abandonment

I grew up in an environment where everybody kept their feelings to themselves. I was a sensitive kid with very strong emotions that I didn’t know how to express constructively. The people around me didn’t seem to have emotions, because they never talked about them. Over time I developed a deep sense of shame about my feelings, and learned to suppress, suppress, suppress.

Are You Still Worrying About Whether Other People Like You?

At the same time, strong feelings of emotional abandonment as a child led me to become terrified of rejection. I didn’t know at the time that feelings are what build empathy and connection between people, and that the emotion-less communication strategies I had learned from the adult role models around me made the very thing I was most afraid of, rejection, more likely to happen to me.

As a young adult, I had panic attacks when strangers I met declined to talk with me. I developed a tremendous anxiety about what other people thought about me, and tried very hard to be perfect so that other people would like me. I thought that if I tried real hard to get people to like me, they’d be more likely to want to hang out with me.

All that did was make me even more self-conscious.

It turns out that none of these strategies work in the real world. Over time, with enough painful interactions with other people under my belt, I developed a paranoid default belief deep down in my unconscious mind:

Other people don’t like me.

Given that relationships have the most significant impact on our life satisfaction, this painful limiting belief is a real joy-killer. And it got buried not just consciously, but subconsciously, unconsciously, neurologically, limbically, and in every nerve cell of my body where it lurked waiting to rear its ugly head by getting triggered any time I encountered a potential rejection.

How do you overturn a painful belief that goes so deep?

I recently read the book Mind Lines: Lines For Changing Minds by L. Michael Hall and Bobby G. Bodenhamer, which offers 26 ways of neutralising painful limiting beliefs like this one via a neuro-semantic process known as “reframing”. Many of the patterns work by defusing the formula by which we create our distorted inner reality from our painful external experiences:

External Behaviour →/= Internal State

Whatever the fuck that means. I wish they’d explain themselves more clearly when they create some new pseudo-mathematical notation. I think it’s supposed to mean that external events don’t necessarily have to adversely affect our feelings. Somebody else behaving in a way that I used to interpret to mean that they didn’t like me, doesn’t necessarily have to make me feel bad.

So let’s see if this stuff works by applying the patterns from the book to the belief: “other people don’t like me”. This gives me 26 Ways To Chill The Fuck Out About Whether Other People Like Me: (more…)