There is no possible way that I could be writing this article FOR you because I love you and therefore want you to feel good. No… I am writing this article because I want you to see how messed up you are and how much you need to change. Or I am writing this article because I want to gain more followers. See the story you are telling yourself? Everyone wants and needs love, but whether or not we are going to recognize or accept the love we are given is another story.
People often think because I focus on primary relationships in childhood as the cause of adult dysfunction that I am on a mission against parents and on a mission to blame someone. This is not the case. What I am on a mission to do is to gift awareness to the human race. Awareness and truth and authenticity suck sometimes. Reality is not always sunshine, gumdrops and roses. And the reality that we all must accept, whether we like it or not, is that even the very best parents in the world today are not in a perfect state of health, alignment, integration or awareness. And so they will negatively affect the health, alignment, integration and awareness of their children.
Most parents alive today do not understand what love really is and therefore do not express real love to their children. Most parents can’t be truly honest even with themselves about why they had kids. Most parents don’t even see that the “loving things” they do for their children are actually self-serving and often against the best interests of their child. Most parents have no idea how to develop healthy intimacy with their child. Most parents have no idea how to feed their child so they are actually healthy. And most parents have no idea how to parent a child’s emotions. Our awareness as a species in in its infancy.
When we defend things being the way they are or were or make excuses for them being that way, it is because of what we are afraid of happening if we don’t. Ask yourself, “If I really admitted to and accepted the ways that my own parents messed up, what bad thing do I think would happen?”
The reality is, it is a very rare parent who intentionally tries to harm their child. Most injure their children thinking that what they are doing is loving their child and helping them. Most of it is entirely subconscious and this is a given. But the more we try to defend the way our parents were and make excuses for it, the less likely we are to switch a pattern. And the pattern we are discussing today is one that needs switching.
Because people do not understand what love is and therefore do not know how to give it, the reality is that many of us did not feel loved as children. To understand what love is and isn’t, watch my videos titled: What Is Love and your Definition of Love is Wrong. If we grew up a scapegoat in a dysfunctional family, we could feel that we were the family garbage can. If we grew up the golden child, we could feel we were not loved as we are, we were loved for how well we abandoned ourselves to meet our parent’s needs. If our parent was hell bent on our success, we could feel it was so they could look good to other people. If they gave us something so that they could get something from us, we felt that indebtedness. No matter what story we told ourselves and no matter what we said to others, down deep we felt unloved. But the subconscious way we coped with feeling unloved by the people in our early lives will blow your mind.
In order to cope with not feeling loved, we adopt a belief that makes everything less powerless and painful. The belief we adopt is “love doesn’t really exist.” It is to tell the story that all people are self-centered to avoid the feeling that you have no value. Think about it… If the most painful thing was to feel that YOU were not loved, in which case you would be worthless and emotionally starved and not close to the very people upon whom your life depended, then the way to escape from that feeling state and the thoughts that go along with it would be to tell yourself it’s not that YOU aren’t loved, it’s that love doesn’t exist. This allows you to maintain your self concept instead of feel like garbage, stay close to the people upon whom your life depends and feel shitty about the universe in general for everyone instead of just you. And it makes it so that you can stay safe and adapt in order to get your needs met. The way you adapt to get your needs met is through accepting that the way people survive here on earth is transaction.
You accept the reality that if someone does anything, they are doing it for themselves and if you do something, it is a strategy to get something for yourself. This understanding has a real benefit because on top of helping you to avoid the pain of YOU not feeling or being loved, it makes relationships both predictable and controllable. It is easy to know what gets you discarded and what doesn’t. You pay the bill at the restaurant because you don’t want to feel indebted to someone in any way if they pay the bill. You meet someone’s needs knowing that it is a guarantee that if you meet those needs, they will not abandon you. You get into the relationship where the business exchange being made is very clear such as, I give him status because of my good looks and he gives me financial security. Your life becomes a subconscious transactional one. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: Cut The Invisible Strings, (How To Detach From Manipulation In Relationships). But the flip side of this coin is what I want you to become aware of today… The way you react to other people giving you love.
The way you react to people giving you love is to hold tight to your belief that love does not exist and to warp it into something that isn’t love. You warp it into a love doesn’t exist story to avoid the story that no one loves you, but by doing so you totally miss people actually loving you.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this pattern is that when this is your pattern, low self-esteem is as much a strategy as using transaction to get your needs met. This might be hard to follow and might require some re-plays, but it is fascinating once you really get it. Low self-esteem is a strategy for protecting the authentic self. If you can’t survive in an environment as an authentic expression (because that leads to consequences) the ego is born. The ego is a strategy that can only exist in an environment where there are others. It is a strategy to become a self that gets approved of. That self-concept has to be something that endears you to the people in your life. The ego in and of itself is a protector. It protects you by agreeing with the people upon whom your life depends. So your self-concept that endears you to mom and dad is a poor self-concept. It is “I agree, I have no value”. To disagree with mom and dad by maintaining a positive self-concept in the face of not feeling loved by them, is to be at war with the people upon whom your life depends. But in order to survive emotionally, the ego that protects the authentic self splits in two. The vulnerable aspect of ego, which feels it has no value and the protector aspect which discovers a strategy to have value for others… To get love where it isn’t being freely given. The vulnerable self-concept gets suppressed through the strategy you are using to be valued, a transactional one. It is helpful to see that a low self-concept is a strategy and therefore, it too is not who and what you really are. It is an inauthentic expression.
If you watch yourself, any time someone does anything that resembles love; you either do not take it in or you take it in to meet a need by turning it into something that is digestible for you, something other than love. Here are some examples of ways that you might do this, someone tries to help you with a pattern of yours and you tell yourself that they are doing it because they are so sick of dealing with that aspect of you, so it is really for themselves. Someone cooks for you, and you tell yourself that it is so they can get recognition for their own talent. Someone gives you a gift and your first thought is: What are they trying to get from me? Someone tries to help you to lose weight or get healthy and you tell yourself it is because they are embarrassed to be seen with you the way you are. Someone does chores around the house to make it more pleasant for you and you tell yourself it is just so they can absolve themselves of guilt or it is just because it has to be done in general. Someone invites you on a trip and you tell yourself that they just don’t want to go alone. I could go on and on all day with these examples. If you want to see an example of someone who has adopted this strategy clearly, watch the character Connie Baker, played by Ginnifer Goodwin from the movie Mona Lisa’s Smile.
When you operate in the world with this adaptive strategy, you will always feel as if you are starving because you cannot just receive love. You have to work hard to transactionally get what you need. You also build walls to prevent feeling good and thus to keep pain in instead of to keep pain out. Because of this, I want you to watch two of my videos. The first is titled: How To Receive. The second is titled: Building Walls To Keep Pain In.
Because we live in a world where people do not understand love and therefore do not practice it with awareness, we do need to be aware when people act in loving ways that are simply transactional ways of getting their own needs met. But believe me, you are a person who is already aware of this aspect of relationships. What you need practice with is to realize that sometimes, people really do love you and really are trying to show you love every day but that love is lost on you. It is like putting quarters into a pay phone and they only ever slip right out the bottom change slot. This makes people in your life feel un-received. This makes people feel unloved by you. This makes you someone who is exhausted and starving, living in a world of scarcity. This makes it so you can’t discern between people who do love you and people who don’t. This makes it so that you cannot face the actual pain in your life that you are trying to avoid…. The terrible self concept and pain of not being truly valued and loved by the people who you tell yourself should have loved you the most and whom you are the most desperate to feel close to and valued by. If you need help facing this wound, try The Completion Process. You can read about how to do the process in my book that is quite literally titled: The Completion Process and if you want assistance with it, you can find a practitioner of the process at www.thecompletionprocess.com.
This strategy is a strategy of avoidance and therefore resistance and it is a guarantee that whatever you resist, will persist. We will literally ruin our relationships if we can’t feel genuinely nourished by them and can’t receive other people. We will only ever be as committed to relationships as the transaction is clear and present.
If you have someone like this in your life, make them conscious that you are doing something for them out of love. And expose the transaction that does exist when you do something for them if there is one.
If we continue to live from this story, we will continue to perpetuate a world that is not based on love, but is instead based on undercover transaction. It perpetuates the very conditions that led to us adapting in this way in the first place. So recognize this pattern in yourself today. Recognize the things you do for people in order to get a need met by them. Recognize the story you tell yourself every time someone does something for you. Recognize the deep wound you are trying to avoid by telling yourself this story and by telling yourself that love doesn’t exist.
