Why Does NOBODY Ever Tell Us?!
It's as vitally important to be able to RECEIVE, as to give!
The tide of the ocean routinely goes out to sea, but it must deposit sand and shells as it returns to shore, or we’d have no beaches anywhere where in our world.
Everybody has both light AND dark facets in their nature, but Super-Givers tend to think they should only accept, embrace and operate from their light aspects. They may acknowledge that they possess darker aspects, yet shun the existence of them in the course of their daily life.
The problem with this inclination is, if you reject your darker personality aspects because they make you feel uncomfortable to possess ‘em, you’ll automatically seek these disowned traits of Yours in other people, hoping to achieve some semblance of balance within.
We see this type of relationship dynamic time and time again~ people who compulsively give copious amounts of care to a partner and endlessly try to please them, yet there’s no satisfying a lover who has BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) features. Hard as it is to comprehend, contentment and joy are averted by such people, due to “happiness” bringing up novel, unfamiliar emotions that tend to trigger anxiety in them, that the ‘other shoe’ is gonna drop!
This emotional conversion is due to consistent early childhood programming that resulted in one experiencing disappointment or sadness very soon after they felt emotionally stable or light~ and there’s nothing you can say or do to ease or erase this reflex for them, if they never get the kind of help they need to dismantle it.
Nobody pops out of their mother’s womb, a Super-Giver. Codependency is a learned trait that’s environmentally driven. We are programmed from infancy onward, to only give, and not expect to receive. Compulsive giving is a trained and heavily reinforced behavioral pattern during childhood, and at its baseline, is poor self-worth. When we (for myriad reasons) grow up feeling unworthy of receiving, Entitlement Issues impact every aspect of our life.
As absurd as this may sound, many of these people believe God hates and wants them to fail~ and that he’s just waiting in the wings, hoping for opportunities to punish them! We derive our sense of God as little children, by how our parents responded to (or didn’t) and treated us~ thus, the template for this distorted, erroneous ideation of God was chiseled in stone when we were too young and naive to refute it.
Entitlement issues are extremely common among Narcissists and Borderlines. Both have poor self-worth, and routinely compensate for this deficit with either over-giving gestures or seductive acting-out reflexes, to bolster their impaired sense of Self.
Entitlement issues mean that we don’t feel deserving or worthy of receiving what we need and want out of life or love. I was speaking with a man today, who’s been with the same fault-finding, emotionally indifferent, somewhat cold female for the past 8 years. They live under the same roof, yet she travels often, they do not share meals together when she’s around, and she shows him no tenderness, warmth or affection. He has apparently accepted this under-satisfying condition as his fate, and obviously has a high threshold for pain.
As you might guess, I couldn’t help asking about his mother. He raved about her, and commented that she gave him lots of support in a “you can do and be anything!” kind of way. But as I’d explained in a much earlier post, there’s a huge difference between parental ‘verbal supportiveness’ and genuine love.
The parent who gives unbridled (and unearned) accolades to his/her offspring is typically enmeshed with their child, and needing him to be “special” in order to fuel the parent’s narcissism. We frequently see over-valuation of a child by a borderline disordered mother, who has inherent self-worth issues. Her child can’t help growing up narcissistic, having been programmed to adopt (due to her biased view of him) a false sense of Self.
This kid is unable to ‘own’ these grandiose compliments and kudos from Mother, yet understands he’s supposed to feel “great” about himself and is confounded by how lacking his personal and professional satisfaction turns out to be during the course of his life. The incongruity between what we grew up constantly hearing from our parent, and what we’ve managed to apply in our world and how we actually feel about ourselves, comes under the banner of cognitive dissonance. I’ve had clients who struggled lifelong, with this very same issue.
Such was the case for a man I conversed with not long ago. When we place our parent on a pedestal (because all young children see their parents as gods who can do no wrong), the only one who can logically be blamed for not having risen to a parent’s expectations, is the child himself. This means, one carries self-esteem deficits for a lifetime, if he/she cannot be guided to view him/herself accurately.
It matters not, how much we’ve achieved or accomplished during our lifetime. All we can perceive is that it’s nowhere near what our parent primed us to anticipate, which bumps up against an inner sense of shame that continually asserts, “I’m not good enough or lovable.” Shame is usually felt in our solar plexus, which is considered our body’s ‘center of gravity.’
Core shame can be eradicated with unique and unconventional professional assistance~ but without this type of help, it typically remains alive indefinitely. A lot of people get sick and die prematurely due to unrelenting self-flagellation, and go to their graves having lived for decades with a sense of inadequacy.
Poor self-worth and accompanying entitlement issues are typically repeated generation to generation, because no positive, healthy template for genuine self-worth is offered to children by adults during their highly impressionable, formative years (between birth and 5 years old). Sadly, if a parent has entitlement issues, there are serious limits as to how much affection and adoration they can comfortably receive from their kids!
Deficits in how parents view themselves, are transferred to their children~ ‘cause no blueprint for what it takes to own authentic self-esteem is part of the parent’s reality, and cannot be taught. In short, if the mom or dad feels unworthy of receiving joy and abundance, how might their child manufacture his/her own sense of deservability?? Children learn fastest and best, by example.
Sitting in my doctor’s office today, I struck up a conversation with a soon-to-be new mother. From what little she shared about her (lawyer) husband, I sensed how hyper-controlling he is. This beautiful gal kept apologizing for herself (as she choked on the water she drank) but my sense was that she is constantly apologetic, just for being. Her apparent inability to feel worthy of anyone (in this case me) showing any kindness or attention was palpable. I instantly knew what her home life was like. I also knew what kind of mother she’d grown up with, ‘cause she’d chosen the same person (in male form) to marry!
We derive our sense of worth from our maternal object in the first hours and days of life outside our mother’s womb. Sadly enough, far too many women who have babies haven’t a clue about how to truly love and bond with another being~ even if it’s grown within their own body! Whenever I’ve had females in my practice who express their vehement desire to have a baby, I always ask: What do you think having a baby and raising that child will give you? It’s a crucially vital question to ponder, in my view.
Their answer often reveals a deep, somewhat painful yearning for “unconditional love” they presume will finally be attainable. And yet, they have no template for what real love actually feels like, having incurred severe maternal deficits during their own infancy experiences, which have left them with a painful, gaping hole in their soul. I have witnessed this no less than dozens of times, during the course of my consulting practice.
I always ask these women to experiment first, with trying to love and care for a cat or dog. The trauma arising from one’s neglect of a four-legged being has fewer serious repercussions, than those experienced with a two-legged one. And who knows? Just maybe, these gals will get to learn (perhaps for the first time ever) what being loved in return actually feels like, and even grow some genuine empathy for another being along the way.