"We human beings, we're kind of wired to be admired. We want to
look good. We want people to think well of us. And so we try to be
authentic.
We try to be real with each other because one of the things that
everybody knows is admired by others, is if you're
authentic
- if you're kind of a phony, you know nobody's going to admire you. So
we want to be
authentic.
The beginning of all
authenticity
is to be
authentic
about your
inauthenticity.
And that's how you start to get an honest
view
of yourself."
We have a certain fixed
point of view,
a belief system, a widely held
interpretation
forming an unexamined opinion then taken as fact, that our need for
attention, our need to be loved (perhaps more generally and more
inclusively and more maturely expressed as our need to be
admired) is a result of being unloved as a
child.
It's classic Psychology 101. We all know people with a story
about being unloved as a
child,
or about being unloved as a
childsome of the time or on a particular noteworthy occasion.
If we're honest about it, you and I are included in this very, very
large group of people. Everyone has a story like this,
yes?
The first quarrel I have with this particular story is this: for a
child,
it's often impossible to see and appreciate the bigger picture framing
a particular set of circumstances. For example, some of
my school
mates were sent away from home to boarding
school.
I myself was a day
scholar.
But many of the other pupils at
my school
were boarders. It's an easy conclusion for a
child
to come to:
"My parents
don't love me, so they sent me away to boarding
school.".
Children
may not get and / or appreciate the bigger picture even if they're told
about it. Some of
my school
mates'
parents
served in the diplomatic corps. Some served in the armed forces. Both
of these jobs / lifestyles involved continuous travel, an environment
not ideally suited for raising young
children.
What may have looked to a
child
like being unloved by their
parents,
was actually an expression of great love by their
parents
providing the very best they knew to provide for their
child.
The story, then, is simply an
interpretation:
it's neither fact nor true, yet it's held as fact and true.
The second quarrel I have with this particular story is this: who
gave you the job of critiquing your
parents'
performance
in any case? (that's all I have to say on that one).
The third quarrel I have with this particular story is something I get
from being around
Werner
and taking the time to consider what he reveals, without blindly
accepting everything he says as the truth (blindly
accepting anything he says as the truth is one surefire
way of ruining everything he says). The value in considering what
Werner
says, doesn't come from blindly accepting it's the truth. The value in
considering what
Werner
says is whether or not, when I try it on for size, new space opens up,
and
presence of
Self
and new power and possibility become available. Then it has value.
Otherwise it doesn't.
This is what I get: consider the possibility we don't have the feeling
of being unloved and / or wanting to be admired, because of something
which
happened
when we were a
child.
It's way simpler than that. It's we want to be admired
because it's built into
the machinery
- or as
Werner
says
"We're wired to be
admired.".
This
observation
and its stunning implication is so simple that we
resist
it. We say "That's impossible! That can't be it. It's too
simple.". But I assert yes, that's how we are as human beings:
we're wired to be
admired,
and
what happened
in the past has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's more than
that actually. It's going down the path of trying to figure out the
reason
why
we feel unloved and want to be admired, by telling and re‑telling
and analyzing and re-analyzing
the story of what
happened
all those years ago is a colossal waste of time. It's simple:
we're wired to be
admired.
That's it. That's all. End of story.
Once you consider the possibility
we're wired to be
admired
and that it's built into
the machineryand that's all it is, all the struggle and effort to explain,
understand, and
fix
the feeling of being unloved and wanting to be admired, evaporates.
Once you consider the possibility
we're wired to be
admired
and that's all it is, all the drama and the histrionics of the story of
why
we want to be admired, fall away and lose their grip. They disappear.
Mostly, once we consider the possibility
we're wired to be
admired
and that's all it is, we can choose to give up the story about being
unloved as a
child.
Then an
extraordinary
thing
happens:
choosing to give up the story about being unloved as a
child
allows for the possibility of fully appreciating our
parents
and what they made possible for us. So, what if you say your
parents
made
nothing
possible for you? Well ... that's not true. For starters, they
obviously made Life possible for you, yes? Listen: Life is
enough for
transformation
- even if you're an orphan.
By the way: in Life, people who are admired most (look and see for
yourself if it's true) are people who are
authentic.
But that's a subject for another conversation on another occasion.
