Monkeys used to be trained by their masters to perform – to do things like dance for onlookers in exchange for money. And in the monkey’s case, dance in exchange for food. Because of this, the phrase dancing monkey is now used when describing someone who performs (and performs hard) to try to get what they desperately want and need or avoid what they are desperate to avoid. In relationships, people can slip into the pattern of desperate performance in order to be loved and avoid abandonment. And this pattern, is the dancing monkey pattern in relationships.
As living beings, we need to feel a sense of empowerment about getting the things we want and need as well as avoiding things that are painful and unwanted. This becomes tricky when we are navigating the land of relationships. We are relationally dependent in many ways, regardless of whether we are children or adults. There are a great many needs that we have which involve other people. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Dependency Needs - The Thing That No One Will Accept They Have. Relationships are the heart of human existence. But this does not mean that people easily align with what we want and need in our relationship with them. We ultimately have no control over what another person chooses to do or not do. We have no control over whether someone will love us and behave as if they do. We also have no control over whether a person will abandon us. But when we desperately want and need to be loved (seeing as how love is the most blissful thing a person can experience in a relationship and even in life) and we desperately want to avoid being abandoned (seeing as how abandonment is the most painful thing a person can experience in a relationship and even in life), it is too tormenting to be powerless relative to this.
The way we gain a sense of control in relationships, where truly there is so much we can’t control (because it involves another person’s free will) is to take 100% responsibility for the relationship and convince ourselves that we can control whether we are loved and whether we are abandoned. That we can do that by being what would entice them to love us and to stay. It is at this point that we enter into a dancing monkey routine in relationships. We perform, desperately doing anything and everything we can to be loved and anything and everything we can to avoid being abandoned.
For example, we do things like: Let go of our hobbies and interests. Suppress our opinions. Adopt their hobbies, interests and opinions, pour energy into making ourselves as attractive as possible, show off our talents, control them, manipulate them, obsess over fixing ourself, warn people about ourself to try to test whether they will or won’t abandon us, figure out their desires and go above and beyond to become what they desire, desperately assess compatibility, try to act easy going, hide our needs, anxiously dive into hours of conversation in order to try to establish security, shower them with affection, words of affirmation, gifts, service and quality time so that they will love us and not leave us, make sure that we stay in their proximity, do shadow work on them, be kind no matter how we are treated, let go of our boundaries, help them, make ourself as entertaining as possible, make them laugh, be overly nice, validate them, suppress, deny and disown parts of ourselves, ask them questions about themselves, victim control dynamics and the list goes on and on. It’s not necessarily that doing many of these things in a relationship is in and of itself wrong. For example, there is nothing wrong with showering a person in physical affection. The problem is that our motive for doing it, is a desperate attempt to be loved and avoid abandonment. So, we are doing this like a desperate dancing monkey as a so that we are loved and so that we don’t get abandoned. So that’s are a really big problem. If you want to learn more about that, you can watch my video titled: If You Want To Be Happy, Don’t Do This!
A great deal of these dancing monkey behaviors are self-abandonment behaviors. They are behaviors where we reject, suppress, deny, disown and do not caretake that aspects of ourselves that we believe will interfere with other people loving us and not abandoning us. As a result, we are no longer loving ourselves. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Do You Abandon Yourself to Not Be Abandoned by Others?
When some of us were young, we came to families where our caregivers did not engage and step into the relationship with us. Families where we were rejected, neglected, turned against, and abandoned emotionally, if not physically as well. Families where we did not feel valued and wanted and loved. We took the blame for this, so as to have a sense of control in an inherently powerless position. We made it about ourselves. And we slipped into the illusion that we could change this terrible situation somehow. By being good enough to be what they want and value. By trying to eradicate and abandon the aspects of ourselves that we feel “made” them reject, neglect, turn against and abandon us. We take this attitude of desperately working for and performing for love so that we aren’t abandoned with us into our adulthood. We live our adult relationships like this as well. We do so only to find that nothing works. We find that people abandon us anyway. And this, usually makes us into an even more high performing dancing monkey. We inevitably will reach a point where we feel like nothing we ever are or ever do, is good enough to make it so that people want us, value us and don’t abandon us. And like something that we don’t see must be really wrong with us to make them do it.
What we don’t realize and will not accept is this: There are plenty of people who do not meet our criteria for a person whom people would want, value and never abandon and yet, they don’t get abandoned. I’m not going to be politically correct here, because it is important to see this through the lens of a person in the dancing monkey routine. There are people who have terrible personalities. There are people who are old. There are people who are needy. There are people who are ugly. There are people who are disabled. There are people who beat up their wives. There are people who are addicts. There are people who are in prison having committed crimes. There are people who are mentally ill. There are people with chronic illnesses and terminal illnesses. There are people who do not consider others. There are people who can’t regulate their emotions at all. There are people who spend their whole life focused on their career rather than their partner. And yet, the people in their life, their partners for example, do not abandon them. Why is this the case? Because abandonment is not actually about how amazing you are or horrible you are to be with. The truth is, you have less power than that. It’s about the other person choosing to be an abandoner in response to whatever. They may have all kinds of excuses, maybe even good ones, for why they made that choice. This conversation we are having right now isn’t about whether it is objectively right for someone to leave a person or not. This is a conversation where you need to become aware that other people in the very same situations as you have found yourself in and even way worse ones, would not choose to abandon. So, how you show up in a relationship is about you. But the choice to abandon is about them. And it isn’t ok to take responsibility for both how you show up and how they show up in the relationship. So many of the people who abandon in relationships, are absolutely incapable of having relationships because, they step out of them. That is their go to response. And that does not work in a relationship. That is an anti-relationship behavior.
When we desperately perform for love and perform to avoid abandonment, we cannot actually attract a person who will value, want and love us. The reason being that the person on the other side, is in love with the performance. This means you can’t ever stop performing. And a big part of you does not feel loved when you are always on edge, having to work your ass off to keep someone interested and keep them from going away. A lot of what we do when we are in this pattern is to put effort into amplifying aspects of ourself that we feel would be desirable. For example, it may be true that we are beautiful. And so, we will amplify those looks and lead with that being what is of value about us in relationships. Or, we may feel like we are smart. So, we are overly demonstrative of our intellect in relationships. This takes serious effort. Also, a lot of what we do when we are in this pattern is to try to change ourself so as to be desirable. And we can’t keep up the act. Underneath this attempt to put effort into pushing certain traits forward and change ourself, is the fact that we feel unlovable. As a result, we don’t put very real things on the surface for someone to see. So how can the person who would love us (and even love those things about us) see us so as to come forward and love us? How can we find someone truly compatible? Some questions to ask yourself if you recognize yourself in this dancing monkey pattern are: What do you do in a relationship in order to be valued, loved and wanted by others? And what do you do in a relationship in order to try to guarantee that you won’t be abandoned? Are these elements of your ‘performance’ part of what you want the exchange to be in the relationship? Are they real? Are they authentic to you? are they painful? Are those things what you want to be valued and loved for? Are you going to drop it? Would you be fine performing in this way forever in the relationship? Does keeping up fill in the blank eventually make you feel unloved by the other person or even more insecure about yourself and the relationship?
The bottom line is, you need to accept that you have no control over whether you are loved by someone or not. And you have no control over whether you are abandoned by someone or not. This, is really hard to accept. You need to stop maintaining the illusion that if you demonstrate to any person that you have enough value and are what they want and give enough, that they will value and love you to the degree that they will not abandon you. When you accept this, even though accepting this is painful, you will stop taking the full onus for how people act towards you in a relationship. You will realize that if a person decides to be an abandoner in a relationship, that is their dysfunction. They could just as easily decide not to be, no matter what you’re doing. You will realize that being authentic is the only genuine way to get real love from someone who values you and whom will not abandon you. As a part of this authenticity, you will decide how you want to show up in a relationship. You will decide what your reasons for doing different things in a relationship are (such as looking nice or cooking for them, or staying up all night to settle an argument so you don’t go to bed angry). This way, the things you do in a relationship are no longer just a “so that” in order to try to get love or avoid abandonment. And this way, you are taking responsibility for your half of a relationship… Being the kind of person you want to be in a relationship. Your way of being in relationships will no longer be a desperate performance. You will no longer be caught in the terrifying, life sucking, exhausting nightmare of being a dancing monkey to get love and avoid abandonment.
Just because you had parents and lived under the same roof as they did, doesn’t mean that they took ownership of you. It is more than possible to be an orphan with parents. Let’s explore this dynamic and pull back the gaslight that is hiding it.
Parents who orphan their children (but keep them) usually point to certain things as a way to discredit the idea that they were bad parents. They say things like: “You had a roof over your head. You had food on the table. You had clothes on your back. Look at all the things we bought you.” This is the gaslight that the orphan with parents dynamic hides behind. And this is an illusion that almost everyone falls into. The parents fall into it. The child falls into it. Family friends fall into it. Teachers fall into it. As a result, the hell of neglect that the child is experiencing is never actually seen for what it is. In fact, they are constantly gaslit that the reality is the opposite, despite the fact that their wellbeing continued to decline due to deprivation and starvation on many levels.
The first way to crack through this gaslight is to look at an orphanage. When a child is put into the government system or into an orphanage, they have shelter. They have clothing. They have food. They have toys. In many countries, they have education. They have the basic physical necessities. They have the very things that people point to as proof that a person was parented and has a home. So, the question is: What is missing? What makes having parents and a family so different from being in an orphanage? By doing this, you will see the needs that are necessary, but were never met in your childhood. Needs that had to be met in order for you to actually develop in a healthy way and thrive. I would like you to stop this video and actually think about this question I’ve asked for a minute before you resume.
In order for a child to actually thrive and therefore, in order for us to be able to say that they were parented, here is a short list of thing that a child needs… They need to feel owned by their parents. If you want to understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: Own People. Positive ownership is the thing that makes all the other necessary expressions of parenting possible. To truly own something is to see it as part of yourself. If you see something as part of yourself, it becomes impossible to hurt that thing without hurting yourself. You cannot usurp its free will without harming yourself. Therefore, in true ownership, which is for something to be a part of you and therefore to belong to you, the best interests of that other thing is of the utmost concern. A child needs to be made to feel a sense of belonging. They need to feel as if they have an important place within the family/social group. They need to feel taken responsibility for. They need to be protected from harm on all levels. They need to feel a sense of security, both regarding their relationship with their parent and within the world. This implies stable, consistent and secure attachments. They need to have proper nutrition. They need good quality sleep. They need good hygiene. Access to good medical care. They need social interaction and stimulation. They need positive role models. A child needs to feel a sense of being able to have things that are theirs and theirs to control, that can’t just be taken away. They need to feel valued and wanted and loved. They need to feel seen, heard, felt and understood. This is emotional intimacy. They need their boundaries and personhood to be seen and honored. They need play and exploration. They need mirroring. They need to be able to develop a sense of themselves and autonomy without that threatening their relationship with the people around them. They need physical activity. They need a sense of empowerment. They need to feel received. They need encouragement. They need to be enabled. They need age appropriate challenges to build their self-esteem. They need guidance. They need communication. They need appropriate limits. They need physical affection. They need emotional support and to be emotionally co-regulated. They need a deep sense of connection. They need to be able to trust those upon whom their life depends. They need attention and engagement from the people around them. They need to feel like a priority. They need a sense of connection to wider community. They need a sense of accomplishment. They need to be given a positive self image by their caregivers. They need to be given self-awareness. They need consistency and structure and predictability. They need to be taught self-discipline. They need to be taught and enabled to learn. They need empathy. They need validation. They need respect. They need to feel that others are committed to them. They need support regarding the achievement of their goals and their desires. They need quality time. They need words of affirmation. They need acts of service. They need gifts. They need acceptance. They need the freedom to express themselves. They need honesty and openness. They need companionship. They need to feel like they can go to their caregivers with whatever they are struggling with and whatever they need. And this list could be longer. By the way, some people will feel like this is a lot… too much even. But what does that say about us and our relationship to children and each other? Looking at this list, isn’t it even more obvious that we are meant to be living in tribes? Also, looking at this list, you may find that your needs were met even less in your childhood home than they were for some children who were actually a system kid or put in an orphanage or put into foster care.
These needs are needs. What I mean by this is, they are non-negotiables. Without these things, a child cannot grow into a healthy adult. They may find coping mechanisms to be able to make it to adulthood. But the after effects of the missing of these needs will be there and will make thriving in their adulthood hard. Most especially, it will make their relationships hard. So many people who were orphans with parents, have no idea why they are so messed up because they have fallen into the gaslight of having parents that kept them and having all their basic necessities provided for them. This is even more true if the family uses gaslighting verbiage. Things like “This is the best family”. Or “We are so close” or saying “I love you” when most of the behavior or actions in the family are out of alignment with this. Or “You always have a place with us” when it doesn’t feel like that at all. This is also far more extreme for children who grew up in wealthy households. Society has the total misconception that it is impossible to be an orphan if you come from a wealthy home. After all, it isn’t that your basic needs of food and water are just met. They are met to a higher degree than most people will ever experience. Rather than just having shelter, you may have grown up in a mansion. Rather than just being fed, you may have been cooked for by a private chef. But guess what? You can still be orphaned in a wealthy family. You can still be missing the very most important things that are necessary for you to have developed in a heathy way. You may be completely emotionally neglected.
As people, we need to stop telling the lie that physical needs are more important than emotional needs. In fact, the reverse is true. There are a great many truly poor people, whose basic necessities are a daily struggle, but whom are thriving far more than other people who have everything and more on a physical level, but whose emotional needs are not met If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Today’s Great Epidemic and How to Solve It.
People love to tell the story that once you reach a certain age, you do not need certain things that you needed in childhood. As if, regardless of whether you had those needs met in childhood, you reach some arbitrary age where the need simply went away and you were fine on your own. In this same vein, people love to tell the story that it is impossible to abandon an adult. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: 8 Truths About Adult Abandonment. It makes people feel less dependent and more empowered to think this, after all, we can’t control whether other people actually will or won’t meet our dependency needs and we don’t want to accept that needs not being met in childhood will, without exception, have an effect on our adulthood. It also lets us off the hook regarding meeting each other’s dependency needs. By telling these stories, we can make the person with the need the problem for putting pressure on us to show up in a relationship, rather than make ourself them problem for not wanting to take any responsibility for other people and not wanting to meet other people’s needs. The problem with these stories we tell is that they are not true. Not by any stretch of the imagination. We have dependency needs. And these needs continue into our adult life. Even more so, if you lacked them in childhood. In fact, a great deal of conscious relationships is about consciously re-parenting each other’s inner child and by doing so, becoming the healing element in their life. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Dependency Needs - The Thing That No One Will Accept They Have. The reality is, these needs that were not met in your childhood, must be met in your adulthood. And the more creative that we get with this within human society, the better off every single person within society will be. When you look at what any person was missing in childhood, you will quickly see that these are the very things they are looking for in their primary partner. And so it should be. They should be looking for these things from more people than just their partner. This story that we tell that it is dysfunctional to look for the parent they never had in a partner, makes every single person within society dysfunctional. This is what everyone is doing subconsciously. And the needs becomes more extreme the less that need was met. Think about it… If a person had no predictability or attention from their parents and were not prioritized by them, they will look for a partner who is predictable, pays attention to them and prioritizes them. This is how it should be. This is the basis of healing relationships. And the more conscious we become about this, finding people whose needs are met and who are healed by meeting these needs that we have, the better. To learn more about this, watch my video titled: Be Consciously Transactional.
It is important to remember that because you live inside your own skin every day, your relationship with yourself matters. This means, every need that was not met by your parents, you should be offering to yourself. For example, if your parents did not offer understanding, you should be putting energy into understanding yourself. But do not believe anyone who tells you that this will be sufficient. This only takes care of your relationship with yourself. In fact, for people who were orphaned, these ideologies that center around a person meeting their own needs, only enhance and reinforce their sense of abandonment and aloneness. Because of this, these ideologies are re-traumatizing. You need to ALSO get these unmet needs met by other people. This is the most critical act of self-love relative to dependency needs.
It is time for us to stop falling into the gaslight. As a society, we need to accept that it is more than possible for parents to keep the child they created rather than give them away and still turn them into an orphan within the home. And we need to start recognizing when this is the case, so we can put energy into meeting those critical needs that are not actually being met for that child by their parents.
One of the main reasons that human beings are so deeply disturbed as a species is because they go against and deny their own nature. Humans have had a big problem with being human and with human nature for thousands of years. So many of the elements of human society, governments and religions exist to control suppress, deny and fight against what it is to be human. And the very sad reality is that a big part of a being’s nature is their needs. As a part of this war humanity has waged against their own nature, they have decided to go against their own needs. And the need that they have perhaps gone against the very most aggressively, is their need for each other. Adult humans desperately seek for their dependency needs to be met, while at the very same time, denying that they exist. For this reason, we need to talk about dependency needs.
Human beings are a superbly relationally dependent species. If you look to infancy, you will discover that a human infant is entirely dependent on its adult caregivers. It is dependent for all of its needs on its adult caregivers for a very, very long time compared to other species, which we are perfectly able to recognize as relationally dependent. For example, a bison is able to stand and walk within 10-30 minutes after it is born. They nurse for six months before transitioning to grass. By three years, they are fully grown. Compare this with a human child. We can recognize that in order to thrive, a herd animal, such as a bison or a group animal like a guinea pig must be with others of its kind. And we recognize that this need does not go away once they reach a certain age. This means, we are able to recognize dependency needs in other species. But we have a real issue with this when it comes to ourselves. And this is a real tragedy because human beings are one of the most naturally social and naturally relationally dependent species in existence.
I’m going to start this conversation by exposing a truth and then, we are going to unpack it. The truth is this: As a person, you have dependency needs. And this is true for the totality of your life. This means, you have dependency needs as an adult. These are needs that you either cannot give yourself. Or needs that even if you can give them to yourself too, that does not remove the need get them from others. In order to thrive and be healthy on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level, you need these dependency needs to be met. I’m going to give you a basic list of what these dependency needs are: Connection, belonging, trust, prioritization, empathy, presence, affection, words of affirmation, communication, sex, emotional support, physical support, expression (sharing one’s thoughts and feelings with others), co-regulation, contact comfort, attention, a sense of community, love, warmth, intimacy, quality time, gifts, companionship, commitment, to feel wanted and needed, relational security (that we are safe in our relationships), protection, to feel valued and to be appreciated. I can guarantee that if I sat here long enough, I could come up with way more too.
These dependency needs are non-negotiable needs for human wellbeing. Without them, we starve on the level(s) that the need is meant to satiate. And when we starve, we cope with that pain in very unhealthy ways. We fall into addictions. We become mentally ill, emotionally ill and physically ill. And many even die or resort to suicide. These needs are not a sign of weakness. And they are not a sign of immaturity.
So, why have you been led to believe that you can be independent. And worse than that, why have you been led to believe that the most mature and awakened person is a person who does not need others, because they can meet the needs they have from others, in, of and for themselves? The answer is: The reality of dependency scares the crap out of people. Dependency has become a dirty word. And especially in Western cultures, where self-soothing and self-sufficiency have become the goal, independence is pushed on children as early as possible. Why does dependency scare us so badly? Because it makes us feel powerless to things external to us. In this case, other people. If we did not receive our dependency needs adequately from our significant relationships in our early life; and even worse, if we were harmed by those who we depended on to meet our dependency needs, we become desperate to not be dependent on others. We create and adopt and latch on to social and spiritual ideologies that promote the idea that we do not need things from other people. That everything we need, we can get from within. We find ways to be the least dependent on others as we can be. It makes a great many people with trauma around their dependency needs (especially those whose dependency made them feel harmed by others) feel empowered to think that they can meet all of their needs themselves. And at the same time, it retraumatizes a great many people with trauma around their dependency needs (especially those whose trauma was forced independence) to be told that they don’t need others and instead, need to meet the need for themselves.
The problem is, when we do this, we slip into a delusion that we are convinced is the ultimate reality… The most spiritually awakened reality. In the modern world, independence has become an illness that the vast majority of people are infected with. People have become so ill with the illusion of independence that they don’t even see their dependence. They feel independent if they can get in their own car and drive to the store to get food with their own money. They don’t realize that in order to do that, they are dependent on all the people who manufactured the car, on every person involved in the process of making sure there is fuel available for the car, they are dependent on the store and the entire process the store goes through to put food on the shelves. They are dependent on the financial system, which implies a dependence on the government. They are dependent on the food they bought to sustain them. It’s just an illusion of independence that they have. People simply seem to have an easier time depending on a carrot to sustain their physical bodies than they have depending on a friend or partner to feel secure in the world. Emotional dependency is the thing that people struggle with the very most, because it is the thing that seems the very hardest to control. We feel we can control being able to get fuel for our car. We don’t feel we can control whether we can get someone to love us. And when people feel they can’t control things and are therefore are at someone else’s mercy, they do anything they can to wriggle out of that position. They try to find any possible way back to a sense of personal empowerment again. Even if they have to do so at the expense of themselves.
People also like to tell themselves that to depend on others is to be co-dependent. This is not the truth. In fact, I’m really upset that we decided to use that name for the relational strategy people are describing when they use this term. Co-dependency is not about dependency. It is about choosing not to maintain a sense of self within the context of relationships. If you want to learn more about this, I suggest you watch three of my videos. The first titled: Codependency Has Nothing to do with Dependency. The second titled: Dependence vs Independence. And the third titled: How Has It Come to This? The Societal Collapse into Independence.
Spiritually speaking, to deny your dependency needs using any spiritual ideology is not a transcendental state of being. It is a state of disconnection, separation and ego masquerading as awakened-ness. It is also a profound dis-ownership of your temporal, human aspect. It is illness masquerading as health.
The surest way to corrupt and destroy yourself, is to deny your dependency needs. The surest way to destroy another being is to deny them of their dependency needs. The surest way to destroy the fabric of human society is to deny that people have dependency needs. The reality is that nothing is an island unto itself. No person is an island. The reality is that this universe, this world and this human society is deeply, deeply interdependent. This interdependence is a system of connectivity and health. Interdependence, which involves the conscious meeting of each other’s dependency needs, is what will create a safe human society in which people can thrive and navigate life on earth.
People are adaptable. They adapt to the people, places and things around them. This is especially true of children. There are upsides to adaptation and there are downsides to adaptation. One of those downsides is the downside of adaptations seemingly making us safe when they are in fact making us unsafe and keeping us fixed to unsafe situations.
We live at a time when human relationships are profoundly dysfunctional. And all families fall somewhere on the scale of dysfunction. When we are using the word dysfunction in this context, what we mean is that a relationship is not working because one or many elements of the relationship are detrimental to one or both parties involved. Because the dynamics in a dysfunctional family system are detrimental, they are unsafe on an emotional, mental and or physical level. A dysfunctional family is not a safe environment. This means, each member of the family must adapt to the reality of this unsafety in whatever way they think makes them the safest. This obviously helps them in some way. But it also dooms them. It dooms them in two ways.
It forges and forms them for that specific type of environment and relationship. They “fit in” with that environment and relationship now because they have been made for it. The empowerment they found relative to staying safe and to their needs was specific to that situation. They are operational in it. It is familiar. Their way of being doesn’t make sense in any other environment or relationship. And so, they gravitate towards that specific environment and that specific kind of relationship. They feel unfamiliar, disempowered, non-operational and out of place in any other type of environment or relationship, even if that environment or relationship is dangerous and/or unhealthy for them.
When you adapt to a dysfunctional family, you are adapting to an unsafe situation. You aren’t changing what is unsafe into what is safe. You are making yourself fit in with an unsafe situation, so you will be able to stay there. And so, by definition, you are making yourself unsafe at the same time as you are developing safety strategies. And when a dysfunctional family is making you unsafe, you tend to disown qualities that would keep you safe in the world, so as to fit in with that unsafe environment. This means, your adaptations can handicap you relative to your ability to create actual safety in your life.
So that you can understand this better, let’s look at the example of Rose. Rose was raised in a family with a father who was gone almost all the time and a mother that had the wrong idea about parenting. Rose’s mother imagined that having a child would be like having a doll. That she would have so much fun taking care of it and dressing it up and that the child would be a playmate in life and love her unconditionally. When Rose was born, she certainly was unprepared for night time screaming fits or feeding and changing the child’s when the child needed these things, rather than when she decided she wanted to do them. She was unprepared for a child moving around when she wanted her to sit still or fighting nap time, when she decided she was done looking after her. She was unprepared for Rose developing her own personality and likes and dislikes that were different to her own. Rose’s mother did not want a child. She wanted a living doll. Because that isn’t what she got, she was consistently upset with Rose. From her perspective, Rose was hurting her by not being that. And there were consequences for that. Things like shaming, isolating her in time outs, belittling, negative comparisons, victim control dynamics, spanking, triangulating her father against her etc. These things were harmful to Rose and therefore, not safe.
Rose, like all children, was a captive in her family environment. People don’t like to think of children as captives. But that is what they are. They are stuck in their family and can’t get away, unless the situation is so severe that external authorities step in and remove them. So, being unable to make her environment and relationships safe, she adapted to them. Rose started keeping herself safe by becoming the doll that her mother always wanted. To stay safe, she became a people pleaser. She became sedentary and didn’t move around a lot. She convinced herself that she liked the same things her mother liked and wanted her to like. She stopped asserting any of her needs.
It is easy to see how these things made her safer with her mother and father. But these same qualities made it so that she was forged, formed and made for relationships with people for whom there is only a “me”, not a “you”. Environments where her sole purpose is to serve others, regardless of the cost to herself. These adaptations also make her unsafe in her adult self out in the world. She is now obese and feels constantly incapable physically, so she feels no physical safety. She can’t assert boundaries, so no one knows what they are and so, her boundaries are constantly being violated by others and by herself. She says “Yes” to things that really should be a “No” for her. Her first instinct is to comply, when complying with the wrong person, has proven to be really unsafe. She is keeping herself alone in relationships because no one knows who she is, she doesn’t bring who she is to the table. She gravitates towards use dynamics, where no one really cares about her beyond the use they have for her. She has no inner compass, she threw it away to do what her mother wanted and thought was right, so she always needs someone else to tell her what to do. And this list goes on and on. Rose’s adaptations for safety have not bent her for success. Instead, they have bent her for unsafety.
Take a look at your own childhood. What were the unique specific pains and specific kinds of unsafety that were present in your childhood? What are some of the ways that you adapted to those specific pains and specific kinds of unsafety? How did those adaptations keep you safer and/or help you to meet your needs better? And from there, can you see the ways that it bent you towards unsafety? Can you see how it may have forged and formed you for a specific type of environment and relationship? Can you see how each of the specific adaptive strategies you employed could make you more unsafe?
To learn more about this whole concept, you can watch my video titled: How Your Adaptations Save Your Life, Only To Doom It.
Because you associate these adaptive strategies with safety, even though you are in fact getting safer by changing them, doing so will make you FEEL more unsafe. But changing these default safety strategies you adopted will make you far safer in the world. It will make it so that you can choose to be in different, healthier and safer relationships and environments. It will make it so that you can choose a method for safety that actually works for whatever situation you may find yourself in.
Because people are so relationally dependent and need relationships to thrive, abandonment is one of the very most painful things a person can experience. Because it is so painful, people have all kinds of strategies to avoid it. These strategies are not usually good ones. Today, we’re going to look at the most common and most detrimental adaptive strategy that people have to avoid abandonment.
The very most detrimental adaptive strategy that people have to avoid abandonment in relationships is to abandon parts of themselves. To understand this adaptive strategy, we need to begin in childhood. When we are young, our entire existence depends on our adult caregivers. But even when we grow up, we are a species that needs other people in order to thrive. Every person has dependency needs. And this is true for the totality of your life. This means, you have dependency needs as an adult. These are needs that you either cannot give yourself or that even if you can give them to yourself too, that does not remove the need get them from others. In order to thrive and be healthy on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level, you need these dependency needs to be met. Because of this, relationship security is one of the most important things in a person’s life. Aside from this, the single biggest cause of pain for people is other people. Throughout history and today, we have proved that we can harm each other and make each other very unsafe. For this reason, social confluence is a way we guarantee that we can stay safe from other people. What all this boils down to is that we use adaptive strategies in order to get our needs met and stay safe in this human world.
So, let’s say that a little boy is highly sensitive. And this child is born into a household with parents who have an issue with emotions, because they are afraid to feel negative emotion themselves. When the child’s sensitivities kick up and the child displays negative emotion as a result, the parents will not react well to this. This will be perceived as a rupture in closeness to the child. This response could range all the way from them displaying negative emotion in disapproval to outright shaming to punishment to isolating the child. Essentially, the child will feel the threat of abandonment by the people he or she needs and loves and depends on most. The child will get the message that he or she cannot have their sensitivity and have their parents at the same time. Their sensitivity is a threat to the relationship security with them and therefore their needs and safety. As a result, the child will abandon this aspect of themselves. They will suppress, deny, disown it and definitely not caretake that aspect of themselves. They will not own and caretake their sensitivity. As a result, they are no longer loving themselves.
Or let’s imagine that a little girl came down to a father that really wanted a boy and was disappointed to have a girl. In order to not be abandoned or feel abandoned by her father, she may disown her own femininity. When she does this, she will start to act like the boy she knows her father wants and reject anything “girly”. Every feminine trait gets rejected, suppressed, denied and disowned. None of the decisions she will make for herself or in relationships are conducive to her femininity. In fact, they are likely to be quite abusive to it.
When you think of how many parts of ourselves we can potentially abandon so as to not be abandoned by our parents, it is overwhelming. And this process does not just end with our parents. It extends to anyone with whom we want to not be abandoned by. You will see themes though that carry over from childhood. When we abandon aspects of ourselves, we don’t make decisions for ourself that are conducive to the wellbeing of those aspects. Just like a neglected, rejected and abandoned child, we are not doing ANY of the right things for these aspects of ourselves. And this includes in our relationships. We are likely to get into relationships with people who are not conducive to the wellbeing of these aspects of ourselves also. After all, using the example above, if we really owned our sensitivity, we would not put ourselves in a relationship with someone who didn’t like and didn’t caretake our sensitivity. When we don’t positively own parts of ourself, we end up in relationships with people who also don’t positively own those same parts of us. Rather, we end up with people who abandon them and perhaps abandon us entirely. That there is the sick irony of the situation. We abandon ourselves to avoid being abandoned by others. But instead, it dooms us to more abandonment by others.
To reverse this process, what you have to do, is to re-own the aspects of yourself that you have disowned and by doing so, to caretake them and start to think, speak, make decisions and act in their best interests.
To start identifying these abandoned parts of self, you can identify what about yourself you are ashamed of. The mechanisms of shame relate directly to the dis-ownership of parts of the self. If you want to understand more about this, you might like to check out my book titled: The Anatomy of Loneliness, which has an entire chapter on shame alone. You can also think back on your childhood to what you felt was disapproved of, rejected, opposed, denied or ignored in you by your parents and by your school and by your culture.
If you would like to level up this process of re-owning these parts of yourself, you can do parts work with them. For example, the woman in our previous example could do a parts work integration between the aspect of her that is her femininity and the aspect of her that abandons her femininity. To understand more about how to do this work, you can watch my video tited: Parts Work. What Is Parts Work and How To Do It.
Abandoning parts of yourself so as to not be abandoned by others, is something that nearly everyone in human society does. But it is a one-way ticket to living hell. A life of painful relationships and the building of a life that is not right for you. So, re-own those parts of yourself that you have abandoned and watch those right relationships and that right life for you start to manifest before your eyes.
The feeling of safety and security matters a lot to people. And people employ all kinds of strategies to try to feel safe and secure. This is even more true of women because women feel chronically far more unsafe in this world and in this human society than men do. But not all of these ways people try to find security, actually guarantee security. Today, we are going to talk about one of the most prevalent ways that women in today’s world feel a sense of security, but that is actually a false sense of security.
First, I’m going to tell you what this false security is and then I’m going to un-pack it for you. Women believe (and have been led to believe) that a man being in love with her and/or being sexually attracted to her, means that he is going to act in her best interests. That he has motive to take ownership of her wellbeing and lend himself to her wellbeing. This means protecting her from harm and ensuring that her needs are met. This is far more than an association that women have formed. It is an assumed given. And this, creates a sense of security.
For many, many women, the minute that she can tell a man is “into her”, she feels more secure because even on a subconscious, visceral level, it is a given for her that because he is into her, she now is an advocate and defender of her wellbeing, should she need it.
This belief is engrained into the fabric of our species at this point. If you look back through time, when men took over the world and women were made into property, there was no way for a woman to secure her wellbeing without a man. If she was lucky, that security was guaranteed by her father and or brothers. But ultimately, her wellbeing was only secured by a man taking ownership of her. And for a huge portion of human cultures, a man taking ownership of a woman was down to whether he was in love with her and was sexually attracted to her. We like to think that this is part of our pasts. But I’ve got to break it to you that women being able to secure their wellbeing in society in any other way than through a man, is so recent, it would make your head spin. For example, let’s just look at America. It was in my parent’s generation 1974 that the equal credit opportunity passed, which meant that for the first time in history, a woman could sign by herself on any credit application without a man having to co-sign with her. And just two years ago, in 2022, the supreme court ruled that the constitution does not confer any right to abortion. Overruling both Roe Vs. Wade of 1973 and Planned Parenthood v. Casey of 1992. And it doesn’t matter what your stance on abortion is, the reality is, it created huge issues with a woman having rights related to her own body and therefore, a woman’s ability to secure her own wellbeing. And guess what? You can’t just undo that in a generation or two or three. So, we are in a transition right now. And it’s one hell of a painful one. If you look around the world, you will see that we do not live in a world where it is easy for women to secure their wellbeing in other ways than through the venue of a man. We do not live in a society where equality is a reality. And yet, women have more opportunities than they did. And society is aggressively pushing towards gender equality. Well, most of society. At the current rate, gender equality (not to be confused with gender sameness is in fact still centuries away. Need meeting in relationships in a society that is now completely focused on equality between genders means that energy exchanges are not about gender anymore. So they are no longer straightforward. It’s simply about need meeting in general. But because of this, no one knows where to actually get their needs met, because the old ‘gender roles’ way of getting the needs met, doesn’t work anymore.
And despite the reality that women should never be considered objects or property, there was a tiny little unforeseen downside to women not being seen as property anymore. And that is that to generalize, both the negative and positive elements of ownership have been dropped by men. Most people have a negative relationship with the concept of ownership. But there is such a thing as positive and negative ownership. And when people take positive ownership of things (and thus take responsibility for them) they caretake the wellbeing of whatever they are taking ownership of and responsibility for. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Own People! How To Take Ownership Of your Relationships. This drop of ownership left women to fend for themselves, when fending for themselves was never what women were asking for.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, the idea that a man being in love with a woman and/or sexually attracted to her, means that he is going to act in her best interests and keep her safe and secure is reinforced by all forms of entertainment. Think back to Disney. There were no good Samaritan princes. They rescued the damsel in distress and protected the princess because they were in love with them. This idea echoes through books, verbal stories, movies, TV Shows, commercials, newspapers, magazines, advertisements and religious doctrine. Society has been very clear… if you want to be safe and secure, a man must want you. He must be in love with you. He must be attracted to you.
What does all this boil down to? Men being seen as the venue through which a woman can ensure her wellbeing. Men being the venue through which she can trust she will be safe and secure in this world. And therefore, women being desperate to gain security by doing whatever it takes for a man to be sexually attracted to them and fall in love with them. Keep in mind that when a woman does her best to look and act in a way that would make her attractive to men and thus make a man fall in love with her, so that she can have security, it is a form of manipulation. Manipulation is all about not feeling like you can go for your needs directly, so you have to go about getting them in a roundabout way.
The security that women feel when a man is sexually attracted to them and in love with them is actually a false security. If it were not a false security, women would not have a million stories of being harmed in their relationships with men. Here is why it is a false security…
Whether a man will or will not act in a woman’s best interests and take responsibility for her wellbeing, has nothing to do with whether he is in love with her or attracted to her or not.
Firstly, we need to talk about what it means to be in-love. To be in love with someone is not the same as to love someone. The issue with the English language is that we have one word, love, to represent a myriad of different states of being. To be in love is a feeling state of wanting someone. It is positive appreciation of them. It is attraction to them. Sometimes it is attachment to them. It compels you into a relationship with someone. It feels good to you to be near them, so you want to do it again and again. When we are in love, the reward centers of our brain are completely activated. Our senses are stimulated and they drive us towards closeness with the person. But there are so many whys behind falling in love that you don’t see. From pheromones to suppressed parts of the personality to needs a person thinks the other will meet for them to getting caught up in the biology of our reward centers to esoteric influences. To be in love is in fact a self-focused state. It can go away. Love on the other hand, is true caring about the other. It is a conscious choice to include someone as a part of you. And by doing so, you cannot go against their best interests without harming yourself. It is a choice to act in the best interests of not just yourself, but also them.
To generalize, there are two pillars to a relationship. Both pillars may be present in a relationship. Or, there may be only one. One of those pillars is love. True caring about the other. The conscious choice to include the other person as a part of you and to be an active advocate to their wellbeing. To act in their best interests. Love is a very hard practice for people. People have egos and thus, tend to spend their time stuck in their own best interests. The other pillar is energy exchange. This is really about mutual need meeting in a relationship. What I get out of being in a relationship with you, and what you get out of being in a relationship with me. You see energy exchange in all forms of symbiosis. Some people may also call this a transaction. Energy exchange is an element of every relationship. But, for the vast majority of people, this energy exchange is totally unconscious. Most of the time the energy exchanges in a relationship are hidden and assumed. And, people only tend to act in each other’s best interests when the energy exchange or transaction is carried out and maintained. The relationships that are harmonious, have an underlying energy exchange that is working for both people. Now a days, living a life in human society is SO complex and so many of the old structures for energy exchange between men and women are gone. So, there are LOTS of reasons that an energy exchange in a relationship might fall apart.
To simplify this, relationships are mostly about mutual need meeting. This means that when a woman has a man that is in love with her, she assumes that she meets a need for him that will guarantee he will act in her best interests. But all this meaning that a woman ads to the experience of a man being in love with her and being sexually attracted to her, may not reflect the actual meaning of it.
The most common thing it means if a man is in love with a woman and is sexually attracted to a woman is this: He thinks she will meet a specific need or desire he has, or that he will get that need or desire met through her somehow. It would be easy to assume that because he sees her as the venue through which a certain need, or multiple needs will be met, that he will look out for her wellbeing. After all, one wants to preserve the fountain from which they drink. But let’s say for example that a man is looking for status through a relationship with a woman, the minute that he secures the relationship, his need for status has already been met. So, why does he need to caretake her best interests any more than is necessary to keep her around? Very important to know that if a man is in love with a woman because of a need or desire he thinks he can get through her somehow, lots of what he is doing for her is not something he likes to do. It is a so that. They are SO THAT he can get those things he wants and needs. And this is a recipe for disaster. Because once the “so that” aim is achieved, the intrinsic motive to do those things for her starts to dwindle. And if the “so that” aim isn’t achieved, the motivation to do those things also dwindles.
In addition to this, many men provide security for a woman at a price. This is a price that most women are unaware of, because people in general are rarely consciously aware of their subconscious transactions and even if they are, people are unlikely to overtly share them. If women knew what this cost was going to be, they would not feel as secure.
So that you can understand this better, here is an example. Juliet had a mother that was always focused on work and a disengaged father. As a result, she was super emotionally neglected. And, she was molested by a teacher for several years. She could find no way to get anyone to really caretake her wellbeing. But when she turned into a teen, she became hyper aware that the other girls and women who were being obsessed over and who were being taken care of and who were being protected, were girls and women who had boys and men that were in love with them. So, she studied what made those girls desirable and modeled herself after that. She became obsessed with her looks. She started dressing in sexy clothes. She learned how to flirt. She put on an air of confidence. She became demonstratively affectionate to the boys. Sure enough, she ended up with her first boyfriend. And she felt so much more safe and secure. She finally had some of her needs met and she finally had someone who would rush to her side and to her defense if she got into problems or was facing threats. She had attention, engagement, belonging, protection, containment etc. The thing was, this first boyfriend did not keep it up. In fact, he abandoned her for another girl he fell in love with. So, she jumped into a new relationship with a boy who would keep her safe and secure. A boy who was full of rage towards the first boyfriend who had treated her so badly. The second one, an exchange student, was good for a while, until he left the country. And she jumped into another relationship. And so on and so forth this went all the way through her adulthood. Juliet’s belief that a man is the venue through which a woman can ensure her wellbeing and be safe and secure in this world, was reinforced by everything. TV shows, movies, books etc. As well as her own life observations and experiences. After all, she watched men be unwilling to lift a finger to help women succeed, unless they got to be with them sexually. And she watched men be totally uninterested in her talent, only fixated on wanting her to be theirs. And she watched the difference between women whose husbands bought them cars and put them in beautiful homes and women who were hard and stressed all the time, because they had no man in their life. And she got into lots of situations where she was unsafe, where the person who came to her rescue was the man in her life. After all, her father and mother would not bail her out of trouble. Well, Juliet was married four times. And one day, it dawned on her that every man she had ended up in a relationship with, had eventually gone directly against her best interests. They had abandoned her, stolen her money, cheated on her, become emotionally abusive and the list goes on.
It was then that she had an epiphany. Her method of getting security through a man, had not actually worked. Many of those men that were her partner, were still in love with her and were still sexually attracted to her. And admitted it openly. And this could only mean one thing. That a man being in love with you and being sexually attracted to you, is actually no guarantee that he will act in your best interests. Juliet was going to have to find different methods for feeling safe and secure in the world. She installed a security system and got one of her best friends to move in. She started looking into finances and learned how to make safe and smart financial decisions. And in the next relationship she got into, she directly told him that what she was looking for, is someone to protect her from emotional harm and someone to prioritize her. And it was understood that no matter how much she cared about them, if they made it a pattern to not do these two things, she would end the relationship. With the exception of three men she dated, every other man appreciated the straightforward expression of exactly what her expectations were, so they could decide whether that was something they could sign up for, or not.
Now that you understand this dynamic, there are also two big chinks in the chain of this ‘security through a man being in love with me dynamic’ that are worth mentioning. In male - female relationships, one of the biggest issues is that men tend to not perceive the threats that women perceive. Given that for so many women, the energy exchange they are looking for is safety and security (be it emotional, mental or physical) the man (the one offering that end of the energy exchange) had better perceive the threat and respond to it. Otherwise, he isn’t answering to the actual need and so, he isn’t actually keeping up his end of the assumed bargain, whether he agreed to it consciously or not.
A final thing to consider is that this whole dynamic we’ve been talking about, perpetuates separation within society. If the source of a woman’s security is a man being sexually attracted to her and being in love with her, this makes other women a threat to her. She thinks she has to insulate the relationship with him and exclude others. And this reinforces the binary relationship system as well as the nuclear family, neither of which is natural or healthy for a physical human. If we were living in groups, like what is natural for us and our needs, security and safety would be something that is provided by all members of the group to every other member of the group. This is a much more secure and safe system.
So, what’s the moral of the story? For the sake of this conversation, it doesn’t matter how things should or shouldn’t be. The reality is that a man being in love with and/or sexually attracted to a woman, does not mean that he is going to act in her best interests. It does not mean that he will caretake her wellbeing. His decision to do that, is separate from whether he is in love with and or sexually attracted to her.
On top of this, mastering the two pillars of relationship (consciously choosing to love each other as well as conscious and direct energy exchanges) is the future of human relationships. You can only successfully do that when you see that the current way that you are trying to secure an energy exchange, doesn’t guarantee that the need you have will be met. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Be Consciously Transactional. Why Every Relationship Is Transactional. If you are a woman and you recognize yourself getting sucked into this false security. Really consider the following: What threats are you afraid of and therefore what type of security are you looking for? What might be the best way to go directly for security relative to each unique threat and therefore each security need? Consider answers that involve a man, potentially even a male partner. And consider answers that don’t.
Disidentification is a critical element of spiritual awakening. Because it is so important, people assume that it can only be good. But there is a shadow side to disidentification. Let’s look at this shadow side of disidentification so that you don’t succumb to it.
First, let’s talk about what disidentification is. Identity is the condition of being oneself. One… separate self. Another word for this is ego. You cannot have a sense of self without also simultaneously having a sense of other. Whenever we associate something with our self, we identify with it. It becomes part of us. We make it the same as us. This is what attachment really is. It is identification. Before people start down the path of awakening, they are completely identified with their temporal self. The temporal self being this human self that they call by their name. This means they think they are their body, they are their emotions, they are their thoughts, they are whatever relates to their mortal, human self in this one lifetime. Most people are totally ignorant to their non-physical aspect; the one who created the incarnation that they are calling by their name. By the way, people use many names for this aspect. Names like the soul, the higher self, numen, stream of consciousness, eternal witness, essence, spirit, immaterial force and so many more in different languages. They don’t understand that their temporal self is a creation and expression of their non-physical aspect and so, they mistake the temporal self to be the totality of who they are. Really, you could say that a person is two main points of perspective. Non-physical and physical or spiritual and temporal. On the path of awakening, a person begins to gain awareness of their non-physical aspect and starts to disidentify with their ego (their temporal self in this life).
This dis-identification is a profound thing. To dis-identify with something, you must identify it as different to yourself. You must see it as “other” than you. For example, if you would like to dis-identify from your own pain, all you must do is to conceptualize of your pain as a separate entity and when you experience pain, observe the pain as if you were watching this separate entity reacting. In this way, you do not take the pain personally. When you dis-identify, you become able to see things much more objectively. Disidentification allows you to be more aware of the non-physical elements at play in any given situation, it makes it so that you are the observer of your own thoughts, it makes it easy to change beliefs, it tends to make you less emotionally reactive, it allows you to not resist the ever-changing conditions of your body. It allows you to change roles and be more flexible as a being. It causes you to be able to let go of what no longer serves you, change and adopt what does. It helps you to let go of the past and be far more present in the here and now. There are many more benefits to disidentification. Because of what it is, it makes people feel better. And because of this, it can be used as a coping mechanism and drag us deep into the shadow expression of dis-identification.
When people are in enough emotional pain, sometimes they detach from their emotions all together. This is sometimes called emotional blunting. And sometimes when people are in enough physical pain, they disconnect from their body, this is often called dissociation. This is to intentionally create a separation between our consciousness and the thing that is in pain, so that we don’t experience that pain. If we understand this concept, we can then move to an understanding of the shadow side of dis-identification. It is when we identify the problem that is causing us pain as being our temporal, human self. And so, we choose to separate ourself from it, so as to get away from it. It is radical self dis-ownership. Our temporal human self is in pain and we don’t want to be experiencing that pain anymore and so, we disconnect from it and detach from it and dis-identify with it and no longer consider it to be a part of us. This is the most extreme form of self-abandonment that a person can exact upon themselves. They no longer see any aspect of their ego or temporal form as “theirs”. And as a result, remain disconnected from those things, deny them, refuse to acknowledge them, renounce them, minimize them and see those things as invalid to them. No greater cruelty can be exacted upon your temporal self. And as if this is not bad enough, the doing so is often justified with spiritual beliefs and even spiritual truths. Things like: “The purpose of life is to transcend the illusion of the physical plane”. Or “the body is simply a vessel for the divine”. Or “you are not your body and you are not your mind”. Or “strong emotion only arises as the result of attachment to that which is not you.” etc. The shadow side of disidentification is a deep state of resistance because the entire process is done out of resistance to the self. Resistance to the ego.
This coping mechanism of dis-identification is absolutely rampant in the religious and spiritual communities because the focus of these communities is the non-temporal and so many people within these communities are using religion and spirituality for pain relief. And because it is working for them to feel less pain using this coping mechanism, they are all encouraging each-other to do so and presenting each other beliefs that support the idea that you should do so. These communities support this coping mechanism in the same way that bars support the use of alcohol as a coping mechanism.
The absolute tragedy about this is that people who are effectively using dis-identification as a coping mechanism to blunt their conscious experience of their temporal self, are often considered by others to be the most awakened and enlightened of them all. They are considered to be transcendent and “above it all”.
So that you can understand this better, I’ll give you an example. Eeshan grew up in rural India. He was very, very smart from the get go and because of this, could not simply accept and believe anything that he had not experienced himself. He was fairly non-compliant. His father would consistently berate him. And his mother was very manipulative to try to get Eeshan to do what she wanted him to do for her sake. She was especially prone to victim control dramas. His grandfather, who was his only safe attachment figure, died when he was seven and as a result, the family had to move to a major city and he was put in school for the first time, which for Eeshan, was a jail. Eeshan ended up in more and more and more pain until he became suicidal. One day in his early twenties, he wandered into a Ganesha temple and felt immediate relief. He became interested in studying about spiritual philosophy. As he did this, he met many gurus.
Eeshan had an epiphany one day that there were two parts of himself. The part of himself that was miserable, that he couldn’t live with anymore and the part of him that was watching or able to observe that part. He came to the conclusion that the one that was watching, was his real self. His soul. The Eeshan that existed before this life and that will exist after. And he came to the conclusion that the other part was his ego. Not his real self. This caused an inner shift whereby he drastically identified with his non-physical self and drastically disidentified from his temporal self. His “unhappy self”. He no longer saw any of his temporal self that he calls by the name Eeshan as him or as his. He radically disowned it. This is not my body and my body is not who I am. It is not me that is in pain, it is this ego and this emotional body that is in pain and that is conditioned in such a way to stay in pain. These are not my emotions. They are just reactions that I am watching happen in this body that isn’t me. When Eeshan would experience an emotion, he would not see as ‘his’ emotion. He would minimize it and see as totally invalid to him, refusing to engage with the language of felt perception. As a result, he may have been observant of the things going on within his temporal self, but he was unresponsive to it. He was dismissive towards anything that related to his temporal self. He did not act in a considerate, caring and loving way towards it. Eeshan had effectively disowned his human self.
The thing is, in this state of disconnection and separation from his own temporal self, he was very, very non-reactive. He felt very at peace. Truly, he felt very little. He spent all of his conscious energy in the non-physical planes due to being solely identified with his non-physical aspect. And as such, people started to regard him as someone to follow and emulate. A teacher. Eeshan gained a very large following and went on to teach people that the solution to their suffering, is to dis-identify from their temporal self. But he was not simply teaching them to dis-identify from their temporal self. He was teaching them to disconnect from it, to dismiss it and to disown it.
Here is a rule that you need to follow so as to not fall into this shadow side of dis-identification. There can be no healthy dis-identification without radical self-ownership. You cannot dis-identify from the ego without owning the ego as a cherished part of you. You need to be loving, caretaking, responsive, valuing of all aspects of your temporal self. You must integrate physical and nonphysical, temporal and non-temporal. The point of expansion of consciousness is not to wake up from some illusion and realize that you are not your body and you are not your emotions and you are not your mind and you are not the you that you call by your name and you are not human. The point of expansion of consciousness is to understand that you are your body, and at the same time, you are not. You are your emotions and at the same time, you are not. You are your mind and at the same time, you are not. You are human and at the very same time, you are not. you are the you that you call by your name, and at the very same time, you are not. You must hold dichotomy. As such, one of the intentions of dis-identification from the temporal self must be to better own and caretake and integrate the aspect of you that is temporal. The you that you call by your name. This is meant to be a harmonious marriage between your non-physical aspect and your temporal, human self in this life.
The hardest part of spiritual practice is the complimentary contradictions inherent in a multidimensional universe. Ultimately, the highest truth is that all is one. The painter is one with the painting. And so, any form of dis-identification must not be done to enhance ‘self’ and ‘otherness’ in this universe. Nothing is other than you, not your mind, not your body, not your emotions, not other people, not your kitchen table, not your dog, not the clouds nor the cement on the sidewalk. But to even see, much less experience and live in alignment with this truth, we must first dis-identify with the very things that are keeping us locked in our own intense sense of identity.
As people, we are rarely wherever we are with our full attention. Usually, our physical body is somewhere, but our focus is somewhere else entirely. For example, it is on the future, focused on something we are worried about or on something that we want. Or it is on the past, focused on something that happened. Or it is dissecting concepts. These applications of the mind are very powerful and serve great purpose, especially when they are done consciously. But when the mind is focused elsewhere than in the present moment (wherever we are) we are not present. We are not really there for the life experience that is occurring in the here and now. This is a problem because the present moment is the heartbeat of life experience. For this reason, today I want to share with you my favorite exercise for getting into the present moment.
This exercise is an NNE experience. NNE standing for noticing, naming and experiencing process. And version one of this exercise is to do it as a walking meditation. To do this exercise, you will go for a slow, deliberate walk. On this walk, you will put all of your attention on the elements of the present moment one by one. And you will name each of them. And you will experience being in the presence of them. For example, if you see pebbles on the trail, mentally say to yourself “pebbles” and notice how those pebbles look and how it feels to be in the presence of those pebbles. If you wish, you can stop and pick some up to experience the physical feeling of the pebbles. If you see a bird, you mentally say to yourself “bird”. And you experience being in the presence of the bird. Noticing every detail of the bird and attuning to the sound the bird may be making, noticing how the sound that bird is making feels in your body and how it feels emotionally to be in the presence of that bird. If you notice a thought arising within you, name the thought. For example, if you think a thought about needing to run an errand later, mentally say to yourself “Thought about picking up detergent at the store.” And rather than getting sucked into the future scenario, simply experience the way that thoughts like that arise in the mind, as if you are watching the arising of that thought simply being something that occurred in the present moment, just as you would the sound of a car going by. You are the observer and experiencer of the thought having occurred. You do not insert your consciousness inside of that thought. If you feel an emotion or a sensation arise within your body, mentally name the emotion or sensation. For example, “buzzing in the heart area” or “Irritation flaring up”. And experience that sensation that is occurring within your body, as if you are experiencing a feeling flavor in your body. If you feel a physical sensation, name it. For example, “cold fingers”. And really experience the sensation of having cold fingers, as if you were brand new to earth trying out a body for the very first time, really noticing all the sensory details of that experience.
So, if you put this all together, on this walk, naming things might look something like this: “Sunlight filtering through trees, dust, blue sky, compression sensation in knee joints, shade, sound of a car, frustration with this exercise, sea gull, sound of wings flapping, dog running, bright color green, air against my skin, soreness in my back, blue sky, moving cloud, needles on pine tree, bark, shade, a turn in the path, sound of a dog bark, a thought about what to eat for dinner, whooshing sound of a car, feeling like someone is coming up behind me, turning around to look behind me, bicycle, metal spokes, sound of pebbles on rubber tires, dust in the air, smell of cologne, beautiful plant, purple petals, smell of pine, feet against shoes, shoes against ground, sparkles on water etc. And with each one of those things, as you named them, you would be experiencing them, as if for the very first time, even if they seem or feel familiar to you. Keep in mind that it’s totally fine to name and notice the same things again and again.
While you are doing this exercise, if your mind becomes preoccupied with something outside of the present moment, such as a concept or idea or something that happened earlier or some worry or thought about the future, you are simply going to direct it back towards something physical in your vicinity in the present moment and name it and experience it. And pick the exercise back up from there.
Version two of this exercise is to do this exercise wherever you are, no matter what you are doing, for example, sitting on a couch at home or doing a hobby of yours or spending time with friends or family or while you are driving etc. You can use this exercise any time you want to be fully present in the here and now of any life experience you are having. And by practicing this exercise, you will be training yourself into the habit of being present in the here and now.
Just to name a few things, doing this exercise can make it so you are fully in and truly present to what it is to be alive. It can make you aware of a richness of existence on earth previously un-noticed by you. It can decrease your anxiety and stress. Make you more present in relationships which improves them. Help you to move forward emotionally from past wounding. Increase your emotional intelligence. Heal self-abandonment patterns. Enhance perceptual awareness. Help you to disidentify from the ego. Increase your experience of joy. Increase feelings of safety. Give you greater access to objective perspective. Increase your capacity to identify better solutions to problems you may be facing, enhance your creativity. Slow down mental activity, bring a sense of peacefulness and restore a sense of child-like wonder for the world within you. So, make this exercise one of your new habitual practices and watch what happens.
Life unfolds in the present moment. One of the deepest spiritual practices of all, is to be truly present for and with that unfolding.
Human society the world over has values and those values are ranked. This includes what society values in men and in women. And it is absolutely a reality that the thing human society values the most in women, is physical beauty. We may not like that fact. We may think it should be different. We may argue that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We may point to body positive marketing campaigns. You may argue that you don’t value physical beauty in a woman above other more important things. But all of this resistance is not going to get us anywhere because it is a refusal to accept that this is still the way things are. It is still a reality that in the world today, the most valued thing in a woman is physical beauty.
What does all this mean? It means that when a woman is physically beautiful, people see value in her. She has a thing of power. She is esteemed within society. And so, people assume that she can have it all and that she is happy. Or at least she should be. All the focus and attention in society is placed on why it is so hard to be a woman who is not considered physically beautiful. That is a story that has been told over and over again. You already know that story. But you don’t know the other one. Because of this, for the sake of awareness, today I’m going to outline for you why it is so hard to be a beautiful woman.
Before we come into this time space reality as a physical human and we are choosing the incarnation that will serve our expansion the best, we are observing the upsides and downsides to each choice. Any single thing we choose comes with upsides and downsides. We could call this contrast. We opt into certain contrast by opting into any specific incarnation. And most people do not know that all those who opt into the incarnation of a beautiful woman, are opting into the contrast of decreasing their likelihood of ever finding a compatible mate. The reason for this is down to the fact that society values beauty so much in women, that a person (especially a man) can increase their own self-esteem and societal esteem by being with a beautiful woman. A beautiful woman is something that everyone will desire to have. But all of those people who will desire to have her, are not all compatible to her. And those who are wanting her primarily for self-esteem and societal-esteem, (which is the majority of them) will not be compatible to her. So, a beautiful woman is trying to find a needle in a haystack. The problem is, in order to get her, all of the people who want her will pretend to be that needle. And so, what beautiful women have in their hands is a recipe for relationship hell. I need you to stop for a moment here because you must remember that life is about relationships. And painful relationships, means a painful life. And this leads me to the next point.
Because the subconscious transaction that most partners (especially men) have with beautiful women is “I’m doing this for esteem… I’m doing this so being with you makes me feel good and better about myself and to make it so other people think highly of me”, if a beautiful woman does anything that goes against this unexpressed and un-agreed to transaction, she will find herself in conflicts. Her partner will change their mind about her being what they want. And then ultimately, she will lose the relationship. And what it takes to break this hidden transaction, is almost nothing, such as having human needs, being honest (in this case we are talking about negative feedback to her partner) and behaving or dressing in a way that isn’t seemly. A beautiful woman is an object in other people’s worlds. Like a trophy. It is very hard for a beautiful woman to find a person who wants an actual person to person relationship with her. There is a big, big difference between being lusted over and being loved.
It is a complete misconception that beautiful women are never rejected. In fact, they are one of the most rejected groups of people on this planet. It may not look like they are being rejected when they have people lined up around the block to be with them, but look closer. No one knows who she is and isn’t. Everyone is lined up around the block because of the overlay fantasy they have about a beautiful woman and what it will give them to be with her. They are in a relationship with their pre-conceived idea of her. And she cannot live up to that idea they have. And when she doesn’t live up to it, she will be rejected. And that happens over and over and over again.
As people, by the time we reach an age where we are ready to date, we have been set up by the process of socialization to be inauthentic. We spend our time trying to employ a strategy for how to get someone we want, rather than spending our time advertising who we genuinely are, so that a person who would value us can actually recognize us. And most of all, we have been set up to dupe anyone that we date. This duping pattern is a sad reality of relationships in general, no matter what people look like. If you want to learn about this pattern, you can watch two of my videos titled: What is the Dupe Pattern? And The Great Dupe of Dating.
The duping pattern is 1,000 times worse in the lives of beautiful women. People, especially men, will go to great lengths to figure out everything they can about a beautiful woman they are interested in, so as to pretend to be exactly what she wants. So that they can attain her. And then, either quickly or slowly, they drop the façade. And the beautiful woman ends up in the opposite of what she signed up for.
Being a beautiful woman is an intensely isolating experience full of fragile connections. Let’s talk about insecurity in both men and women and how this leads to a beautiful woman’s isolation. People are very insecure in general, especially so when it comes to their partners. So, with beautiful women, you will see the following pattern: Male friends will be friends with her, that is until they get into a relationship with another woman. At which point, she becomes a threat to the other woman. And in order to maintain the security with the woman they are with, they will break off connection with the beautiful woman. And female friends will be friends with them, that is until they get into a relationship with another man and fear that the man will fall in love with her instead, at which point she becomes a threat to their relationship. And in order to maintain security with the man they are with, they will pull away from the relationship with the beautiful woman. It is a misconception that the most beautiful women enjoy social popularity and have lots of friends. In fact, they have very few if any actual friends who will navigate the insecurity elements that beauty brings to the table and who will commit to holding on to the relationship.
Jilted lover dynamics. It is a real argument as to whether it is possible for a man to simply remain friends with a beautiful woman without falling in love with her and without developing sexual attraction to her and wanting more. And when a beautiful woman rejects a man in any way, his ego is often so wounded that he will turn against her as if she is an enemy and try to wound her back. This is also the case when a woman is actually in a relationship with a man and ends the relationship. It is more common that break ups are not amicable because of this. You’ll see all the manifestations of a jilted lover syndrome in the people around her. Yes, these dynamics can take place in a same sex relationship too. It is not emotionally safe to have a jilted lover. And often, it isn’t physically safe either.
Beauty is a trigger to the egos of other people. Similar to money and fame. It activates the human ego. When the ego is triggered, it creates zero sum games, whereby it does not consider the other person’s best interests. As a result, beautiful females are taught systematically that they cannot trust others, because people so often play zero sum games with them. A beautiful woman does not have to do anything to upset other people’s self-concepts other than to exist. For example, simply existing can make other women feel bad about themselves. ALL of the negative manifestations of the human ego are amplified in those who are around a beautiful woman. Here are just some examples: Power games and struggles, jealousy, resentment, envy, defensiveness, unfriendly competition, blame, criticism, judgment, bragging, the fight for superiority, parasitic dynamics, use, projections and betrayal.
And as if this wasn’t bad enough, people make the beautiful woman responsible to do things to calm the ego reactions of other people, for example to tone down their beauty so other woman can feel good about themselves or to not act friendly to men, so they don’t feel led on or so their partners don’t feel insecure. The ego being triggered is not a good or safe experience for anyone. The way that people’s egos are triggered by a beautiful woman makes for a very painful and dangerous life for her. If you don’t believe me, just think back to the witch trials, when men felt out of control of their own arousal near these women and as a result of it, decided they were bewitched. And as a result, these women ended up burned alive and drowned. And just because doing this is now illegal in most places, society has invented new ways, especially in the era of cancel culture, to “burn and drown” women.
Society has revolted against the idea that what is valuable about a woman is beauty. While at the same time, not actually managing to change it. And so, society is a huge mixed message. But this revolt has caused a lot of pain to beautiful women because it has made them simultaneously valued and also the villains. And as if living in this mixed message were not painful enough, it has made it so that beautiful women are consistently fed with negative messaging. Messaging like society needs to show beautiful women that they are not all that important or special. Messaging like because she is beautiful, she’s crap on the inside and shouldn’t actually be desired by men. She is dumb or not nice. This is in contrast to the archetype of the fat or unattractive, but good-natured woman, who should actually be desired by men. And because so many of the body positive campaigns are being spearheaded by women who spent their life not being considered beautiful, and whom feel a high degree of pain about the women who were, so many of them have created anti-beautiful women undertones to these campaigns and movements. Just like the women’s rights movement took on anti-man undertones. They seek to rip the power away from beautiful women, as if it is beautiful women who are the bad guy in the story, who must be pulled from their pedestals. Beautiful women are also always inundated with the presumption that they are stupid. People cannot wrap their minds around the idea of a beautiful woman unpacking deep, philosophical concepts or winning a Nobel prize for physics. In the same vein, society has no interest in hearing about the pains and sorrows of beautiful women. Their sorrows attract scorn. Their pain is treated like the tears of the king. Like beautiful women are too blessed to be hurt. So, their pain is never seen, heard, felt or acknowledged.
Being a beautiful woman is like living in a fish bowl or being an animal at a zoo. You attract attention, and a lot of it. This means you always have the pressure of other people’s attention any time you step out into the world. Every move you make is being watched and judged. You are under a social microscope.
Because beauty is intimidating, most of the people who are willing to approach a beautiful woman are people who are not intimidated and also rescuers who wait for a beautiful woman to be in trouble to make their move. This increases the odds of a beautiful woman being approached by and getting into a relationship with a person with dangerous psychology. Such as narcissists, sociopaths and other people on the anti-social spectrum. And rescuers will wait until the beautiful woman is harmed to make their move. But they have such low self-esteem that to be secure in a relationship, they need the object of their fancy to remain “on the floor” and dysfunctional in some way. Thus, they will employ all kinds of tactics to keep the person they rescue incapacitated and in need of them. There are so many wonderful people who the beautiful woman will never meet, because they are too intimidated to strike up a relationship with her. Also, several studies have shown that people tend to move further away from a beautiful woman on the pathway or sidewalk. Creating much larger distance in common social interactions for beautiful women.
People strip beautiful women of their merit. No matter how excellent they may be or how hard they may have worked to get to the level of success they have achieved, people negate this and assume that their success was handed or given to them because of how attractive they are. It is a sad reality statistically that beautiful women are less likely to be hired for high level jobs that require authority and competence. And it is also statistical that if you are more beautiful than the person of the same sex who is hiring you for a job, your chances of getting the job are abysmal.
Many beautiful women never discover who they really are. Because for many of them, from day one, all the attention and emphasis is put on the way they look. They are led to believe that the only thing that matters is that. Their entire identity therefore revolves around their looks. They are never helped and directed to turn their attention inside themselves to discover who they are, their boundaries, their likes and dislikes, their other aptitudes and interests etc. Their unique character is not unwrapped, like it is in other children and teens. They are not given the grounds to develop a personality outside of the one that other people project onto them. And this leads to a feeling of emptiness and also inevitable identity and life crisis.
Beautiful women are usually always the ones that are blamed when it comes to infidelity concerns. For example, if a man directs his attentions towards a beautiful woman or cheats on his partner with a beautiful woman, it is the beautiful woman who is blamed for it, as if she is the problem for having been tempting or enticing. People also blame the beautiful women for the bad things that happen to her, such as being taken advantage of sexually because of being sexually attractive, rather than the person who is the one taking advantage. Many beautiful women have been blamed for being sexually harassed and even raped and incest. As if being beautiful is the instigation. In line with this, when you are physically attractive, being friendly is almost always percieved as flirtation.
Being beautiful effects the quality of your medical care. People link good looks with health. This means symptoms, pain, illness and ailments are taken less seriously when people are good looking. Medical professionals can miss a whole lot because of this bias. The medical conditions of a beautiful woman are often minimized or ignored. And it doesn’t take genius to see how much of a problem this is. This is an extreme problem when a beautiful person needs mental health or medical care for anything related to body-image issues. A beautiful woman’s body-image issues, no matter how severe, are immediately brushed off, mocked and scoffed at. They are not taken seriously and so they are not addressed.
Constant sexual harassment. A beautiful woman is subject to relentless sexual harassment. Things like being touched against her will, sexual verbal commentary, sexual gestures, pressuring, their path being blocked so they can’t get away, people touching them accidentally on purpose, predatory sexual ogling, lewd jokes made at their expense, being followed, and sexual advances despite it being made clear that those advances are unwanted.
Beautiful women are led to believe that the only thing people value about her, is her looks. This is painful because she doesn’t feel loved for anything else. And while this causes her pain and she wishes it were different, it simultaneously makes her desperate to maintain the only thing she was ever taught was desirable about her. So, there is a deep fear of losing her looks. This turns into a new kind of hell the older that beautiful women get. Because basing someone’s value on something that society also says goes away with age, means that a beautiful woman will be desirable for a time, and then be forgotten about and no longer valued, like an old toy a child is obsessed with and then grows tired of playing with. This leads to so much emotional pain and can lead a beautiful woman down the path of desperately trying to maintain her youth and beauty.
And while we are calling out painful realities to accept, there is definitely a scale when it comes to degrees of beauty. Why is this important? Because relative to all of these patterns, the more beautiful a woman is, the more intense these patterns get and the worse these downsides get.
Becoming aware means perceiving the full reality of things. And people are not perceiving the full reality of what it is to be a beautiful woman. The pain of beautiful women is usually completely unseen. Hence all the focus today on “pretty privilege”. Well, what you are calling “pretty privilege” comes with a cost… a cost most people would never actually choose to pay, if they actually saw it.
Even though they don’t see it about themselves, the majority of parents want to control their child. They want the power to make their child’s behavior be what they want it to be and make the course of events in that child’s life be what they want it to be, and for the sake of their own best interests. Essentially, they want to make their child conform to what they, as the parent wants and needs. And parents use all kinds of manipulative parenting tactics to achieve this aim. Today, I am going to make you aware of one of these manipulation tactics. It is a manipulation tactic that adults use on adults to control them as well. But it is particularly prevalent in the parent-child dynamic. The recognition of this pattern can go a long way towards not only breaking free from control, but also towards increasing your self-esteem.
To generalize, it tends to be hard for most parents to differentiate between their own best interests and their child’s best interests. They tend to imagine that what they want and need and what is good for the child, is one and the same, even when it isn’t. And because each and every one of our human egos are desperate to see itself and be seen as good and right, we can easily hide our own self-centered motives under the belief that what we are doing, is for the best interests of our child, when it is really for our own best interests. This is why, as parents, we need to be so very conscious about whether something is actually best for our child, or whether it is best for us. Because if we can’t differentiate this, we run the risk of controlling our child for the sake of our own best interests.
One of the unfortunate ways that parents control their child, is through the Cut Down for Control technique. The pattern works like this: A parent cuts their child down to size (which means to humble them by deflating their sense of self-worth, potential, power, value or importance) so as to keep their self-esteem low enough that the child will continue seeking to earn the experience of being valued, approved of, validated and their greatness being seen, by the parent. The parent lays out what it will take to gain those things, which is doing what they want the child to do for the sake of their own wants and needs. They will tell the child and tell themselves that the child doing those things, is for their own good. When really, it is their way of keeping the child on the hook and getting the child to do what suits them.
There are so many techniques that a parent may use to cut a child down to size. Just to give you a taste, they may shame the child, belittle the child, demonstrate that the child is not important and is not the priority, deliberately tell the child that other things are more important than they are, say things that cut a child down to size like “the world doesn’t revolve around you” or “that’s good at least for your age.” Negatively compare the child to other children, ignore the child, act unimpressed by or underrate the child’s performance or creations, insult the child, remind the child of his or her inadequacies or weaknesses when he or she experiences an achievement, look at the child with contempt or disgust, be sarcastic towards the child, mock the child, set unrealistic and unattainable standards for the child, leave no room for mistakes and get completely emotionally dysregulated when mistakes are made, never be satisfied with the child, make fun of the child, refuse to spend money on the child or leave bargain stickers on the things bought for them and the list goes on and on. Any and all of these things deflate a child’s self-worth and humiliate the child. They reduce the child to a lower position in their own eyes and in the eyes of others.
The problem is, a child’s existence revolves around their parents. The parent is essentially the god of their world. The need for your parents to value you, to hold you in high esteem, see your potential, approve of you and validate you is deeply embedded in your being, whether you like it or not. And it stays with people often throughout their entire adulthood. Some people are still trying to get these things from their parents when they are old enough to be retired and their parent is on their death bed. Because of this, when a parent cuts their child down to size, it creates a dynamic where the child essentially gets on an emotional rat wheel of desperately and forever trying to earn or gain these things that they are desperate for from their parents. And to do this, the child has to be and do what pleases the parent. Just like a rat wheel, the child never gets anywhere, not even in their adulthood, because the parent subconsciously knows that they can only guarantee that the child will do what they want the child to do (they can only control them) if the child never really gets it… Only a crumb once in a while to keep the child wanting more. And a parent does not have to be smart to create this dynamic, nor do they even need to be conscious of what they are doing.
So that you can understand this deeper, here is an example. Madison was born to a mother with very low self-esteem and who has a big anxiety problem. Whenever Madison behaved in a confident way or acted like she was proud of herself, it triggered her mother because it caused her mother to feel like Madison was gearing up to be bigger and more powerful than her. Thus, out of her control. So, her mother decided that it was very important for Madison to be a humble person and took it upon herself to humble her. When Madison would ask her mother for things, her mother would walk around the room like a princess mocking her and telling her “what would you like instead, Queen Sheeba?” And say “I’m not your servant!” Her mother went out of her way to demonstrate that her younger brother deserved the attention or that reading her book was more important than attending to whatever she needed. When Madison brought home grades demonstrating an A minus, her mother would fixate on the minus and on what she had to do to change it to a plus. When Madison won a trophy for gymnastics her mother said “the fact that this culture reveres athletes and sports like it does, is just more proof of this country’s poor priorities. But I’m glad for you if this is what matters to you.” Despite being more than able to afford it, her mother refused to take her shopping and would have her friends give her hand me down clothes for Madison, despite knowing that Madison hated it. She told Madison that she was just going to outgrow everything, so it didn’t matter that she had new things. When Madison did things that displeased her, she would throw open the windows and yell “you can come pick her up now.” As if she was yelling for extraterrestrials. You get the picture. Madison’s self-esteem was systematically destroyed.
And so, she got on the hamster wheel of trying to please her mother. Desperately trying to reach mom-approved achievements, meeting her own needs and preoccupying herself for hours in her own room so she was not a burden to her mother, dressing like her mother wanted her to dress, writing her mother words of affirmation cards and the list goes on and on. Her mother likes it this way. This way, Madison doesn’t put pressure on her to meet Madison’s needs. This way Madison keeps cleaning her room and dressing how she wants her to dress. This way Madison competes with her younger brother for who has the best behavior, which is a built in mechanism for both children to be the most pleasing to her. This way Madison keeps affirming her. This way Madison does the things that her mother can brag about to her friends to make herself look good. Madison is under control. She is being controlled according to what is in her mother’s best interests. Only, it is clear that what is in Madison’s best interests is not a part of her mother’s best interests. Of course, Madison’s mother would never tell you this. She would tell you that all of it is for Madison’s best interests. After all, she is raising Madison to be a humble person who is very independent, cleans her room, gets perfect grades, dresses correctly, is achievement oriented and who honors her elders. All things that she could argue are in Madison’s best interests. I hope you felt the gaslight there.
When Madison became a teenager and realized that she would never be good enough to please her mother, she stopped conforming to her mother’s needs and desires and as a result, became the family scapegoat. But the need for her mother to value her, to hold her in high esteem, approve of her and validate her didn’t go anywhere. She just entered into a horrible, lifelong internal struggle between wanting to do what was best for herself and yet, trying to do what would make her mother hold her in high esteem.
If you are a parent watching this video, your takeaway from this video should be that it is crucial that you deeply explore what actually is and what actually is not in your child’s best interests. A big, big part of doing this, is to differentiate between your child’s best interests and your own. This way, we can be on top of the potential parenting shadow of hiding our own personal needs and desires under the veil of “it’s what’s best for my child”. In addition to this, it is critical to recognize the impact of our words and actions as parents. We cannot raise a healthy child who will become a healthy adult who can have healthy relationships if we are cutting our child down to size. We are setting them up for tons of pain, if not failure in life. This means, notice if or when you are cutting your child down to size and resolve whatever personal issue of yours that sits at the root of your need to do so. In addition to this, become conscious of the fact that this is a tactic you are using to keep your child under control and admit to exactly how cutting them down to size accomplishes this aim. What behaviors and actions are you looking to get out of your child as a result of what you are doing. You need to recognize this as a form of manipulation. As a parent, we should be the number one person who makes our child feel important, who sees their potential, who values our child, who helps them to step into and feel their own power and who holds him or her in high esteem. And if our child does not feel like we feel this way about them, it is us, as parents that need to adjust what we are doing.
If you are someone who recognizes that you had a parent that used, or still does use the “Cut Down for Control Technique” on you, the time has come to break out of this manipulative control tactic. To do this, first, you need to attune to and notice the self-esteem hits that are designed to cause a deflation in you. Chances are, you have become so accustomed to being hurt by your parent in this way, that you are desensitized to it. You are normalized to it. You need to re-sensitize to it and stop normalizing it. A good way to re-sensitize yourself to it, is to imagine YOU saying what they said or doing what they did to you, but to your own child, or to any other child that you know and really look at what the impact on that child would be. Don’t get stuck on childhood. You can imagine yourself having a grown up child too and doing the same thing to them.
When you notice your parent speaking or acting in a way that cuts you down, you need to immediately remember that it is a control tactic. With each hit, ask yourself: “What outcome is my parent trying to get by saying this to me?” “What purpose does it serve?” You need to seriously question whether the cut down it is FOR your best interests, like you’ve been led to believe, or whether it in fact serves their own best interests at your expense.
This is a control tactic, something your parent is using to keep power over you, so that you are underneath them and stay on the rat wheel of doing what pleases them. What this means is that your parent does not and will not accurately reflect the truth about you. You will not get an accurate reflection of the truth of your power, potential, value, worth, excellence, importance or anything else from them. Because deep down your parent thinks that it is not in their own best interests to give you that reflection. Doing so threatens them in some way. And not doing so benefits them in some way. The question for you to answer is: How does doing so benefit your parent specifically and how does not doing so benefit your parent specifically?
Given that your parent cuts you down to control you, control is the reason you keep getting the picture that they hold you in such low esteem. And this means, your worth and your value and your power and your potential and your excellence and your importance is actually much, much higher than you have been led by them to believe.
A great many of us who consider ourselves intellectual or even spiritual, like to think of ourselves as having graduated beyond religion. And yet, we are raised in cultures and in a world that has been so influenced by religion, that it is embedded within us. The danger of this is that we can easily keep operating according to the same religious programming and simply use different words for it. Today, I’m going to expose to the world one of the major ways that humanity has done this with the hopes that if enough people see it, collectively we can break the pattern.
First, I have to introduce you to the religious idea of a “sin”. Sinning is a concept that is most closely linked to the Christian religions. This being said, nearly every religion on earth has a similar concept, it just simply goes by a different name. The word sin is actually an ancient archery term which meant to miss the mark. Yet, since the beginning, it has been used in a religious context to mean to fail or miss the goal. It implies an offense against God or transgression of religious law. In other words, a serious shortcoming, fault or reprehensible immoral act. To simplify this for you, a sin is anything that a religion sees as bad or wrong.
It is a tragedy, but many religions and spiritual philosophies see countless elements of humanness (and even humanness in general) as sinful. Many religions hold beliefs like a sinful nature is passed down in all men since the origin of man. Or that humans are created weak, fallible and prone to mistakes and therefore are prone to sinful behavior. Or that humans have negative sinful tendencies due to the allure of satisfying one’s pleasures. Even cultures that are formed by religions that do not include the concept of sin directly, are still imbued with the idea of badness or wrongness in many human characteristics and the goal is to transcend one’s humanness.
Various religions and therefore cultures have put so many things into the box of sin. To give you some examples of common things that have been put into that box, you have: Urges, desire, pride, greed, laziness, wasting resources, envy, lust, sexuality in general is very tricky because there are so many different rights and wrongs involving it, hatred, resentment, taking or paying interest, witchcraft, theft, not fasting during specific times, eating specific foods, murder, being immodest, cursing, homosexuality, lying, gambling, gossiping, breaking promises, being disloyal, attachment, believing in multiple gods, idolatry, ill will, ignorance and superstitions. You get the point. But a more accurate definition of a sin is anything you think, say or do that goes against what God wants… Ie: What a religion and therefore culture has decided is right and good.
Because of this, so many things are seen as bad and wrong and are therefore treated like a sin. And because of this, like a moral failure. And because they are seen as a moral failure (perhaps we can call it a character flaw for those of you who don’t like the world moral), any person who exhibits them will experience a loss of both social esteem and status.
In this very long list of things that are seen as bad and wrong by humans, and are therefore subconsciously seen and treated like a sin is: Emotions.
Emotions, especially the negative emotions and especially negative emotions that people associate with the disturbing of social peace, are the sin of today’s world. People who are having these “bad and wrong” emotions, feel wrong and bad for having these emotions on top of the pain of experiencing the emotions themselves. And people who are having these emotions are seen and treated as if they are bad and wrong for having these emotions in the first place. And in today’s world, a person’s non-emotionality and especially non emotional reactivity is seen as a marker of their level of enlightenment, maturity and moral character. In the same way that celibacy was (and in some cases still is) seen as a marker of a person’s closeness to Christ and therefore pureness of moral character. And this, is a big, big problem.
Let me give you two common examples of how this looks today.
First, let’s meet Cora. Cora dropped out of college to do some soul searching and quickly found her way into the new age spiritual community. Now, years later, she hosts retreats. She hangs out with yogis, energy healers, conscious creators, astrologers and self-development freaks. Cora hired a woman to help her with retreats, who pocketed money for herself and botched the company tax returns and as a result, Cora went into debt and was facing the loss of her business. She felt a flurry of desperation, rage, terror, fury, resentment, bitterness and revenge. When people asked her how she was doing, she would break into tears and tell them about how badly things were going and about how she felt. Essentially, she would express these negative emotions. And, as if things weren’t already bad enough, the results were terrible. The people in Cora’s community immediately saw that because of these negative emotions, she had lost her footing on the spiritual path, that she was out of alignment. That she had become so attached to money and to her business that she had let her ego get the better of her. And that she was no longer fit to be an example of being rooted in the objective universal plan, because she had been so affected by something that happened in this little day to day human life that we live. Because of this, Cora fell from grace in their eyes and no one referred anyone to attend her retreats anymore. She was met with a barrage of emotional invalidation and people suddenly seeing themselves as superior to her in terms of their level of consciousness. Essentially, they started seeing Cora as spiritually immature and treating her this way. Because in these communities that Cora was part of, negative emotions and emotional reactivity of any kind is seen as a sin. Of course, they use different words for it. But the mentality and behavior is the same towards Cora’s negative emotions as the mentality and behavior in a catholic community is towards someone who is committing adultery.
Second, let’s meet Grayson. Grayson is in court trying to maintain joint custody of his children in a case that involves parental alienation. His ex-wife will stop at nothing to try to get the judge to see him as the bad guy, so she can win full custody over the children. Today, she has managed to tell their children to tell a family therapist that Grayson and his new partner commit sexually lewd acts in front of the children in the house and that it scares them. When the child therapist, who has fully fallen into this game (not realizing the children have been groomed) testifies, she says she believes Grayson’s home is unfit for the children. Grayson is flooded with a rush of painful negative emotions. Angry and desperate and crying, he yells out in the courtroom, “That is a lie. That is a god damn lie and you know it.” Taking quick advantage of the fact that people see negative emotions as a sin, especially when someone is demonstrative of their emotions, her lawyer jumps in and says “Your honor, this kind of instability and lack of self-control is exactly why my client is seeking full custody.” And it is true. Being the bearer of bad feelings is seen as a character flaw and as evidence that he is ruled by emotions to the degree that he cannot be trusted to make the best and most rational decisions for his children. If you want to learn more about this pattern, you can watch my video titled: The Sickest Game You Can Play.
Religions have always been used as a means of creating social conformity and control. They are used as a tool for establishing social order. They reinforce things like the law, social norms, ethics and gender roles etc. Even without religion, governments seek to do the same thing. And even without formal government, you will see order being established in any human group regarding what is bad and wrong vs. good and right. When people started to associate negative emotions (especially certain ones) with negative behaviors (ones that can cause a breakdown of social conformity, control, order and peace), they made those emotions bad and wrong. And we are still existing with this mentality towards negative emotion today in this emotional dark age we are living in.
Emotions are not bad. Nor are they wrong. They are not a sin. Emotions carry a lot of information about our environment and about ourselves, most especially about our subjective experience of our environment and about our personal truths. It is helpful to think of emotion as a different language in which information is received and transmitted. And by making emotion bad and wrong, ie: treating it as a sin, we cause all kinds of damage to ourselves, to others and to the world at large. If you are looking to challenge your current views of emotions, I suggest you watch three of my videos. The first is: The Emotional Wakeup Call. The second is: Stop Trying to Regulate Your Emotions. And the third is: Non-Reactivity is not Necessarily an Indication of Health or Enlightenment.
The time has come for people to recognize that what we are doing is treating emotions in general, (especially negative emotions) as a sin. It doesn’t matter if we are using this word or not. The time has come for people to really question this subconscious mentality so we can change it for good.
Whether you like it or not, if you have been socialized (and you have if you are reading this), it matters a great deal to you to be good. Most people think the key to being a good person is to disown, condemn and eradicate anything bad from yourself, while owning, glorifying and maintaining anything good about yourself. The problem is, most people are wrong about this. One of the most powerful things you can do to be a good person is to take ownership of what makes you a bad guy.
First, let’s look at the issue with the mentality that the key to being good is to eradicate what is bad and wrong from you.
This is very black or white thinking. Black or white thinking is definitely simpler. But it is rarely a reflection of what is real and true. To understand what I mean, let’s take something like the character trait of envy. Envy, or I should say, what people do in response to envy, can ruin your life. It can make you compete in ways that are self-sabotaging. It eats you up inside and creates intense stress. It can cause you to act in ways that destroy your relationships. To the opposite, it can be a very strong motivator to improve and succeed, it can make you aware of exactly what you want and therefore be a tool for self-awareness, it can enhance relationships because it is a recognition of things like the other person’s achievements and positive attributes.
Badness and wrongness is really subjective. It varies so much from one social group to the next, such as one family to the next and one culture to the next. The vast, vast majority of people have not reached the level of consciousness where they truly take others as a part of themselves and thus, intrinsically cannot harm others without harming themselves. A point where other’s suffering is their suffering and other’s joy is their joy. The reality is that if you look at all the things that humans consider bad and wrong, you will notice quite quickly that they are the things that can cause a problem for other people. This is because humans are a group social species. Our survival and ability to thrive depends on being part of the group, being accepted by the group and having closeness with the group. If the group sees us as bad, this does not happen. They reject us and push us away. And because of this, for the vast, vast majority of people on earth, the reason they want to be good, is because goodness is what guarantees them that the social group will accept them and bring them close. After all, this will mean their needs will be met and they can have a high self-esteem. Most people are extrinsically motivated to be good. This is why a person’s sense of “goodness” is defined by a person’s social group. But man do social groups not agree. For example, one family sees competition and a competitive nature as a really bad thing which will lead to the corrosion of relationships. The other sees it as a really good thing which will lead to success. One culture sees direct eye contact as polite and engaged. Another sees it as disrespectful and aggressive. One culture sees blunt honesty as rudeness. The other sees it as integrity. Also, these ideas change over time. Don’t forget that at one time, many people thought slavery was actually good due to things like deeming it necessary for industry and believing that certain people lacked the ability to run their own lives and therefore benefitted more by other people running their lives for them and that it was a useful form of punishment to reform bad behavior. Now, it is widely seen as a terrible thing. Also, today, being educated is considered a good thing. But for a good chunk of history, being educated as a woman was considered a bad thing due to things like thinking that educating women would undermine the institution of marriage and cause a destruction of society, believing that women could not handle mental strain and were easily corrupted and thus, education would lead to nervous collapse and corruption. Take this 1875 quote from Sex and Education; or, a Fair Chance for Girls by Edward Clarke. “While girls can go to school and study as boys do, this will cause them to suffer from “neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system”.
So many of the things people think are bad, aren’t actually bad. We just think they are. A good example of this today, is negative emotions. Take anger, anger is an emotion that occurs when someone’s boundaries that define their best interests are being violated, especially when that person feels powerless to getting the other person to stop violating their best interests. The emotion of anger is the reaction to that experience. It is an alarm bell going off within them saying: This is a No for me and motivating the person to do something about it. The emotion is not a behavior. A person may choose to behave in a certain way because they feel anger. But, the behavior is then the next thing up to be questioned in terms of goodness or badness, not the emotion. When a person has no anger, they have no personal boundaries. No sense of what is right and good for them vs. bad and wrong for them. As people we do not deeply, deeply question our sense of what is right and good. We simply accept it and act according to the idea of good and bad that we have been socialized into and indoctrinated with.
When we try to reject and push away what is bad about us, it doesn’t actually work. All that happens is, we suppress, deny and disown it. We go into resistance about it. We create an internal triangulation dynamic that causes us to develop a core self concept of shame. We create a split in our own consciousness and these aspects of ourselves go to war. We are forever after at war with ourselves. Also, when we resist something like this, we are actually feeding it energy. So, the monster we are afraid of actually grows bigger and badder and finds new creative ways to rear its head. For example, let’s look at the Latter-Day Saint culture of Utah. Otherwise known to the world as Mormons. This is a sexually repressed culture where sex is seen as bad and wrong outside of very specific parameters. Well, they lead the entire United States in being #1 in online Porn Subscriptions.
When we suppress, deny, disown, and reject a “bad” part of ourselves, we push it out of our conscious awareness. We lose self-awareness, most especially of these parts of ourself that we see as bad and wrong. We do this to try to preserve our self-concept. We find it so tormenting to see ourselves as bad, that we decide not to see anything about ourselves that would cause us to consider ourselves bad. This is why no one is the villain in their own story. If you want to know more about this, you can watch my video titled: “Self Concept, The Enemy of Awakening”. When this happens, those traits are actually subconsciously in control of us, and we don’t even know it. As a result, we are hurting people left and right. But we are convinced that what we are doing is good and right. In other words, the cultural taboo around badness, makes it so we can’t face and go into denial of the things within us that would cause us to see ourselves and be seen as bad. But they are none the less very alive and well in us, finding ever sneakier ways to come out.
A great many of these things that a person might be judged as “bad” for, are not things that should be eradicated as they are in fact necessary for them to keep. Many things in life have two sides to them. There is a very old saying that I’ve always loved that goes “that which can poison, can also heal and anything that can heal, can also poison.” You will come to find, when you take the time to understand anything deep enough, that each thing comes with what we could call positive and negative potentials. Because of this, you cannot devalue anything in its entirety. Also, a person’s desires and the fulfillment of their potential and purpose is often dependent on things that they consider “bad”.
Because of these reasons (and I’m sure others I could come up with given enough time) the way to become a good person (and in this context we mean someone who behaves in a way that promotes positive outcomes and well-being for other people) is to own your “badness”.
What it means to own your badness is to accept that it is a part of you rather than pushing it away. And from there get very curious so as to see, hear, feel and understand it. And from there, with the information you gathered about it, decide what to do with it consciously. When you do this, you will be faced with the choice to either make changes and shift that thing about you or to accommodate that thing about you in a way that promotes positive outcomes and well-being for other people. Or to do a mix of the two. If you want to learn more about this concept, make sure you also watch my video titled: “Double Down or Choose To Change”.
So that you can understand this, here is an example. Horatio is a very, very competitive person. He has been told that his competitive nature is a real problem. One of his brothers refuses to talk to him because of it. He spent many years feeling guilty about being competitive and then slipping back into being competitive. He used to wish that he could just take a knife and cut that part out of him. Horatio is now a salesman at a renewable energy company. And he has recently tripped on the idea of taking responsibility for his negative personality traits in the work place when it was presented at a business conference. This business talk has caused him to consider that his competitive nature is what pays his bills and is also what makes him more successful than the other salesmen at the company and so, it can’t be all bad. So, he takes some time to really understand his own competitive nature. First, he researches competitiveness in general from a scientific perspective. Then he explored when he first noticed his competitive nature. Then he really explored his current competitive nature. As a part of this, he realized that he wanted to stand out as a young boy badly to be paid attention to and valued by his father, who only valued exceptional things. He noticed that for him, winning is how he gets his sense of self-worth. He feels unmotivated to do anything if there is not competition involved. The competition also focuses him and drives him to more successful results. On top of this, Horatio realized that he really like being in charge. And dominating in a competition makes him feel in charge. So, let’s look at what it would look like for Horatio to either make changes and shift his competitiveness or to accommodate his competitiveness in a way that promotes positive outcomes and well-being for other people. Or to do a mix of the two.
If Horatio makes changes to and shifts his competitive nature, he would do something like let go of the idea that standing out above everyone else is the only way to get attention and go for attention in other ways. He might focus on building his self-worth in other ways and find friends who value other qualities in people than winning. He might put himself in situations where he needs to cooperate rather than compete. He might force himself to celebrate someone else’s success and do trauma work on the trigger that arises as a result of doing this. To go this direction, is to make it so he is no longer so competitive.
If Horatio chooses to accommodate his competitiveness in a way that promotes positive outcomes and well-being for other people, he would do something like acknowledge that because he needs his competitive nature for success at his career, and because he knows his competitive nature is so deeply embedded in him and he isn’t very motivated to change it, he is going to warn people that he is a super competitive person so they can decide if they want to be around that or not and he will not expect people who don’t like it to be in a relationship with him. He is going to select for environments where his competitive nature benefits others. He is going to exercise his competitive nature through sports, so he can get the pent up need out of himself before visiting his family. He is going to get into relationships with women who are not competitive and who support his ambitions and celebrate his wins, because competitive partners bring out the worst manifestations of his competitive nature. And he is going to create the boundary relative to himself that his competitive nature does not move him to do anything to compromise his integrity.
If Horatio were to do a mix of the two, he might decide that by taking conscious ownership of his competitive nature, what is right to do is to do trauma work on the trigger of losing as well as focus on building up his really low self-esteem, because he doesn’t want his competitive nature to be a cover up. At the very same time, he may choose to put himself in environments, like his current profession, where his competitive nature is encouraged and rewarded and choose a partner who compliments his competitive nature at the same time as allow his competitive nature to be exercised in the safe container of athletic sports.
What is important to see is that when you actually take ownership of an aspect of you that you have judged as bad, you are now in a position to do what is best for it and with it. You have a powerful resource on your side. And you can become a good person, even with that thing, because you know how to handle it and use it in a way that promotes positive outcomes and well-being for other people. After all, people may dislike a perfectionist until it is them going under the knife for surgery. And people may dislike someone with a competitive streak, until that person plays for their team. And people may hate a conniver, until they desperately need a new strategy. The only way to ensure that any aspect of you is in alignment with the wellbeing of others, is to see and take ownership of the parts of you that could be against the best interests of others. The only way to be a good guy is to take ownership of what could make you a bad guy.
Popular culture and business circles alike are abuzz about the power of optimism. Optimism is currently being hailed as the undisputed key to success. But optimism is a very slippery slope when it comes to success and today, we are going to look at why, as well as look at what you can do to avoid falling down that slope, straight into failure.
Optimism is really a mental attitude. It is a mental attitude of focusing on the positive and believing in a positive outcome. It is to expect that good things will happen and that things will work out for the best. Optimists tend to see negative, unwanted things as being an opportunity to learn and get better, leading to even better outcomes. Optimism is undeniably linked to lower stress levels, better physical health, and higher persistence when pursuing goals. So, how can optimism oppose your success?
It is very easy to slip into toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is when we use positivity as a coping mechanism to avoid anything that causes us to feel negative emotions. It is when we use positivity to deny, suppress, disown, reject and run away from anything we consider negative. You can think of toxic positivity as a person using positivity like a buoy that they are desperately clinging to, in order to keep themselves out of reality, because subconsciously they think that they cannot handle the negative aspects of reality. It is a form of willful denial and it is an extreme form of avoidant resistance. Toxic positivity can and does doom a person. It guarantees a negative outcome that we will not see ourselves approaching until it is too late. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Toxic Positivity.
Optimism can make it so that you do not look at negative realities and therefore do not respond appropriately to them. To be successful, you need to believe that something can work. You need to be able to face many challenges and persevere, even when other people think it is impossible. But success is not about covering your eyes and ears and tuning everything negative out in the unresponsive pursuit of what you are trying to accomplish. To succeed, you need to be able to look the devil in the face so to speak. You need to be able to look at and accept all kinds of negative realities you encounter on the path to success and be very responsive to them. You need to be able to course correct and quickly. In fact, your success or failure depends on this. If you simply keep blinders on to the negative, only focus on the positive and keep taking actions according to your belief that good will happen, you will not make the changes necessary to succeed.
Optimism can make it so you jump to the solution without fully understanding the problem or without listening and sympathizing. Many optimists are averse to emotional discomfort. This makes it so they don’t want to spend time really diving into and dissecting and understanding the problem. They would rather jump to the solution. The problem is, when you don’t take the time to really fully perceive and understand the full scope of the problem, any solution you come up with, will not be the right one. It certainly won’t be adequate. And the solutions you put forth will simply prove that you don’t understand, which reflects poorly on you. This means, your solutions won’t work. That is a recipe for failure. Obviously, your solutions wont work if you aren’t providing a solution that speaks to the actual problem.
Optimism can put you in the illusion of invulnerability. When it comes to success, you need to be in reality about your strengths and weaknesses. Believing ourselves to be invulnerable causes us to make poor decisions and not account for our vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Just ask any business owner who didn’t account for war time rationing to cause their only supply to dry up. To succeed, you must recognize and account for your vulnerabilities.
When optimism makes it so that you dismiss negative emotions, negative experiences, negative feedback and negative realities, you lose trust in yourself and lose the trust of others. And a big part of this is that you will give false reassurances both to yourself and to others. Losing trust and giving false reassurance is a very, very big problem. Why? Firstly, when it comes to success, it is necessary to trust yourself. But you cannot trust yourself if you are so focused on the positive that you are not in reality; and because of it, you lead yourself and others in the wrong direction and do the wrong things. You also can’t trust yourself when you are denying, suppressing disowning and negating the parts of yourself that contain what you judge as negative thoughts, emotions and personal truths.
Second, you cannot succeed alone. If you act in a way that causes you to lose people’s trust (which you will if your optimism leads to problems) and if you falsely reassure them, you will end up alone. Not only alone, often being opposed rather than supported. Anyone who succeeds, succeeds in part because of the other people that join forces with them. Business partners, coaches, employees, independent contractors, volunteers, teammates, co-workers, managers, friends, family members etc. And trust is the holy grail of relationships. When people lose trust for you, they start to look out for their own best interests against you. They start to play zero sum games and not want to be in it with you anymore. Without this critical support, your success will be limited.
If optimism blinds you, it prevents improvement, growth and personal expansion. Both, are necessary for success. It is in the acknowledging of the negatives, as well as the exploration of them, that we are able to gain the awareness and insights necessary to understand the problem, define what we want, brainstorm the right solution, make the right decision, course correct and by doing so, level up. Every great story of success is about what was decided and done when things got tough. Success is defined by what happened when someone was face to face with something seriously negative and rather than succumbing to blind optimism, met that negative situation head on and used the ways they had to change things to become better and to grow.
Optimism can impair your critical thinking ability. Critical thinking is about analyzing information to make a sound judgement or decision. Critical thinking requires you to be able to question, evaluate, and interpret information in a rational and unbiased way. It allows you to identify and understand issues, including hidden ones. It enables you to make sound judgements, challenge assumptions, discern, seek feedback, adjust to new information and change your mind and actions in a way to brings about positive results. You cannot do this if you are wearing rosy colored sunglasses and have a positive bias. Positivity bias prevents critical thinking and clouds sound judgement and thus undermines your success.
Optimism can cause you to assess risks poorly. When people are too optimistic, they become blind to and minimize the potential risks involved in decisions and actions. They underestimate the likelihood that something bad will happen and overestimate the likelihood that something good will happen. Because of this, they don’t take the steps to mitigate the risks. They also tend to be impulsive. And this increases the likelihood that they will end up with huge problems on their hands, if not fail completely. If you need any proof, look no further than the 2008 market crash.
So that you can understand this better, here is an example. Sergey was a little boy with a very successful father. He knew early on that he had big shoes to fill. His father was also an alcoholic, who would sometimes get very violent when he was drinking. His mother coped with her husband’s dictatorial and dysfunctional behavior with denial. She would make excuses for her husband to make things seem different and better than they were. And when bad things were happening, she would focus on something else that made her feel good. Sergey’s mother had no tolerance for negativity of any kind. Whenever Sergey was upset, she would invalidate his reasons for being upset and counter his upset with positives. She loved to say things like “Sergey, don’t be a cup half empty person.” And “When someone is able to take away your happiness, it means you’ve given them your power.” And “keep your face to the sunshine and you can’t see a shadow.” And “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” After struggling with this as a young boy, Sergey eventually internalized and adopted his mother’s coping mechanism.
Fast forward many years later, Sergey is now a business partner in a budding bagel company. As a self-defined, undeterred optimist, Sergey promised his business partner that as of two years ago, they would be making enough net income to double his salary. He also promised that because he knew so many people in the café and coffee shop industry that within the first year, they would have a minimum of 50 contracts. He also reassured his business partner that his absolute expertise is hiring and managing teams. Unofficially, Sergey has taken over the role of COO. Fast forward to today, all of Sergey’s optimistic predictions and promises have not come to fruition (in fact, things have been getting steadily worse) because his optimism has blinded him and has set him on a course for failure.
In his first year with the company, he found another company that operates refrigerated trucks. He interviewed the business owner and really liked his charismatic, go-getter nature. He got into a trial contract with the trucking company to bring his bagels to shops. During that trial, coffee shops were calling left and right saying that the product was molding. It was a huge financial loss for the company. A few employees started expressing concern about the shipping process being the cause of the issue. They had heard from shop owners that the bagels were arriving warm, meaning that they had not been shipped properly. Sergey felt instantly overwhelmed by the negative emotion he felt. Wanting to feel better immediately, he called the owner of the trucking business and was reassured that the shipping process was the best in the country. Sergey immediately swallowed the reassurance, wanting to avoid the discomfort of both conflict and a potential negative reality he didn’t feel up to facing. So, he simply turned around and fed the rest of the company that reassurance and offered the shop owners free product to compensate for their losses. He believed everything would turn out well. After all, he considers himself lucky. Because of this, Sergey not only continued to use the refrigerated truck company, he signed a yearlong contract with them and the product continued to mold and 3/4ths of the shop owners cancelled their contracts. Sergey had to take out a huge business loan. So now, both he and his business partner are in massive debt.
Sergey has also created a toxic work environment. Because Sergey has no tolerance for negativity, he sees it as an unsuccessful mindset, no one in the company feels they can be honest with him. Nor do they trust him to do the right thing any more. They are expected to be up-beat and excited no matter the circumstances, this includes when things go badly in the business and when tragedies are happening in their personal lives. Because of this, employees have been losing morale and burning out. Their concerns are dismissed to the point where employees don’t have what is necessary in order to succeed. And so, they quit. Because Sergey believes in them, people are promoted to positions they absolutely can’t handle, creating a companywide shortage of people in managerial positions. Conflicts are happening all the time and now, employees feel they must escalate by banding together to confront Sergey as a united force. When this happens, rather than addressing the concerns, Sergey points to the positive things he feels he has done for the business, such as better company communications platforms and re-structuring and introducing the idea of commission for product contracts.
Sergey has a dream of their bagels being in every supermarket across America. What Sergey doesn’t know, is that his business partner is fed up with the damage his blind optimism and toxic positivity is doing. And has lost faith in Sergey’s ability to succeed with his dangerous optimism. So much so that he is looking into options for either buying Sergey out or selling his share of the company. He has attended many business conferences and watched speakers talk about the importance of optimism and even point to studies proving it. But here he is, and instead of becoming more successful due to Sergey’s optimism, the company is sinking because of Sergey’s optimism.
Some questions to really explore in order to make sure that your optimism is helpful rather than hurtful is: “If there was anything I was trying to avoid with my positivity, what would it be?” And “If I knew that I shouldn’t be optimistic in this situation, what would I be doing differently than I am doing now?” And “If I were missing or dismissing information based on my optimism, what information might I be missing or dismissing?” And “Is there anything negative that anyone around me is saying, that I am not taking seriously?” And “If I couldn’t be optimistic, what would I be so afraid of?”
The most successful people are realists. Because reality is your axis of power. Realists see possibilities, even extraordinarily lofty ones, as one part of reality. They see both the positive and the negative aspects of reality. They are able to hold an optimistic and realistic perspective simultaneously. They value the pessimistic viewpoint because the pessimistic view point exposes the downsides, challenges and setbacks that must be confronted. Aiming high causes you to go the furthest possible on the path to success. But being rooted in reality, enables you to navigate that path to success. Use optimism as a tool and in the right way. If you want to succeed, metaphorically speaking, you need to look at both the bright side and the dark side and decide what to do with the information contained in both.
Spiritual practice, including the seeing of life from a more objective perspective, is one of the most life transforming things that a person can commit to. But like anything, it can be misused. When it is misused, is does a lot of damage to yourself and to others. And one of the most common ways that spirituality is misused is as a tool of nullification. Unfortunately, this is one of the most common ways that people use spirituality.
Let’s meet Daniel. Daniel came from rough beginnings. His mother, who was a single mother, was a meth addict. He and his siblings were taken away by the state and put into foster care for a few years before they were placed with his grandmother. He loved his grandmother. But in the middle of the night one night, his mother showed up, stole Daniel and his siblings back and crossed the Mexico border with them all. There, she proceeded to use meth again. Daniel had to raise his siblings in a really rough environment in Mexico until he felt they were old enough to take care of themselves. And then, he crossed back over the border alone. In his late twenties, having always felt drawn to spirituality, he decided to find a teacher. He landed at an Ashram in Taos, New Mexico. Daniel spent years learning from the resident teacher there until he was invited to go to India to learn from the teacher’s teacher. He became a yogi and a very talented acupuncturist. For Daniel, spirituality is not a hobby. It is a day in and day out lifestyle. And in many, many ways, he is a truly transformed person. His spiritual practice is very much in alignment. Except for one thing… Daniel uses it to nullify his pain and anything that might cause him pain. And he uses it to nullify anything that causes other people pain. When Daniel describes his childhood, he does so with an air of total emotional detachment. He says things like “But I know that I chose that experience so I could learn to master my own internal alignment, instead of relying on other people to make me happy.” And “At the end of the day, it was better she kind of left us there on our own because if my younger brother had been raised by her, he would have been an addict too and instead, I got him into meditation.” And “I wouldn’t have it any other way because without that experience, I wouldn’t be who I am today. And I love who I am today.”
Daniel has a very painful relationship history as well; he was married three times. The first time, his wife ran away with his best friend. The second time, his wife died in a car accident. And the third time, his wife got cancer and the chemo therapy caused near debilitating peripheral neuropathy as well as infertility, which was a big deal because Daniel wanted to be a father. But he uses spirituality to nullify this pain too. He tells himself that his relationship with his first wife, was karmic. That the reason for it was so that he could purify himself of the residual attachments he had. Also, so that she would reconnect with her birth mother, something she would never have done had it not been for him pressuring her to do so. And they are very close now. With his second wife, he will tell you that he knew from the very beginning in his soul that she would not be his partner forever, that it had an end date. He just didn’t know when that would be, or how the ending would come about. Daniel says that he married her (as well as the next woman) because that kind of thing really did matter to them, and he does what matters for his partners. As for him, he doesn’t need a marriage to be committed to something. He says that the accident was the universe clearing the space for him to be with his next wife, whom he had already met through a local breathwork group. He says that without the accident, he would have never gone into that relationship. Relative to his third marriage, he says that his wife’s cancer is every bit as much his teacher as it is hers. That it has taught him the value of just sitting still and that the universe has decided that he should not have children because of how much that would weigh him down and make it so he can’t help other people. He knows he is meant to be a tool of the universe and the universe has decided that he is best used healing people and showing people how to heal themselves. Also, he will tell you that his wife being homebound has freed him up to connect better with the friends he meets on his journeys when he is away from home. If she were with him all the time, he would not be able to give them his full presence and attention. He will also tell you that each time he works with his anger about feeling limited by her, he becomes more and more free.
Unfortunately, some people look at Daniel with respect because of this way of being. To them, he seems almost enlightened and above it all. He seems enviably resilient. But Daniel is simply using spirituality as a tool to nullify his pain. He is using it to nullify the negative. He is using it to nullify thoughts that could cause him pain, situations that could cause him pain, truths that could cause him pain and feelings that could cause him pain. He is using it to re-write reality in a way that causes him to feel only good feelings.
Even though it is easily mistaken as a kind of enlightened optimism, spiritual nullification is a form of toxic positivity. And it is easy to recognize because people who do it, will always put a positive spiritual spin on everything. Everything they have experienced and are experiencing and everything you have experienced and are experiencing.
People use spiritual tools and spiritual awareness to nullify, negate and cancel out all kinds of things that cause them to feel pain, so that they don’t feel the pain and don’t experience anything unwanted. When spirituality is used like this, it is being used as a tool of resistance and avoidance. And it is in fact a form of spiritual bypassing. To learn more about spiritual bypassing, you can watch two of my videos titled: Spiritual Bypassing and Novocaine Spirituality. The reason that it is so hard to recognize, is because often when people use spirituality as a nullification tool, they often use TRUE things, such as universal truths, or truths about their choice to incarnate or truths about a situation they are in etc. to negate other true things.
The thing is, when a person is truly awakened and integrated, things become an AND, rather than a negation, a nullification or a cancelling out. Using our example, it becomes “I feel very limited by my wife’s condition and very alone in the world. And at the very same time, I recognize that it allows me to be more present with other people I meet when I travel and it has forced me to confront my own relationship with physical limitations so as to free myself in certain other ways.” Not “I am able to be more present with people when I travel as well as work through my own self-imposed limitations, so I am now a very free person.” As if that negates the negative and the unwanted part of reality. Spiritual nullification is a problem for several reasons.
It causes you to never see the reality of things and therefore prevents true awakening. Something that is very hard for people to accept is that two contradictory things can be simultaneously true. Something like: There is no death and there is death. The reason both is true, is because we live in a multi-dimensional universe. Things are true at a higher dimensional level that are not true at a physical level. This means, existence is very different for the non-physical self than it is for the physical self. People use the truths, observations, awareness, perspectives, laws and principles at a non-physical level to negate, deny and nullify truths at a physical, human level. They so often see spiritual reality as the only thing that is real and true. There are many different truths that make up reality. The spiritual truths are simply one truth within a system of truths. Contrary to popular opinion, they are not superior to all and they do not trump everything. Rather they need to be incorporated and integrated. Because spiritual nullification pulls you out of the full picture of reality, it pulls you out of your axis of power and you can’t actually make the right decisions and take the right actions. Just like all forms of denial and bypassing do. One part of reality does not cancel out another. To be truly awakened, you need to master the art of complexity and holding dichotomy, which is very, very hard to do. And which requires you to be able to hold pain, not just spend your life using spiritual practice to not be in pain.
It causes you to push away your temporal, human self. You are two points of perspective. Your non-physical aspect and your physical, human aspect. One of the main points of spiritual mastery is to integrate the two. Unfortunately, a great many spiritual traditions ascribe all negative, unwanted things to the temporal. To that which is human. And teach that the point of awakening is to transcend beyond the temporal and human (most especially the ego), so that you are above it all and unaffected. If you ascribe all negative, all pain and all unwanted to the temporal and then use spirituality as a tool of nullification, you are splitting yourself off from, denying and disowning your temporal self, i.e.: your human self. You have effectively rejected and abandoned a major part of yourself and justified it by saying “that is not the real me. That is an illusion.”
I want you to imagine going up to a little boy or girl who has just been sexually abused by their father and saying something like “you know, you chose this experience because every person in your family doesn’t know any better than to do to their child, what was done to them. You chose to take on this pattern and be the one in the family to change it.” Guess what? This may be true. But that truth does not erase and negate the hell of the experience itself. And if it is used to do this, which it so often is in the spiritual field, it is deeply abusive. When you are experiencing something negative, unwanted or painful, that is a part of you that is observing the negative and experiencing that pain. That is a part of reality and it needs to be acknowledged, seen as important, cared for, worked with and integrated. Not invalidated, suppressed, disconnected from, negated, pushed away, denied, disowned or bypassed. It does not need to be stuffed under the floor boards. To use spirituality to nullify pain is to use spirituality as a tool of emotional abuse disguised as loving, divine assistance from above.
When you approach yourself or others with spiritual nullification, the appearance of something being healed, being in alignment and being empowered is false. In actually, you’ve negated, denied, suppressed, invalidated, disowned and disconnected from what needs to be healed. This means, it’s going to take you much longer to heal, actually be in alignment and find genuine empowerment. The negative and the pain and the unwanted will just keep coming back. In fact, it will keep escalating, keeping you in a loop. It is like injecting Novocain into a gangrenous wound. That’s not going to go well for you.
When you use the spiritual to nullify the negative, the pain and the unwanted, you start to expect yourself to hold a standard of no pain. This means, should you inevitably end up in pain, you suddenly lose self-esteem. It’s akin to sinning in a religion. You are not spiritual enough or enlightened enough and you are failing in some way. If you spiritually nullify, you also hold others to a standard of no pain. And if they are in pain, it immediately causes you to demote them in terms of your estimation of their level of consciousness. It causes you to see them as less than, un-awakened, limited, less evolved, out of reality, having lost touch with the bigger picture and temporarily succumb to an infantile rather “human” state of consciousness. Today’s spirituality looks to get rid of human-ness. In the exact same way that religions have looked to get rid of human-ness for thousands of years. So, congratulations, if you use spirituality to nullify, you are a deeply traditionally religious person, your religion simply got a makeover called spirituality.
It is time for spiritual people to stop using spirituality as a coping mechanism and as a tool of emotional escapism. For this to happen, people have to start recognizing when spiritual nullification is happening and stop mistaking it for a form of enlightenment.
The path of spiritual awakening is peppered with pitfalls, especially pitfalls where the reality of things is the exact opposite of what it appears and present itself to be. For example, in the attempt to set oneself free from the ego self, people can become entrapped in the ego about being egoless. One such pitfall, is the pitfall of the spiritual persona. Let’s look at what it is, so that this will be one pitfall you can recognize and avoid falling into.
There is a big difference between genuine awakening and the creation of (and over-identification with) a spiritual persona. So, let’s define the difference between the two. With genuine awakening, a person dis-identifies from their temporal sense of self (what people call the ego). Doing this, causes you to become aware of your non-physical aspect and therefore the fact that you are simultaneously two points of perspective. There are many names for this nonphysical aspect such as the soul, the seat of consciousness, the eternal self, witness consciousness etc. This is the aspect of you that is creating the temporal, physical form that you call by your name. You are a consciously spiritual being because of your sudden awareness of the you that is beyond the physical. You are living life from your two points of perspective. From here, you take positive ownership of the temporal self (your own ego). Recognizing that you are the you that you call by your name and at the same time, you are also not. When you are living life from this place, it causes your perspective to be drastically different. This causes things about you to change. You recognize all potentials inherent within yourself and you begin to consciously work with those potentials, choosing what to bring forth when and for what purpose. At the very heart of awakening is drastically expanded awareness of all that is.
The problem is, over the course of history, people have watched individuals who have experienced genuine awakening. And whether the people were actually right or not that certain behaviors owe themselves to that person’s awakening; they attributed certain character traits and behaviors to these awakened people. They saw these people as good and right and as having what they want to have. And so, they began to emulate them. This emulation was in fact part of the process of the creation of a new identity. The creation of a new part to the structure of their ego. They then identify only with that part and convince themselves and everyone around them that this is their new self, who they “really are”. They will say it is due to them having an awakening, which in fact they only thought they had. They don’t know what a genuine awakening is, as opposed to a situation that increased their awareness in some way or a spiritual experience.
The human ego is not cohesive. It is fragmented. Even though we have one body, within that body, we end up with multiple selves. The best way to picture this is to imagine that inside your body, you have a collection of conjoined twins. They are technically all conjoined because they all share one body. But each one has its own identity, its own desires, needs, perspective, strengths, weaknesses and appearance. The vast majority of these fragmented selves that belong to the ego, are formed as splits in consciousness when we experience distress. The split being between a vulnerable self and a self that coped with that vulnerability so as to self-preserve. You could call this part, a protector part. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Fragmentation, The Worldwide Disease. All of these parts make up the you that you call by your name, but at the same time, because your consciousness exists separate from your ego, it is also true that none of them are you. The thing is, the creation of a spiritual persona, is the creation of a split within the ego. It is the creation of a protector part. It is a coping mechanism that masquerades as a spiritually awakened person. And the people who have these “spiritual protectors”, are completely convinced that what is in fact just a spiritual protector part of them, is who they are, the “real” them. And as a result, these individuals are a walking, breathing gaslight. A gaslight to themselves and a gaslight to others. It is over-identification masquerading as disidentification. It is a disconnectedness masquerading as a deep connectedness. It is personal truth bypassing masquerading as spiritual transcendence. It is emotional suppression, denial and dis-ownership masquerading as non-reactivity. Above all, it is a 24-7 game of pretend that the pretender does not even recognize as a game of pretend. It is self-delusion and it is deception.
So that you can understand this better, meet Therese. Therese grew up in England in an upper middle-class family. She felt a lot of pressure growing up to do whatever it took to be held in high esteem and achieve status. Her brother had down syndrome, something the family was looked down on for, so she had to work twice as hard to overcompensate for it. She wanted this social esteem so badly that she convinced herself she was whatever gave her that and that she wanted whatever gave her that. This was very painful at a deeper level because she had to deny and suppress so much of what was actually true about herself.
Growing up, Therese attended all the most prestigious schools and played on a net ball team and went on to become a model and refused to date anyone until she met a young man from an aristocratic family. But her picture perfect, esteemed life covered up poor self-esteem and came with a lot of pressure. The pressure of pretense. The young man she was in a romantic relationship with was emotionally unavailable. This caused consistent misunderstandings and a loss of trust in the relationship. Therese was lonely and felt completely unsupported, which was a big deal when she found out she had become pregnant. This of course was totally out of line with her picture-perfect life façade. And her boyfriend started pressuring her to get a secret abortion, so his picture-perfect life façade was not ruined too. When she did go through with the abortion, Therese’s life fell apart. She left her boyfriend because he was so profoundly not there for her during any difficulty she faced, including this life changing one. She could no longer suppress the flood of negative emotions she felt towards so many things, including having had an abortion, something she was wracked with guilt about. And it became painful to pretend to be fine. She had a nervous breakdown and started looking for help on the internet. That was when she came across the spiritual world. She started reading and watching everything she could find. These spiritual teachers were everything she was not. They were virtuous and stable and calm and unemotional and peaceful and stoic and powerful and they knew the way out of suffering. Therese took a job in a crystal bowl shop which was run by an older woman with 30 years of yoga practice and spiritual experiences under her belt. Therese did a mushroom journey in which she felt her body and identity fall away until all that was left, was this deep connectedness with all that is. Absolute peace. This, she thought, is what an awakening is. She would never be the same again.
Subconsciously, Therese saw this way of being as her new way out of suffering. As her way of truly feeling good in life and keeping away from pain. She began to create a new persona for herself. One that reflected this new self (she would tell you, her true self). The person who she wanted to be and felt down deep that she was. Because of this, she felt her name didn’t fit her anymore. So, she decided to pick a new name, Shaanti because it means peace. Therese identified solely with this new part of her ego. Of course, she was quite convinced that it was not her ego, it was her true, eternal self she had found and was allowing to come out through her. She began to craft herself in the image of what she imagined and had been told a spiritually awakened person would be like. She began to mimic other spiritual teachers and people like her new boss at the crystal shop. As if in character 24-7, she would ACT in a way that her thoughts, words and actions matched how she believed a spiritually awakened being should be. She bought all new clothes, ones that made her look more spiritual, more like the yogis. She repeated the truths she had heard other spiritually awakened people teach. In fact, she decided that she needed to help other people to awaken and to be recognized as a teacher and healer. So she set out to become a spiritual influencer on Instagram. She changed the tone of her voice to reflect more divine femininity. She attended every spiritual event she could in order to get every certification she could that would enhance her status in the spiritual communities. She lived like a zealot according to any spiritual ideology that resonated with her.
Therese felt safe in her new disguised and covert power trip. The superiority she felt around “normies” and other, less awakened people, protected her from that pain and vulnerability she felt before. Of course, she would tell you the exact opposite. She would tell you “we are all perfect as we are, each and every one of us.” Therese is now further away from a genuine awakening than she was in the midst of her mental breakdown. The problem is she, as well as many people around her, are convinced of the exact opposite. She is completely lost in a spiritual ego. She is more identified than ever. And now, anyone who does not act in perfect alignment with how she has decided an awakened being should act, she sees as not awakened. Therese is lost in illusion. She is playing a new game of pretense and is again, lying to herself that it is real.
Here are some tips for how to tell whether someone is identified with a spiritual persona.
If you are sensitive, you will feel that they are pretending. You will feel the façade because you are perceiving what they are presenting vs. what is underneath what they are presenting, and the two will not match.
You will get the feeling of belittlement by virtue of the virtue power trip they are on. Advice they give and things they do are meant to make you feel subordinate and make them feel better than you. These power trips are often disguised as a kind gesture, such as healing they think you need or prayers or channelings from your guides or contacts to other people who you can learn from or sympathizing with you based on how they used to be or positive energy sent your way.
Their personality will be very one-dimensional. This is because they are stuck in a single part of themselves, rather than truly owning the multifaceted nature of the totality of their ego.
They will have huge issues with emotions and emotional reactivity. They are using this coping mechanism (this protector part) to escape from negative emotions. So, their persona is designed to not have them and to resist others having them. Non reactivity will be a commandment. They will negate, invalidate, deny, bypass, and reframe their negative emotions and the negative emotions of others.
They will be in a degree of disengagement from other people, especially anything unsavorily human about them. They only want to be in relationship to the “true” aspect of others, which they see as being the “higher self”. Or have a relationship with others where they are the one on top socially, usually as the healer that is healing or teaching them. This protection mechanism comes about most often in people who have suffered relational trauma and so, their relationship will be with people’s potentials and the universe or God instead. They will be trying to get all their needs met from ‘within themselves’. They don’t want to be in the nitty gritty mess of human-ness and human relationships.
Due to their own powerlessness to pain, especially in relationships, they crafted this persona to have power over pain. The idea of a victim is too threatening. So, they don’t believe in the existence of victims and will not acknowledge anything other than a person’s power or the blessing in any given situation.
They hold a strict dogma. So, you will start to feel around them, like you would in a religious setting. You will feel like there are only certain things that are good, right and acceptable and you must hide anything that doesn’t fit into those categories, so as to not be negatively judged. You’ll start to feel insecure about yourself, especially your own virtue.
They struggle with any questioning that leads them towards vulnerabilities or truths about themselves (or about the world) that make them feel unenlightened or feel uncomfortable negative emotion, disempowered, too human, destabilized, weak, like they don’t know the answer, stuck or inferior. They are using a spiritual personal to AVOID going into and towards any of these things. They don’t question themselves in any way that leads them in this direction either. If you do question them in this way, they will behave like you are trying to go against a commandment. They are not interested in canvassing what is real. Nor are they committed to the continual finding of what is true and real in any situation. They look to negate certain aspects of reality with other aspects of reality, such as negating suffering by pointing out that people choose their life experience because they know it served them in some way.
An awakened person does not want you to reject, deny or disown any aspect of yourself, no matter how “unsavory”. A person with a spiritual persona will influence you to do exactly this with their words and/or behavior. Because it is what they are doing.
Their spirituality will be performative. You can think of a person with a spiritual persona as a method actor. This is after all an act that someone has confused as their real selves. They must become that person. So, they walk the walk and talk the talk and dress the dress and put it right out in front and up in your face to assert that this is who and what they are. Nothing about them will be original, because their persona is copied from other spiritual people who came before them and the current spiritual trends.
The spiritual persona is quite possibly one of the most obnoxious, mind twister things you will encounter in the spiritual communities and you will encounter it if you haven’t done so already. And it acts as a prevention to genuine awareness and genuine awakening and even genuine spiritual connectedness. This being said, the more people that are aware of the existence of the spiritual persona as a pitfall on the spiritual path, the less likely the spiritual persona can continue to serve as a gaslight or a false image of awakening in the spiritual world.
When unwanted or bad things happen, it often feels like there are forces against you. You may even feel like the universe itself is somehow against you and like the situation is simply fully negative and detrimental. This makes it much harder to accept what is and also causes us to go into a state of resistance. Today, I’m going to share with you a spiritual exercise that will pull you out of that state of resistance, as well as potentially bring you more into alignment with the universe at large.
First, I’m going to tell you a story about an ant. Imagine that somewhere in Texas, there is an ant who is dreaming of a more cooperative colony. Imagine that I knew for a fact that this ant would find the exact colony he is wanting in Africa. So, I put him in a little jar, take him away from his existing colony and put him on an airplane bound for Africa. I know that what he is wanting is going to come to him as a direct result of what he is experiencing. I know that it is FOR him. Yet, will this be the experience that the ant is going to have? No. He will think his world has ended. He will think he has lost everyone and everything. He will experience terror and pain and tell himself that this is the worst thing to ever happen to him. He will go into crisis.
In our subjective life experience, we do not have the same degree of objective perspective that the universe at large does. And so, the universe is very often in my position in this ant scenario, but relative to you. I don’t want this example to put the idea in your mind that you are simply an ignorant chess piece that is being played by the universe or Source or God, whatever you wish to call it. But there is a great deal of orchestration going on in this universe. Much of which you vote for and ask for with your thoughts, words, actions and desires. And that orchestration is being done from a bigger picture awareness. From our perspective, what is not a straight line to what we want and to what is good for us, may in fact be the straightest line there is to both; from a higher perspective.
Every one of us can think back to at least one time where something good, potentially even better than we could have imagined, came as the direct result of something bad. What if you had known that would happen in advance? Would it have changed your relationship to the bad thing that happened in any way? Would it have helped you to accept or embrace what was happening in any way? A potent spiritual exercise that you can do, is to brainstorm how the universe might be FOR you by bringing a situation into your life. Or put differently, how it might be FOR you for a situation to be happening.
To do this exercise, it is very beneficial to write rather than to simply think. Doing so makes thoughts more solid. The objective is to act like a detective trying to crack the existential case or a lawyer whose job it is to argue for how what is happening could be for you. Some things to consider when you are doing this exercise are:
*Reality contains both the polarity of positive and negative. What are some of the positives inherent in the reality of the situation?
*Is there anything you appreciate about any element of this negative situation, no matter how small?
*What strength might you be developing?
*What ability or skill might you be developing?
*How is this experience giving you an advantage over others?
*How are you changing as a result of this experience and how might that serve you?
*How might what is happening make you better suited to what you truly want?
*Have you discovered anything new that you appreciate or love as a part of what is happening?
*If someone else was going through what you are going through, how might it serve them or be a blessing in disguise?
*Is what is happening making you aware of anything new about yourself and what matters to you?
*Is there anything you like about yourself better since this experience as opposed to before this experience?
*Is this experience making you aware of any limitations you have had that you need to break through to get what you want or to become who you want to be?
*Has this experience freed you from anything?
*If you continued down the path that you were on with everything staying the same, and this experience never happened, how might that not benefit you? And what might you be missing out on? And how might that lead to something unwanted?
*How might this be bringing you closer to your desires, rather than further away?
*What does this make possible?
*What positive experiences might be happening now that are outside your comfort zone in a good way?
*If this were not just an end to something good, but a beginning of something good, what might it be the beginning of?
*What is this situation asking of you and for what positive purpose?
*Even if it is bittersweet, what beauty have you seen during this process?
*What has this caused you to be more grateful for and to take more appreciative notice of?
*What has this caused you to be more committed to?
*If you were sitting in front of your grandchildren, what might you tell them about this situation? What lesson might it contain for them?
*What has this situation made you aware that you are capable of, that you didn’t feel capable of before?
*What new people have you met as a result of this experience?
*How will this situation cause you to do things differently and how might doing things differently in that way, lead to better results?
*What have you learned in this situation or as a result of this situation? And how does that give you an advantage?
*What if you looked at this situation through the eyes of your future self?
*If this were leading you to something great, what might this be leading you to?
*If everything had stayed the same, and this had never happened, what might you regret never experiencing?
*Has this situation made you aware of a gift you have to give others?
*If you planned for this experience and even chose it for yourself before this life, why might you have done that?
If you feel more like making this a group exercise, you can involve other people in the brainstorming of how the situation you select might be FOR you. So that you can see an example of this exercise, here is one that was submitted by Makayla, a woman in her early 20’s:
“So, I thought about this for a while such as my recent breakup, not having enough money, and my health issues but if I’m honest, what is bugging me the most and affecting me on a daily basis is what happened in my childhood.
When I was young, I had been sexually abused by my father and no one in my family did anything about it. I was suffering with this all by myself while my mom made it all the worse by constantly belittling me and making me the family problem. Even the ways I tried to cope with the abuse were made wrong. For example, when I had depression and was lying in bed, my mom would storm into my room, screaming at me to get up and do something with my life. I was constantly criticized in all the ways you can possibly criticize someone. She criticized my appearance because I wasn’t making myself look presentable enough when part of why I didn’t put any energy into my looks to begin with was because I already felt worthless. I was constantly told I wasn’t smart enough because I didn’t get good enough grades in their eyes. There was little to no possible feedback I received from anyone.
When I was in elementary school, the so-called “friends” I had would make fun of me, belittle me, and ditch me for other people they found cooler and more relatable. “You are worthless” is a message I got from everyone and everywhere. I was completely isolated on all levels. Because of this, for most of my life, I have struggled with deep shame, self-hate, OCD, anxiety, and hopelessness.
So how was all of this for me? I am now incredibly skilled at recognizing patterns in people and situations, which has helped me in relationships. Unlike many people who were able to cope with overlays and fantasy in their childhood (like my sister who was the golden child), I was always in reality and never had rose-colored glasses on about people or life. I watched my sister struggle in her 20s because of all the fantasies that were shattering for her. I will never have to experience this type of pain. This also makes it so that I am more capable of relationships because I can be both in the positive and negative realities about people.
If I hadn’t gone through this experience, I would’ve been embroiled in family patterns and societal expectations. I see my peers struggling with a lack of meaning in their life. They seem to care more about their appearance, status on social media, and keeping up with trends so that they can feel good about themselves and stuck in surface level relationships. They don’t feel like they have a solid place in the world. They are not in touch with anything that is real or authentic about them. I could never anchor my self-esteem into this because it was completely destroyed from the get go. I could never really let go of what is real for me even if it was under attack everyday. As the scapegoat of the family, I could literally not adapt to the expectations other people had of me, especially my family.
I saw how my sister was caught in the rat race of trying to prove to my parents her worth through performing at things that they deemed as important and of value. She completely lost touch with herself and her intrinsic value. She needed to spend years having to sort out what is her vs not her. I have never been able to let go of my core self.
My suffering has broken me free from petty things so I am very aware of what matters. I am not stressed out about the way my life needs to be to impress others like needing to have this “picture perfect” image. I am not susceptible to peer pressure at all. A lot my peers may feel they need to drink or party or have a lot of friends or be popular - to be accepted. But I have a really strong sense of what I value. Because of this, I am able to have more compatible and authentic relationships that are based on what is genuine for me. I am able to prioritize what matters from the understanding of the greater picture of my life. What matters to me is having incredibly connected relationships with people who are in touch with what is real, people who value honesty, people who care about other people outside of themselves, etc. What happened to me has made me highly aware of my needs and desires in relationships so I am closer to what I want than most people are.
I am also stronger than most people I know. I am actually able to take pain for the things I want and not give up if something gets hard. I notice people struggling with accepting pain and contrast as a part of life and as a part of getting what they want. People are trying to cope with or adapt to painful situations in their life. I am able to be in a conscious relationship with pain because I was unable to adapt, cope with, or run away from pain.
I never do anything with the sole motivation of getting positive feedback from others. I will not be swayed in something I believe or am passionate about just because of opposing opinions. I have a greater sense of integrity because of this. I am solid in who I am. I cannot separate from what matters to me in life.”
When something bad happens, you should not bypass the painful emotions you feel and the information contained within them by jumping straight into any exercise (including this one) that is designed to have you become aware of the positives or potential positives of the reality you are facing. The first step should be to go directly into the painful emotions. For this reason, when something bad happens, the first thing to do is an exercise that helps you to become aware of and to feel your emotions and become aware of the personal truths they contain. Something like The Emotional Experiencing Process. If you want to learn how to do that, you can watch my video that is titled: How To Do The Emotional Experiencing Process. You can treat exercises like this one, which bring you into a more positive state of being as a step two. What you want to make sure of, is that you are not using any exercise (including this one) as a way to deny, negate, suppress, avoid or escape from the reality of how you feel. This exercise is meant to be done as a loving assistance to yourself, not out of resistance to yourself. Doing this exercise is not meant to negate anything. Afterall, the ant in our earlier scenario did experience super painful things in his process. The arrival at the ant colony he desires, did not make that pain he went through suddenly not real or not happen. But it did change his perspective on the whole process for the better and he does now feel like it was FOR him, rather than against him. As a sidenote to this, a video that will benefit you to watch if you are going through something panful is: The Gates (The Great Untold Prerequisite To Getting What You Want).
Doing this exercise will pull you into alignment with the bigger picture orchestration of your life experience. It will help you to come out of a state of resistance to what is happening. It will open you up to seeing opportunities and upsides inherent in the situation that you were unable to see before. It may even cause you to make different decisions and take different actions, ones that are far more in alignment with your actual best interests.
The self-help industry, the psychology world and the spiritual field are all currently abuzz with the idea of “emotional regulation”. You can’t go anywhere without hearing people talk about how important it is to learn how to regulate your emotions and to be emotionally regulated. Today, I’m going to explain to you why the idea of emotional regulation is detrimental and needs to be put to rest, as well as what needs to be done instead.
The unfortunate reality is that we are alive at a time when humanity is in the dark ages relative to emotion and feeling. In the year 1600, doctors considered bathing unhealthy because they thought that it removed a protective layer of oil and dirt, exposing the body to unclean water and diseased air. They also considered bloodletting the right treatment for all kinds of physical maladies. So, it should not surprise us that in the emotional dark ages, experts have all kinds of misconceptions about emotions and how to deal with them.
So first, let’s talk about emotions. Emotions are reactions in and of themselves. They occur within you in response to many different stimuli, such as people, places, things, situations, circumstances, and energies that you are encountering in the external world as well as your own thoughts, especially your own thoughts about those external stimuli. Remember that thoughts can be subconscious or conscious. When we encounter a stimulus, we experience a reaction to it in the form of a highly physiological response that we feel. Within this felt based response, is information. Emotions carry a lot of information about our environment and about ourselves, most especially about our subjective experience of our environment and about our personal truths. Some people might refer to this as cognitive interpretation. For example, a person may be having a strong emotional reaction and contained within this emotional reaction might be the information “that makes me feel powerless to X bad thing happening and I need to feel like I have some hand in making sure it doesn’t happen.” This is why emotions can serve as a kind of internal guidance system and influence a person to take a certain action.
Sometimes it is helpful to think of emotion as a different language in which information is received and transmitted. When we have an emotional reaction, most of the time, this information within the emotion is totally subconscious. And we do not take the time to make it conscious. We don’t tune into this language that is occurring within us so as to consciously ascertain the information it contains. And because of this, we simply have a behavioral response to the emotion. This is what people are most familiar with… the actual behavioral expression of an emotion. One of the biggest false assumptions people make is that all people experience emotions the same way and with the same level of intensity. They don’t. For example, anger does not always feel the same in one person’s body as it does in another’s. Some people also feel emotions much, much more intensely and for longer.
Our emotions are an automatic response. And for very good reason. When we are out navigating the world and the people, places and things in it, we need to have reactions to things and make sense of things VERY quickly. The physiological arousal response element of emotions (which you feel) as well as the cognitive interpretation element of emotions (which you are only rarely consciously aware of) happens in such an immediate and intertwined way. And yet, all of the focus is on trying to regulate emotions.
Let’s look at what it means to regulate. To regulate means to control or govern by a rule, principle or method. To adjust to some standard or requirement. To adjust so as to ensure accuracy of operation. Or to put something in good order. You should not be trying to control, govern, hold a standard for, expect “accuracy” from or order your emotions. And here is why:
Emotions are not a problem. They are certainly not the problem. And this mentality that you must control your emotions, paints emotions to be the problem. It paints them as not ok and not good. It scapegoats them.
You cannot “control” whether or not an emotion occurs within you. You should not be trying to control the way you feel. You are not going to be able to bring order to the way that emotions occur within you. And you need to stop considering emotional control a virtue. When we try to control our emotions, we approach our emotions as our adversaries. And when we do this, several negative things happen. We make our emotions the problem for existing. We resist them, rather than opening ourselves up to feeling them and becoming conscious of the information they contain. And we fall into behaviors like denying, disowning, negating, suppressing, rejecting, opposing and disconnecting from our emotion/the way we feel. Also, we play mental games with ourself to try to convince ourselves that we shouldn’t feel the way we feel or that we don’t feel the way we feel. Or that everything is fine when it isn’t.
Our approach of trying to change and manipulate and control the emotion we feel does not actually work. So, it doesn’t lead to results. So, you just end up feeling like something is wrong with you and you start fearing, distrusting and hating this fundamental aspect of yourself. This is a big deal when you realize that the way you feel is the core of your life experience.
When it comes to emotions, the idea of holding your emotions to a standard or to some requirement is utterly bizarre. After all, emotions don’t have the free will or ability to live up to a standard or requirement.
Emotions are sometimes a perfect reflection of reality. And, emotions are sometimes very much not a perfect reflection of reality. Especially given that emotions are responding to all kinds of factors, including previous life experiences that have informed a person’s cognitive interpretations of events. In this way, emotions cannot ever be held to the standard of “accuracy” or “appropriateness” for that matter. Nor should they be. Our emotions may not perfectly fit the reality of a situation and still, they are very important and carry very valuable information that serves our awareness.
There is no way to prevent an emotion from occurring. There are simply a great many things you can do regarding the cognitive interpretation of things and this may in turn alter what emotional reaction you have when you come into contact with a specific stimulus.
What is important to accept is that you can’t prevent an emotion from occurring within you. And you can’t choose which emotions you experience. The process we call an emotional response, happens very quickly and without your conscious will. Your rational mind is not involved in this process. You can however decide what you do with emotions when they occur. Where we are trying to consciously intervene is in that tiny, (let’s be honest sometimes infinitesimal) gap between the experience of an emotion and the behavioral response to the way we feel. Most of us behaviorally react to our emotions on autopilot, and mostly according to patterns from the past. For example, you feel angry — therefore you hit someone. Or, you feel insecure — therefore you withdraw. Therefore, we need to stop talking about learning to regulate our emotions and start talking about learning how to consciously master our behavior. Any tool out there that is presented as a way to regulate emotion, is actually a tool that is designed to regulate behavior.
Emotion (you could say the way we feel) is a very important part of us. It is a key component of being truly alive and staying alive. Emotions are absolutely constructive. And as such, this language should be mastered and the way we feel should be consciously tended to. When emotions occur, they must be acknowledged, seen as important, owned, fully felt and allowed to move through our being, the information within them, ascertained. And then, your response to the emotion (including the information contained within the emotion) must be consciously chosen. We should not be trying to prevent or control or govern or hold a standard for or expect “accuracy” from or order our emotions at all. We should be trying to prevent the activation of the automatic behavioral reaction, so that we can consciously choose to respond to our emotions and according to the information inherent within them. And guess what, the more you try to control, suppress, deny, disown, negate, reject or opposing your emotions, i.e., “regulate them”, the harder it becomes to do this.
Help me to change the discourse in this world around this topic, because in this case, the discourse and the semantics really do matter and really does have a negative impact on people and on human society at large. Help me to change discussions around emotional regulation into discussions about emotional embracing + behavioral mastery.
Non-reactivity is a quality that people in the world today hold in very high esteem. People tend to hold a positive opinion of and a very high degree of respect for people who do not canvass their emotions and who do not take actions that are triggered by emotions. And like anything that is esteemed within society, people strive to be what is esteemed. People aspire to not only have complete control over their emotional state, but to be non-emotional. Currently, people see non-emotionality, especially non-reactivity as an indication that a person is mentally healthy, mature, safe, in control of themselves, wise, self-actualized and even enlightened. Today, I’m going to show you why un-emotionality and non-reactivity is not necessarily an indication of any of these things. As well as explain why this obsession we have with non-reactivity is causing people harm.
In today’s world, people have a very, very poor relationship with emotions. We are essentially living in an emotional dark age. Because of this lack of understanding about emotions, people don’t have an accurate perspective about them and so, they don’t do the right thing with emotions when they occur. So, let’s start at the beginning. Emotions are reactions in and of themselves. They occur within you in response to many different stimuli, such as people, places, things, situations, circumstances, and energies that you are encountering in the external world as well as your own thoughts, especially your own thoughts about those external stimuli. When we encounter a stimulus, we experience a reaction to it in the form of a felt based, highly physiological response. Within this felt based response, is information. Emotions carry a lot of information about our environment and about ourselves, most especially about our subjective experience of our environment and about our personal truths. For example, a baby may be having a strong emotional reaction and contained within this emotional reaction might be the information “that scared me, I need comfort”. This is why emotions can serve as a kind of internal guidance system. Sometimes it is helpful to think of emotion as a different language in which information is received and transmitted. When we have an emotional reaction, most of the time, this information within the emotion is totally subconscious. And we do not take the time to make it conscious. We don’t tune into this language that is occurring within us so as to consciously ascertain the information it contains. And because of this, we simply have a behavioral response to the emotion. This is what people are most familiar with… the actual expression of an emotion.
The truth is, we should not be focusing on trying to regulate our emotions at all. If anything, we should be concerned with consciously regulating our behavior. After all, what we are really concerned with when we talk about needing to be non-reactive is the behavioral response that we have to experiencing an emotion.
One of the biggest false assumptions people make is that all people experience emotions the same way and with the same level of intensity. They don’t. Anger does not always feel the same in one person’s body as it does in another’s. Some people also feel emotions much, much more intensely and for longer. Emotions (you could say the way we feel) is a very important part of us. It is a key component of being alive. And as such, this language should be mastered and the way we feel should be consciously tended to.
The problem is, all of us have experienced negative emotional reactions being caused within us in response to the behavioral responses someone else is having due to their emotions. And we don’t want to feel bad, so we don’t want other people to have them. The behavioral responses to emotion we are feeling can have a negative effect on us and can have a negative effect on others. But they can also have a positive effect. The problem is not behavioral responses in and of themselves, the problem is we are not consciously involved in the process. These behavioral responses are so subconscious, it seems like they are simply happening to us. I find it amusing that so much of our relationship to emotions (as well as our glorification of non-reactivity) stems from our own desire to not have a negative emotional reaction to someone else’s negative emotional reaction. As well from our desire to be held in esteem by other people, which many of us feel is not possible unless we have no negative emotional reactions that could make them have a negative emotional reaction. In other words, we are very, very resistant to feeling. The obsession we have today with non-reactivity and emotional regulation is causing people to go into resistance to their emotions and to try to achieve a state of non-emotionality in detrimental ways. Ways that can prove even more detrimental than the automatic behavioral reactions people have to emotions.
In today’s world, people see emotional regulation, non-emotionality as a sign that someone is mentally healthy, mature, safe, in control of themselves, wise, self-actualized and even enlightened, regardless of how that state of being is achieved. And this is really really ignorant. There are a great many mentally healthy, mature, safe, wise, self-actualized and even enlightened beings that are highly emotional beings and who choose to canvass their emotions very intentionally. But the most important thing to understand is that when it comes to what people are calling emotional regulation, the WHY and the HOW matters a great deal. It matters why someone is wanting to regulate their emotions. It matters why someone is not being emotionally reactive and it matters how emotional non-reactivity is achieved.
So that this idea that nonreactivity is a perfect indication of someone being mentally healthy, mature, safe, in control of themselves, wise, self-actualized and enlightened is destroyed for good, let me explain some super out of alignment ways that people can achieve this state and thus, you can be fooled.
Denial can easily make it so that someone does not have an emotional reaction. When this happens, they are telling themselves a story in their own head and are therefore not reacting to what is occurring in reality. For example, you could use the story that a child who was born into an abusive environment is an eternal soul who wanted to be in that very experience in this life for the sake of their own expansion. By doing this, it is easy to deny the negative reality of that experience and to not have a strong negative reaction to a child being abused. You can also deny and ignore your emotions themselves because you’ve decided that they shouldn’t be there.
People can have no emotional reaction by disconnecting from their own emotion. This is often called emotional blunting. This is a coping mechanism whereby people detach from and disengage with their own emotions and the emotions of others. People can disconnect from their own body so they no longer perceive the physiological responses associated with emotions in their own body. People can also disconnect from other people, so other people have no real effect on them. Disconnection is one of the most out of alignment states there is. Unfortunately, it is easily mistaken as someone being evolved.
Disidentification without self-ownership. This is an especially prevalent issue in the spiritual community. This is when people identify only with their non-physical self and disidentify from everything else, especially their human self. They call this dis-identifying from their ego or from their physical form. But, they do not caretake their temporal self or take it as a part of themselves. Rather they radically disown it. As a result, any emotion that they have, they don’t see as ‘their’ emotion. They minimize it and see as totally invalid to them, refusing to engage with the language of felt perception. They are disconnected from the temporal self and have effectively abandoned the temporal self. Unfortunately, to the untrained eye, these people are often seen as the most enlightened of all.
The creation of (and over-identification with) a spiritual persona that does not have emotional reactions. When something is as highly esteemed as emotional non-reactivity, we can easily create a persona that mimics this quality. We can then get stuck in this 24-7 game of pretend. We pretend to be that person, only that one created part of ourselves. Like an act, we craft our thoughts and behavior to match how we believe that person would and should be, rather than working with what is real about us and real about how we feel. This creation of a spiritual persona like this can often be a means of achieving power over others in the form of a covert superiority complex. And it is quite possibly one of the most obnoxious things you will encounter in the spiritual communities. It is a walking, breathing gaslight.
We can live in the coping mechanism of toxic positivity. People sometimes use positivity to cope. Rather than seeing reality, they simply only focus on the positive aspect of anything they encounter, reframe everything to be positive and tell themselves a positive story about everything. When they feel a negative emotional response, they immediately counteract it. They are actually at war with their negative emotions. But because on an emotional level, they are essentially injecting themselves with pain killers constantly, you will not see any strong emotional reactions from this person. People who live from this coping mechanism refuse to hold the cognitive dissonance state of two opposing things being true at the same time… “And Consciousness”.
Suppression. It is possible for some people (not those who feel very, very strongly) to suppress emotions. Emotional suppression is so, so common amongst people. You can also suppress emotions with certain drugs and medications. As a result, they will seem very in control of themselves emotionally. Though they will feel very numb in life in general and will have lost touch with direction in life because they are not listening to the information about themselves contained within their emotions.
Lack of empathy. When we are deeply connected to all that is, we have a high degree of empathy. This means we have strong negative emotional reactions to what is occurring out there in the world. When we are not deeply connected to the world, when we don’t take others as a part of ourselves, we lack empathy. But this makes a person seem much less emotionally reactive.
Withdrawal. Some people accomplish non-reactivity by withdrawing. They simply remove themselves from whatever is causing an emotional reaction in them. They accomplish emotional control by removing the stimulus that is casing that reaction. This is a state of avoidance, unfortunately withdrawing is often seen as an evolved behavior, certainly much healthier than exhibiting an emotional reaction.
As a society, we need to resolve this resistance that we have to emotions. We need to love them instead. Only then can we be in a working relationship with them. We need to stop seeing non-emotionality as a virtue. And we need to stop seeing non-reactivity as an automatic indication of someone being mentally healthy, mature, safe, in control of themselves, wise, self-actualized or awakened.
Online dating, most especially dating apps, is quickly becoming the most common way that romantic relationships begin. Which is absolutely mind blowing, given that online dating became widely known in society in the mid 1990s and was heavily stigmatized to begin with. It didn’t really start catching on with the mainstream public until around 2012 and start becoming the way to meet people. If you look at how people have met and formed relationships within the context of the course of history, and then look at what has happened since the boom of online dating and dating apps, you will realize that in the blink of an eye, the entire landscape of human relationships has changed. There is an upside to dating apps, otherwise they would not have caught on. Things like having access to connecting with people who are outside of your limited social circle and geographic area. Being matched with people according to preferences and compatibilities (which is not immediately obvious when meeting someone face to face). More inclusivity and opportunities for people whose sexuality or orientation is not mainstream. A sense of control and most people finding it easier, less daunting and less high stakes to initiate a conversation with someone they are interested in, etc. But the landscape change of human relationships due to dating apps has not been a thing of beauty. In fact, there have been many profoundly negative effects of dating apps, including many that most people do not see. Here are the top negative impacts of dating apps.
Due to the fact that dating apps are essentially whole data bases of individuals who are looking for romantic and or sexual relationships and that they take in a wide geographical range, dating apps give people a sense of endless opportunity. Because of this, it’s reducing the value of people. People do not value the specific connections and specific people who they come into contact with as much. There is always someone else and always potentially someone better. It has enabled people to become like employers vetting candidates from a never-ending pool. This has also made people become zero effort in their approach to relationships. If anything becomes hard, they can just move on to someone else. This laissez faire, apathetic, grass could always be greener on the other side attitude towards relationships in general has made it so that it is actually harder to establish a relationship with someone and harder to keep the relationship intact, especially when things get less than pleasurable in the relationship. There is no real investment in relationships. The reality is, when it comes to relationships, people need to have their best interests cared for and they have long term needs. Things like attachment, belonging, relationship security, emotional intimacy, to be known, positive ownership, emotional investment and trust are things people need in relationships. These are all long-term needs that require you to put energy and care into the development and strengthening of a relationship. These things take investment. So, people are not getting what they actually need in relationships from dating apps. In the same way that people do not get adequate nutrition from fast food restaurants. Dating apps are the fast food of relationships. Dating apps have effectively corroded a great deal of the energy input and the grip in relationships, which are necessary elements of making a relationship work. Humanity needs to master relationships. Dating apps are not helping people with this at all.
It has created a hook up culture boom. And as it applies to the destruction of human relationships, this is not really an argument about human sexuality or the morality or immorality of casual sex, which is what most people make it about. It is an argument about the boom of zero investment relationships. Dating apps (especially those designed specifically for hook ups) have enabled people to have casual sexual encounters without any emotional intimacy, bonding, commitment or investment. This has increased the degree to which people are simply narcissistically using each other for personal romantic or sexual gratification. It has eradicated the motive and the need to form deep, emotionally intimate, committed and invested relationships in a significant amount of people. It has led many people to feel like while there are endless opportunities to find someone, it is also rare to find someone who wants an actual relationship. Humanity needs to learn relationships. People are not learning relationships when they are normalizing no investment relationships. And because of a great many factors, this hookup culture damages women even more than it does men. Also, because dating apps overwhelmingly cater to hook up culture (the fast-food relationship system) people who are looking at dating apps for their committed, invested relationship needs are often looking for their needs in a place that contradicts their needs.
Because dating apps have become “the way” to meet people now, other ways of meeting people have gone away, making it seem like the only real option. People do not go out to events or places with the idea of meeting potential partners, like they used to. So, people keep to themselves when they are out and about. People don’t approach each other and strike up conversation like they used to. Lots of the events that used to cater to people looking for romantic, sexual partners don’t happen anymore.
It has removed the human element from social interactions. Because dating apps are turning dating into a ‘shopping for people, like you would shop for products at a grocery store’ experience, people are becoming like objects to other people. You can just go for whatever relational need you have in any moment. Which has created a narcissistic dating culture. When you get on a dating app, you are getting on because you have a need. You are “swiping” on whoever you think can meet that need the fastest and best. And people are doing the same to you. Dating apps have made it so that people treat potential romantic candidates like objects rather than people. They forget that there is a person on the other side of the profile and conversation and so, they are not careful about the impact they have on one another. People are also slipping into self-objectification because of all of this. There is a lot of superficiality and there is a lot of hurting going on. Downright ruthlessness if you want the honest truth.
Dating apps are like a menu that disgustingly simplify who someone is. They take all the complexity of a person and whittle it down to essentially a marketing pitch. Something that does not show you the reality of who someone is, at all. People also do not understand themselves enough to accurately portray the reality of themselves. So, it puts you in the position of having to meet them in person, to see if 1. They have accurately described themselves. 2. If they are a match to what you are looking for. And when someone does this over and over and over and it’s a no, they start to feel a sense of burn out, futility and bitterness relative to relationships, become more narcistic and put less effort into relationships themselves. They may even withdraw from them completely.
Dating apps promote relationships on the basis of superficiality, and especially physical appearance. The dating apps of today encourage you to create a profile to showcase superficial things, such as images to show people what you look like, what your hobbies and interests are, what kinds of things you like sexually. These are not the qualities that determine whether a relationship will work. They are also not the qualities that determine compatibility or lack thereof. What someone looks like, does not tell you who they are or what they will be like in relationships. Nor do any of these other superficial things. Due to this, people are passing up potentially very compatible people and they are thinking they are a match to people they are not actually compatible with at all. And they are thinking that a superficial approach to relationships works, when it doesn’t.
Because of the nature of dating apps, dating apps have given rise to a situation where people’s negative beliefs about relationships are being reinforced, rather than healed. Beliefs like, I’ll never find a relationship with a woman if I’m not tall enough. No one will want me unless I make enough money. The only thing that matters to men is looks. Men only want 20-year-olds. People just want sex. All people do is lie. I’m easily replaceable. There is no one out there for me, etc. As such, they have made it so people are not healing their relational traumas. Instead, they are getting more damaged and are becoming worse at relationships.
Ghosting has become a common and normalized social behavior. Ghosting being to end a relationship and withdraw from all communication suddenly and without any explanation. This is a horrible social behavior that has deep negative impact on a person’s wellbeing.
Negative impacts on self-esteem and mental and emotional health. This should be obvious given the previous points I have mentioned. But on top of this, dating apps have made rejection a super frequent if not consistent part of social interaction. And due to the aforementioned factors as well as the barrier that exists between people when they are not face to face, people have much less of a problem rejecting each other over a digital platform, either by ghosting or communicating that you are not what they are looking for. You’re essentially marketing yourself to be judged and tried out and rejected by people. This can increase a sense of despair relative to finding someone who will want you. Anxiety about whether people will like you. And this leads people to feel like there is something wrong with them and like they are undesirable and dig a sense of loneliness deeper and deeper into their being. This pain can cause a person to withdraw from relationships all together in anticipation of rejection.
Duping. This is an issue when it comes to dating in general. But dating apps have rolled out the red carpet for the human shadows of deceit, anonymity, lying and duping to reign supreme. People can catfish, lie to you about themselves and their intentions, present a totally false image of themselves and cause all kinds of pain while hiding behind an online façade. They have even encouraged this deception by making it so that the name of the game is to present yourself in a way that other people will want you, as opposed to presenting the reality of who you are. And the nature of dating aps makes it feel like the only way to get someone to not reject you, is to play this deception game. Also, dating apps are littered with dangerous dating app scams.
Dating apps are making it so many people are not out in the world living. They are on their phones, pouring all of their energy into things like constantly updating their profile and constantly checking to see if someone has liked them. And constantly messaging with multiple people. And constantly doom scrolling profiles. Chasing the “high” of being admired. There is a stressful, addictive quality to it that can consume all of your time and energy. This damages your other relationships; limits the time and energy you can put into other things that are important and meaningful to put time and energy into. And it robs us of your engagement with the present moment. Dating apps can become a real accessory to the squandering of your life.
All of these negative impacts have made it so that dating apps have given rise to more pain in relationships and a collective hopelessness about relationships. Society has made people feel like relationships are painful and too hard. This is true for so many reasons from the traditional structure of relationships no longer working in today’s modern world to autonomy and independence becoming such a cardinal societal value to all the truly damaging behaviors people exhibit towards each other. To marketing and social media setting an ideal no one can live up to. Dating apps have come onto the scene and they have been presented as the way to get your relational needs met. But they change nothing about the dysfunction in human relationships at this point in time. Neither do they teach nor promote any of the relationship skills that could put an end to these oppositional factors to human relationships. They simply put you in touch with more people. So, dating apps are just highlighting and amplifying, if not playing into all of the relationship dysfunction amongst humans. The only thing that will lead to what most people are actually wanting and needing in relationships, is investment. Most especially the investment in mastering relationships.
The road to getting what you want, the road to success (no matter what is it) is not a straight one. It is full of twists and turns and ups and downs and challenges and times when you feel like you are back at square one. Most people don’t find out what will be required of them in order to get what they want, until they are far enough down that road to find it out for themselves and not in a particularly conscious way. Today, I’m going to reveal this untold prerequisite for getting what you want, so that you can be more prepared and have a far more conscious relationship with this road to getting what you want and the many “gates” you will encounter along the way.
It’s at this point that you might be asking “what is a gate?” A gate is a barrier you must pass through in order to advance forward. As it applies to this conversation about getting what you want, a gate is an obstacle that acts as a barrier to us moving forward towards our aim and thus, that prevents us from getting what we want. Each gate is different. And our task is to find out how to pass each gate we encounter. In fact, our personal expansion depends on us doing so. Each gate represents something within ourselves that acts as an oppositional factor to what we want. Just so that you can get an idea of what I mean, let’s say that a person wants to win a world title in a sport. They may hit a gate that pertains to them having no support where the only way to pass through it is to go above and beyond what other athletes have to do to train and enter competitions, demonstrating perseverance where others might quit. And then they may hit a gate of self-criticism, where the only way to pass through the gate is to integrate their inner critic. And then, they may hit a gate that pertains to success causing them to lose belonging in their family. And so, the only way to pass through it, is to be able to choose to move forward, despite the consequence being to lose closeness with those people around them who will not be advocates to their success and surround themselves with people who will. And then, they may hit a gate where they are injured and so no one believes in them anymore. And so, the only way to pass through the gate is to tap into an inner resource that acts as a drive to rehabilitate and try again, despite being up against the pressure of everyone’s doubts and the attention and celebration being geared towards other athletes. And then, they may hit a gate where the barrier they hit is their own shame about needing and wanting support, where the only way to pass through the gate is to work through that shame and admit to needing and wanting support and then learning how to take it in, etc.
Obviously, how big gates are, how hard they are to pass through and how many of them there are tends to correlate with what one’s desires actually are. And tends to correlate with the vibrational distance between where a person is and where they want to be. You will hit these gates no matter what your desire is. But, imagine that what you want is to find a job somewhere that really values your presence and contribution. You are likely to hit less big deal gates than you will if what you want is to reach a state of enlightenment by integrating your ego. Each time you hit a gate and do what it takes to pass through it, you are growing. You are developing. You are strengthening. Your deepest values are being revealed. You are becoming more aware. You are refining yourself. You are transforming. You are being forged. You are expanding personally, as well as causing universal expansion. And in this way, desire plays an absolutely massive role in expansion. Desire is not the cause of suffering. People suffer because of not making peace with the fact that there is no end to desire. You will always want something else and something more. And people suffer because of hitting their gates. And even a person whose desire is to rid themselves of desire, will hit gates on the road to that desire. On the road to getting what you want, you will encounter every oppositional factor that exists within you to the getting of what you want.
One common gate that people hit on the road to what they want, is the resistance to going through so many of these gates on the road to what they want. A common way that people work through this resistance, is to give up on what they want to the point where they don’t really want it anymore. By doing so, they are no longer in resistance to the not getting of it. And so, the gate swings open. This is why you may have observed that people often get what they want, when they don’t even really want it anymore. It is also why the author of The Never-Ending Story chose to make this the final test for Atreyu.
The thing that almost no one on earth knows and the thing that no one will tell you is that when it comes to getting what you want the very most, the final prerequisite, the final gate, is to choose the very thing that you have been avoiding your entire life in order to get what you want. And this, is the most difficult gate of them all. Often, when it comes to our deepest desire, we are compelled towards that thing, at least in part because of a trauma we suffered and therefore, something that we are desperate to get away from and avoid. And the day will come that rather than avoid it, to get what we want, we must be willing to experience it. We must say yes to it for the sake of what we want. And often, when we hit this gate, it feels VERY counterintuitive.
So that you can understand this better, here are three examples: Jeremy grew up in a very poor household with a very dysfunctional family where the only way to have a home was to become whatever pleased and placated his mother. His deepest fear has always been to be homeless without physical resources and without people to come home to. Jeremy’s big desire in life is to live an authentic life, to be himself. At this point in his life, he ended up where he lives by becoming what his partner needed to please her, moving into her house, putting himself in a support role to her company and by acting compatible to everything. This, is a precarious position he has put himself in. Revealing that he is not who he said he was and must change everything in order to be true to himself means he will have to quit his job working for her so he will have no income, she may kick him out of her house and she may want to end the relationship because he isn’t who she signed up for, so he will have no one to come home to; which is a special hell given that Thanksgiving and Christmas are just round the corner. Now, in order to get what he wants, he must actually decide that being authentic is worth the risk of being homeless and choose that risk, even if it means temporarily experiencing that.
Afifa comes from a culture where women are typically obedient and subservient to men. Her father, who was particularly tyrannical, had all the power in the household and he was very abusive whenever he felt that his power was challenged. As a result of this, in order to be safe, Afifa disowned her personal power. She has lived her life from this place of prioritizing safety over everything. Afifa really, really cares about safety. However, years ago, Afifa became so sick of being disempowered. She decided that she desperately wants to be empowered. As a result, she has made a lot of progress doing little, empowering things. Things like getting a certification so she can make some money and pay for things she wants. And learning how to fix things around the house herself. And working through her inability to say what she wants in any given situation. But now, she has hit the gate where becoming more empowered means being unsafe. Becoming empowered means making decisions and doing things that will set off her father’s tyrannical fury. Becoming empowered means upsetting the people in her culture, which is likely to lead to them causing her pain emotionally and even potentially physically. And becoming empowered means changing herself in ways that go against all of her life long safety strategies, such as becoming someone who takes charge, when taking charge was the sure-fire way to be attacked. In order to become empowered, Afifa will have to consciously choose unsafety.
Mia was a child who was very nerdy and pensive. Not exactly the kid that had the easiest time fitting in. She found herself in so much pain due to exclusion and rejection in her early school years that she chose to abandon her authenticity and copy-cat other popular girls, so that she could get belonging. This social camouflaging strategy is something she has used her entire life in order to get belonging. But now, Mia is all too aware that she does not have true belonging if what she has to do is pretend to be the same as other people are, something other than who she is, in order to belong. She sees that in order to find true belonging, the gate she must pass through is to face and choose likely rejection and ostracization. The very thing she has spent her entire life trying to not experience.
Dewei was deeply alone for the first half of his life. He was the scapegoat of a very emotionally cold family. And to make matters worse, he was prevented from having friends. His deepest connection was with a parakeet the family owned. He spent 20 years building very deep friendships, cohabitating with many people and partnering up with people on various endeavors. As an adult, Dewei is on a big mission. He is a political activist. He especially believes in freedom of expression and does not believe that the government should be able to suppress and imprison those who speak out against the government or their various agendas. Dewei has had to pass through a boat load of gates on the way to what he wants, which is to change the way people in his country are governed. But now, he has met the most dreaded gate of all. Six months ago, he organized a public assembly to protest the imprisonment of a man who spoke out against the ethnic persecution being carried out in a province of their country and with it to demand the right for free speech. This assembly turned ugly. Police and even military arrived and started beating and detaining people. It was so traumatizing for everyone involved that everyone started questioning their commitment to the cause, as well as their association with Dewei. Many of the people who lived with him, moved out for their own safety. All but one of the people who partnered up with him to bring about a cultural revolution, left the cause, pledging their support only in their desire for him to succeed. The person who stayed, spends their days questioning whether it was the right decision and whether they are strong enough. This person is in such a bad place emotionally that he is emotionally disabled from really being fully behind the cause he believes in. And Dewei’s wife ran home to her family and has expressed her family’s disapproval of what he is doing. She has told him that if he continues, she must divorce him because it will mean that he does not care about her or her family’s safety. Dewei has now found himself in the position where to advance forward and have a chance at getting what he wants, he must actually choose aloneness for the sake of what matters most to him.
When you hit this gate, you will struggle to accept it. The position you are in will feel so impossible to face and experience, it will shock you. Every single adaptation that you developed within yourself in response to that dreaded thing or in order to avoid that dreaded thing will be called into question and either let go of or altered. You are likely to feel like the universe is cruel. You will feel like you are in the worst lose-lose of all time and therefore ripped in two. And you will feel like you are at square one. And you will have to make the decision to go through this gate by being willing to say yes to the very thing you have been running from your whole life, without knowing whether or not it will lead to any results. Whether or not it will actually get you what you want. Your vote for what you want has to be this strong. Strong enough that the choosing of it is not conditional upon whether you actually do get it or not.
Many people (especially those who cannot accept painful truths and realities) believe that getting what you want is as simple as focusing upon it, visualizing that you have it and taking inspired action towards it. As if doing so acts as wings to fly you past any and all gates, so you don’t have to encounter any of them. But this is not the case. What will happen if you take this approach, is that you will eventually hit the gates of not being able to get what you want because of your avoidance of the negative, the gate of fantasy, which involves the refusal to face and accept reality and the gate of the coping mechanism of denial.
The very design of this existence is to allow desire to lead you through a process of self-transformation, by virtue of you hitting these gates. It is these gates that are the alchemizing force behind all evolution, both at a microcosmic level and macrocosmic level. And knowing this will enable you to move through these gates with far greater mastery because you know to expect them. And when you encounter them, you will know what is happening. You will know that the only way forward, is to consciously take on that gate with your own free will with the willingness to engage in that process of the alchemy of self.
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