I once had a healing session with a woman who had a very common and at the same time very old problem. She said that she has had this problem her whole life long: she is afraid of not being loved and not being accepted.
I say that this is a very common problem because I meet really a lot of people who have this problem. It is also a problem which affects all areas of your life.
In your family you may have always felt that your siblings get more love than you do and still today, when you are with your parents, you feel like you have to fight for their affection and appreciation. You work harder to make them proud of your independence and you help them and are there but always feel that you may not be enough to be loved just as you are.
At your workplace, while working in a team you think that everybody else just fits so nicely together while you are not a complete part of the team. You are all the time worried, self-conscious about what you say because it might be wrong or not valuable to the common project. You hesitate to speak openly about more private things, too, because your colleagues may think your hobbies are strange. You join office parties and celebrations although you don’t really like them, just to be a part of it.
Among your friends you think everything is perfect. When you are together, you joke around, talk and everything seems just fine. But when they leave, you feel exhausted, sit down on your couch and think that you need some time alone now, to be just with yourself and to be yourself. Doesn’t that mean that you played a role all the time? Maybe to make your friends like you and love you more? To be lovely and loveable?
Even in your relationship and with your partner, the person by whom you should feel most loved and accepted, you sometimes have doubts. There is not any reason for it, he hugs you, loves you and treats you just as always but still you sometimes are afraid, he might just one day be gone.
I have met many people who have this problem, maybe not always in all parts of their life but often in several. Whenever they interact with others and even if they are alone, they think about whether they are fine as they are.
Let me assure you: you are loveable, lovely and loving. You don’t need to do any change to yourself to please another person. You don’t need to play a role or wear a mask. This world is so big and there are so many different people in this world that it is normal if a few don’t agree with you or don’t like you. It will happen to everybody. But in the same way there will be people who love you. Don’t go into your inferiority complex, stop comparing and just be yourself.
It takes some self-confidence to get out of the habits of comparing and pretending to be someone else but if you don’t get this self-confidence, you will spend your whole life in doubt, worrying whether others like you or not. Love yourself, as you are. Accept whoever you are, respect your feelings of what you want to do and what you don’t want to do and love! Then your mind will be free from the worry and you will realize that others do love you as you are.
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Thank you for writing about self-confidence. It is so important. I myself had huge problems accepting myself, my body and my way of being. I just didn’t seem to fit in. Never in any fashion, never in any group activity. Since I started on the spiritual way, i can love myself as I am and i have found friends with similar interests. They may only be a few, not a whole football team, but they are valuable to me.
Swami, It may be nice to think all people are lovable just being themselves, but my perception is that people who are strong in samskaras and kleshas of anger and avarice are often not lovable at all, and the stronger the bad kleshas, the less lovable they are. An irony of this is that in a society that is in itself strong in these negative kleshas, those who are strong in negative kleshas may find the most “friends”, because those who are strong in the negative kleshas are attracted to others like themselves. But these friendships tend to be not friendships of true and actual love, because people of such nature tend to be attracted to others of this nature for what they can get out of them to further gratify the negative kleshas. You may be correct that if you can peel back all the negative kleshas and see the soul that is under them, there you will in fact find a lovable soul. But those who have negative samskaras dominating their personalities are often quite repugnant to be around and to associate with, and being with such people too much can be an infectious poison, so it is often good advice to stay away from them if one seeks to cultivate good samskaras in oneself. So as usual I seek to inject realism into the discussion, and to acknowledge that realities are not always so pleasant, that the reality is that especially now at this historical time many people are dominant in negative samskaras and kleshas, and they are not really so lovable. I say let them work on themselves and make themselves better in order to earn love and acceptance from those who know better. In the meantime, I can love them for the good soul and heart that I know beats underneath, but I do not love and accept negative kleshas and bad samskaras.
However, I get your good point that there are some very good and pleasant people who are too afraid or don’t feel free to let their true self shine through in social situations. It’s very true that such people should just be themselves and not worry so much about pleasing others by not acting in ways authentic to themselves. If they do this, people who they are truly compatible with will still like them, and those who they are not compatible with and may be better off without may drift away, but that’s OK.
Dear Deniz,Of course there are people who are negative and are not really lovely in their actions and behaviour. I fully agree with you that such a person should first of all change him- or herself in order to find acceptance in society.
You already said yourself however that there are people who are insecure and afraid of being themselves although that self is truly lovely. It is to them that I am writing this diary in order to encourage them to accept themselves.
I have the feeling that the negative person you describe would not really identify with the text written above. They are not afraid and insecure but they themselves reject society as it is.
So I think our thoughts actually match nicely and are going the same ways.
Love
Oh yes, many true points in that. Even if most of us may not be very extreme in this way, there are some points in your journal here which go deep. While I don’t care about office parties I do care about my parents and try to make them satisfied, pleased and proud – which I don’t always succeed in. I have however learned that this is more their own problem and not a deficiency of mine. This is a realization that really helps!
True, Swami, after I thought about it for a while I realized you were speaking about those who are really fine but act in ways not true to themselves to please other people, as I say in my second note. Yes, I agree fully.