Читать книгу When You Think You're Not Enough - Daphne Rose Kingma - Страница 13

In some sense, feelings of unworthiness are tied to our very sense of survival. Psychologically, it works like this: If I'm a good and perfect child, my parents will love me. If they love me, they'll take care of me. If they take care of me, I'll survive and thrive and become all that I'm meant to be. On the other hand, if I'm not good enough, they won't love me, they won't take care of me, and I won't survive. I'll be so neglected, I'll die.

This is not an entirely irrational fear. When we're young, we are completely dependent on our adult caregivers for our very survival. Somewhere inside we know this. Quite naturally, we feel that we'd better measure up … or else.

In my case, for example, my infant fear was that because she was overwhelmed and overworked, my mother would forget to feed me, and I would starve to death. My friend Tom, the son of a raging alcoholic, was frequently beaten with any blunt object that was handy, and he legitimately felt that his life was in danger. And my friend Jane, who learned that her mother had tried to abort her, correctly sensed that at some point her mother had wished her dead.

Whether the danger is obvious, or merely implied, the bottom line of all this is that, psychologically, we believe we have to be lovable in order to survive. In this way, our sense of our own value is related to an unconscious fear of death. This is one of the reasons why, in adulthood, our own acts of not loving ourselves can feel so deeply violating. Each time we don't love ourselves, we are re-creating the unloved feeling we had as children. This make us feel once again as if our very lives are in danger. We're afraid we might treat ourselves so badly that we will die from the lack of our own self-love.