First, we have to understand what happened to us.
We lost trust, and our inner power.
No longer do we feel powerful, or feel like everybody is our friend!
This leaves us feeling helpless.
Feeling helpless causes us to try being popular and important.
With everybody doing that, our world has changed!
These attempts cause trouble.
We used to reach out and satisfy our needs.
Now, while doing these other things, our needs have no chance of being satisfied.
We feel permanently anxious!
Why did we lose trust and our inner power?
Life is supposed to get support in all its efforts.
That’s what all other life on the planet does.
But, people don’t do that anymore. We don’t support the needs and attempts of our young.
Instead, we tell them what to do! Consequently, everybody grows up telling each other what to do!
That has driven our behavior from naturally compassionate and responsible, to self-seeking and adversarial!
To keep people healthy and strong, we have to be supporting our infants in their own quest for competence, right from the very beginning.
But we don’t!
Without support, everybody is afraid.
We now live in a world full of fear.
We expect that becoming popular or powerful will make us feel better. It doesn’t though!
It only makes others jealous of us.
To really feel better, we need to get some of our inner power back!
Our first step needs to be stopping our attempts to prove ourselves to others!
Proving ourselves has become everybody’s main effort now, in these times of compromised inner power.
We obediently do all the things that we are told makes us good people!
Well these things don’t make us good people at all! They make us obedient people. They make us victims to those who would take advantage of us.
Our behavior will be far better in every way, if we satisfy our needs, rather than follow those rules.
Why better? Because the primary need of a human is trust!
We all crave being part of a trusting group!
Our behavior will honor and respect that need! We will just naturally be good people because we want to!
Following the rules will never, ever, make us good people!
The opposite is true! Surrendering to the wishes of others like this, makes us feel ever more helpless, and consequently more dangerous.
Next we rediscover what we like! What we like doing. What we want to do!
If we have got this far, our wishes will all be honorable, so no worries! Our behavior will be so outstanding, the rules will be redundant.
It doesn’t take much detective work to establish that bad behavior always comes from the most helpless and therefore most desperate individuals.
The world will become more gentle, one person at a time!
There was a song! “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think”. It sounded whimsical. It isn’t though. Before you know it, your life is all used up, doing things that never mattered!
Feelings matter! Following our hearts allows healing! The disconnection of our identities, feelings, instincts, and all around senses, can begin their repair!
Letting go of driven behavior, and reconnecting with needs has made this possible!
With any trust at all, the anxiety gradually goes away!
Good luck on your journey!
This post is part of https://clarity -of-innocence.com. If you want to return, it might be better to remember the address, as the links to it get broken at times.
Take care,
Norm Cormier
I welcome considering other thoughts.