Do you need to be liked?
At a healing retreat I attended, a woman once said, “When we choose defensiveness, we have chosen the side of war.”As children, we are in the most vulnerable time period of our life. If we are born into a loving family, we have some sense of safety and belonging. But even in the most loving of families, we can experience aspects of ourselves not quite belonging. We may even feel ourselves to be rejected instead of accepted at times. Once we move outside of our immediate family into the real world, we can encounter this even more.
These experiences leave an uncomfortable feeling within our consciousness. From these uncomfortable feelings, we begin to extrapolate thoughts, beliefs, and judgments. I see this as our best efforts to attempt to make sense of our internal dis-ease, like the feeling of disharmony when a piano is off-key. And if one goes off the deep end and becomes ensnared in a winding labyrinth of thoughts, beliefs and judgments, they will likely spin into what psychology has termed neurosis. Recent experiences have challenged me to reflect on the need to be liked and accepted. In the words of Michael Scott:
It’s funny because it’s true. It exposes the egocentric nature of humans. It’s the reason why I can easily feel my body tense up and my face flush when others disagree with me or when I perceive them as potentially not liking me or hating me. The tension immediately activates a switch within me that desperately seeks to defend, explain, or justify myself. It is as if a part of me inside is screaming, “No, please! Just hear me out! Don’t hate me! Don’t leave me!” Back to the experience of children, we can’t help but want our family to love, accept, and like us. To not feel this way arouses the terror of being abandoned.
A sketch I made capturing the split between the part of me that wants to be my own person and the part of me that is terrified of not being liked by others.
But what if this is all an illusion? What if there isn’t anything to actually defend? After a recent experience evoked old fears of rejection, being hated or misunderstood, I began to do some deeper reflection.If a person feels the need to justify their existence, then do they truly believe they deserve to exist? Theories and reasons become an exercise in mental gymnastics that ultimately serve to cover the deep terror and thought that they may doubt their own right to exist. If that terror can be met with compassion, then there is no need for theories or reasons. They simply are.I am.And that which IS, needs no justification for being. The Tao does not demand to be acknowledged. Its very being is a tacit acknowledgement on its own. This realization floored me. Part of it felt like workings going on within my own mind, while another part felt like the Tao was speaking through me. Sometimes wisdom comes so gently and unsuspecting as a feather landing on the surface of a pond. No longer did Don Miguel Ruiz’s, “The Four Agreements,” just exist in my head as an idea; I had a profound felt experience of it. In the West’s culture today of political correctness, character assassination, cancel culture, hive mind mentality and hair-trigger reactivity, the above shift in consciousness is the medicine. If I am constantly preoccupied with and projecting fears of being silenced and misunderstood, I will create that reality. Instead, I choose to relax and let go, allowing others the freedom to have their experience and opinions without trying to justify myself. The desire to be understood is natural. So when we experience others misunderstanding us, we naturally want to clarify our intentions. Unfortunately, we cannot control the impact we have on others, even if we have the best of intentions. A person’s reaction towards you will likely be filtered through their own life experiences and schemas. What if someone is committed to misunderstanding you? Do you spend all your time and energy desperately hoping they will finally see you favorably? That certainly has been my modus operandi for most of my life. The affirmation I offer to myself and those of you reading who struggle with standing solid within yourself is:“It is safe for me to let go, even when it means allowing others the experience of misunderstanding me.”
Once you let go of the need to defend, explain or justify yourself, you will have that much more vital life force energy freed up to just be. You will have that much more energy to direct towards that which brings you joy.