Wow! We go to lengths and breadths to be seen don’t we? And we mostly don’t know that what we are seeking is to meet an inner infantile need in us. How? What was your experience watching the interactions between toddlers and their parents? Can you remember yours? Chances are your childhood is not really something you care to actively live in because for you right now what matters is where you are in your life as the adult self.
But wait a minute. It’s not so simple. When you don’t receive the validation or acceptance… okay wait let me rephrase this to something relatable – my father loves to tell jokes and he is pretty good so good I laugh at the end and honestly ask him to tell it again a few times. And I am sure Papa gets a real rush of dopamine from the telling of the joke to how how avid listeners respond to this. To this day I can remember one joke he must have retold at least fifty times. It was about a blind man who couldn’t see saying he could see so far and there was a man on one leg that was lame, talking about what a good run he had. Anybody laughing? Nope at least not at what I just wrote. I am not great at telling jokes but I can tell good stories. But imagine when nobody laughed at Papas jokes anymore. Papas face dropped.
Okay so imagine you have carved out this beautiful fallen tree branch and can’t wait to show it to your husband. He sees it and even watched your excitement. But he is so busy in his own project he says “later” or he says “ah how lovely” without any engagement with it. Your face drops. Next up is the lovely mama who has pulled all the stops to get a gourmet supper on the table. Her toddler throws most of it on the floor. The doggies enjoy this but the mamas face drops. Papa seems to like the meal but says nothing. Nada. Nobody has noticed her efforts or acknowledged the taste or texture of any of it not to mention the little fairies and glitter laden napkins she has laid out tonight. Mamas face drops but she picks herself up and carries on to wash up while Papa takes the rubbish out and little bubba carries on painting the walls with the left over food on the floor the doggies left!!!
Most of our “adult” issues stem from how we were managed as children. Or you could say ours adult lives mirror our child lives except we have developed brains and bodies. And we are independent. Well, at least we put the facade up to that effect.
As children of the generation past, we were “managed” “controlled” and “trained”. Our physical needs were mostly met. Our parents showed us love in the ways they were shown that love and how they in turn loved their own self, if at all the did. Mostly, the era of fully feeling didn’t arrive until now. At least not in the fully expressive and expansive and known ways as now. Now people want to talk about feelings and engage one another but again we don’t quite know how to.
We are a people in transition.
As a child grows a sense of self that is independent and not an extension of the mama, the child wants to be seen in that new glory of self – the space of this is me and this is my story. But, as parents, we rarely give our children the space to be because we cannot “see” them as them. At least not until they pass adolescence and then we just have to square up. There is a movement in recent times to educate parents about the equal necessity of a healthy emotional upbringing of a child. And that includes acknowledging accepting and respecting a child’s own emotional expression without locking that down.
When we “see” our children they feel a sense of “self worth” and “self esteem”. They get to feel that amount to a “someone” with something to say that will get heard. We give them the confidence to shape their mind to produce a thought process that will say something like this, “I am worthy, I am safe, I am loved, I matter, I am valid, I am secure, people are good, people appreciate me, people value me, I am valued, I am valuable and I am enough”.
Our mind is shaped by the experience it is exposed to very early on. Whilst we can build on this, it is very difficult to undo this or dig it out and up if it’s a norm you want to change, simply because it is not conscious to us. Memories made by infants are embedded and implicit. They don’t have the language to encode these in a readable format that can be reached by the hippocampus. It is only through a dedicated self awareness that an self inquisition can lead us into the crevices of the minds first imprints. You can go to a psychotherapist, a healer, an intuitive, a mystic, a neuroscience, a scientist, a hypnotherapist or any other form of recall giving that implicit memory a form to make it explicit. These will give you the same arrival port because really none are mutually exclusive but rather mutually interdependent working on the same side. We can respond to all of these because all of these methods will key into parts of us that can be accessed by all of these because we are all of these. After all, it is our mind that created all of these various tools of mind awareness.
Have you noticed the how much of an impact social media has had on us? How we scroll down the pages to see whether we have sufficient “likes” to our posts, we want to target our audience so we write what might get them to notice us, our talents and what we have to share. Why? It is not because we love doing what we do but because we have a desperate need to be seen! We want to be heard. We want to be validated. We will find excuses to log back on to these platforms just to get that little “high” to say wow look people really like what I posted!
For some who feel that level of social anxiety or shall we say cyber social anxiety, more than likely the root to that will come from a feeling deep down of not being centred in the true self. Without us being grounded in our self, we will seek validation and all else. The problem is that we are not conscious that we are driven by unmet infantile needs.
Take a look at what drives you to post our inspirational pictures stories and quotes? Are you perhaps lonely and crave some social interaction? Very rarely, and sadly so, will we share or forward posts because we genuinely care about what we are posting. We write to impress and not to create a trust because we don’t trust our selves. And this is not just social media and how we interact. It’s across the continuum of life. Do you suddenly get loud when you are out or do you cower and hide? Do you show off your talents or maybe not so much of talents but perhaps what you wish you could be good at? Do you drive an expensive automobile but cannot afford to? What else are we doing which is underpinned with please I want to be seen I want to be heard and I want to be loved?
You might read this post and think no way but I really want to inspire people every morning and share my lovely posts that I dig out from the bottomless pit of the cyber world, but if that’s the case, why don’t you just write your own daily inspiration that is just yours? Do you need to send these out?
Toddlers want our attention all of the time, and appropriately so. This is a special time for them which will impact their entire model of love, life, people, God and more. Oh yes and the all important wealth money abundance issue along with health too! The more we acknowledge our toddlers as individuals in their own rights and wherever possible “let their will prevail” with obvious boundaries to include safety health and whatever is acceptable to the family, the higher the possibility for them to find their self expression with ease whether that be writing, healing , engineering or any other, but it be theirs. No people pleasing or mama papa pleasing or authority or “God” pleasing but simply an express of self coming from wholeness.
When we feel seen and heard then we don’t need to shout out for attention; not literally but maybe for some. We attend the same class and each will secretly think their wit outdoes the others. What utter nonsense of the egoic mind! We attend a forum of spirituality and each attendee will share their “wisdom” which mind, will probably be a parading of the amount of sacred literature one has read or how many workshops for that matter! We show off not because we want to but because we want to be seen.
Why then don’t we show up for ourselves now, and endeavour to inculcate an actively engaged self awareness, so that our self expression is not a hidden act of neediness; or one that we don’t really feel is who we are but one we just do to get noticed without “noticing” this!!
It is natural to want to be seen and heard; but quite contrary to Self when we express our art for compliance competition and compensation for a lack we feel within – a lack of self love!