been true in our childhoods.
Had we been unconditionally loved as children, unconditionally provided for - we would have had the foundations for self expression. We would have been able to follow our true pain and pleasure signals. We would have been TAUGHT how to navigate pain when we tried things that didn’t work. We would have been taught how to learn from both pain and pleasure. How to problem solve. Slowly how to identify our own needs, and how to navigate the world around us to get those needs met. We would have been supported in our interests, as well as supported where we were weak but needed to learn in order to manage well in society. We would have been given the tools to become our fullest selves within this reality that is complex and interconnected. In our childhoods unconditional love and support WOULD have meant self actualization.
We have to realize this perfect love is never, ever going to come from the outside.
This perfect safety will never exist either.
Childhood is over.
Life will always be a threat to a certain degree, and no one is ever going to fully accept us.
But this is ok. Because we are ADULTS now. We have agency. We have power. We can provide for ourselves. We can solve problems. We can be rejected and still get our needs met. We can express and become who we really are as well as letting go of what we aren’t and STILL be SAFE and OK.
Now trying to contort ourselves into what’s loved, doesn’t bring us closer to joy - because joy comes from GROWTH. Expansion. Expression. Now, in our adulthood, joy is a result of being truly ALIVE and being truly alive is being on a path of self actualization - whatever that means for us in the moment.
Being loved and approved of for what we aren’t can only bring temporary relief of existential dread - but it then leads to coping, self sabotage, addiction, dark emotions and a LIFE we ‘think’ we should be living that doesn’t actually feel good to us. So to live to be approved of, when that approval comes at the cost of true self expression/expansion/growth/learning, we are actually taking ourselves farther from what we want.
We are making ourselves LESS safe.
Less capable.
Less aware of how reality works.
We become more and more dependent on others to figure things out for us, because we are looking to THEM to meet our needs/make us feel safe. We don’t question society or it’s methods - we stay stuck in childhood reasoning that tells us if we aren’t getting the results we want in life, it’s something about our behavior that needs to change. That WE are FLAWED in some way, and need to be FIXED so we can fit in and get along. We are convinced that the world around us has the answers, and if we could just get ourselves to conform to the systems we were raised in/are surrounded by, we will then have success. We keep trying to contort ourselves, rather than seeing our coping, numbing, scapegoating, dark emotions and addictions as SYMPTOMS - not problems. We keep trying to be what society wants us to be, always feeling like we’re failing. We keep looking to others to tell us the answers because we don’t know how to find answers for ourselves. We keep doing things that don’t work, because it’s ‘normal.’ We are afraid, deeply, deeply deeply viscerally afraid, to embrace anything outside of our conditioning for fear we will die if we do. We ‘rebel’ from normal, thinking this is going to be the answer to our pain - but just swinging to some opposite idea never actually works either - we don’t learn to look for TRUTH, we just run from what we deem is false. We look for the group that will accept us constantly. The partner. The working environment. Shifting ourselves over and over to try to make ourselves work. We deny our emotions, our desires, our paths of interest. We fear ‘failing’ and making mistakes. We just want to be loved, believing deep down this will liberate us from all pain - as it did when we were children.
THIS is the web.
The matrix.
The trap.
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Let's take one more pause here for this week. Next week we will dive into real ego death, and what it means to awaken to 'real reality'
<3
