THE EPIDEMIC OF LONELINESS, EMOTIONAL BARTERING, AND THE REMEDY - Part 1
In the previous installments in this series on “How To Mindfully Approach Romantic Relationships” – Eros Love & “Love As a Bandage” we talked about how our concept of LOVE is developed at a very young age through positive and negative reinforcement and ultimately becomes conditional. Applied to romantic endeavors later in life, love is reduced to “emotional bartering.” It’s in learning there are rules to this Crazy Little Thing Called Love, (yes, that’s a QUEEN reference) most relationships become breeding grounds for the emergence of fear and insecurity that are the unresolved by-product of traumatic events experienced in our early, pre-teen childhood. This underlying fear we carry, which may be entirely unacknowledged by us until triggered by something that threatens our sense of security, serves as the underpinnings of every choice we make in our relationships.
Simply put, AUTHENTIC LOVE is appreciation and has nothing to do with our physical attraction to another person or the physical exchanges we have with our lover. LOVE and SEX have nothing to do with each other, though lust is usually the impetus for any romantic pursuit and is generally at the heart of what holds most romantic relationships together initially. And therein lies the problem. In a culture that conflates love and sex, for most of us, our pursuit of love is driven entirely by biochemistry and compulsion – not love itself – to stave off our fear of being alone or feeling irrelevant. It’s not truly an expression of AUTHENTIC LOVE (which seeks nothing from another) but rather becomes a means of importing self-acceptance from others. As you can imagine, carrying these unexplored and misguided concepts of LOVE into our pre-teen, teen-age, and post-teen age years as young adults, the impact of these beliefs only becomes more and more pronounced as our fledgling self-image sheepishly limps into adulthood and our ego and all of its dysfunctional yearning for approval starts to emerge. This is the foundation upon which most marriages are entered into, with the promise of a lifelong commitment; is it any wonder why over half of marriages end in divorce within 7 years?
For most, these paradigms are left unexplored and unexamined. As a result, these uncontested beliefs we hold about love and marriage means we enter into these contractual agreements with someone unaware of the fact that the very commitment we demand from our lover is the anti-thesis of LOVE and is based entirely in fear, though the celebratory guise of a wedding would dictate otherwise. Because we have been conditioned to see a lifelong commitment as the quintessential expression of love, most would dismiss that statement as heresy, as it’s very unpopular to expose what most people have been taught love is, for what it is . . . nothing less than self-serving. AUTHENTIC LOVE requires no such commitment because AUTHENTIC LOVE only wants for the other what they want for themselves, whether it includes us or not. What most call LOVE is in fact an entirely selfish enterprise, sought out to create a feeling we desire to have within us and designed to “fill the void” we feel within us.
As adults, our concept of LOVE becomes an extension of what we learned as a child by modeling the behavior of others such as parents, television and movie characters, etc. Entering adulthood, deep rooted, these well-learned patterns of behavior, expectations, emotional bartering, and codependency learned through positive and negative reinforcement, have become so automatic that they are now completely unconscious and compulsory behaviors. We are driven by these compulsory impulses that have been programmed into us. These drives have created predictable and reflexive patterns of behavior within us and now govern most of our choices. But here’s the hitch. They’re entirely sub-conscious behaviors devoid of any conscious choice we’re making. Though it feels like our decisions are largely conscious decisions, I can assure you, they’re not.
It’s important to understand that whatever we are deprived of as a child, becomes our highest aspiration in life as adults. Deprived of money, wealth becomes our highest aspiration. Deprived of security, creating a stable living space becomes our highest aspiration. Deprived of love as a child, feeling loved as adults becomes our highest aspiration. We will endure anything, overcome any obstacle, travel any distance, just to believe we are precious in the eyes of another person.
If unconditional LOVE and acceptance is not displayed or demonstrated to us as a child, which allows us to develop a sense of emotional security, then one of the most persistent drives in us as adults is our need to be needed, validated, accepted, and to feel relevant to another person. In short, we become codependent.
SO HOW DID WE BECOME SO NEUROTIC AND NEEDY?
Loneliness has become an epidemic in our society and it’s been programmed into us since childhood. Lonely people find all kinds of ways to cope and many develop addictive behaviors to fill the void ranging from alcohol, to drug, to eating, sex, gambling, and shopping which is great for the economy, not great for the individual. For most of us, everything we know as adults is the product of a process of indoctrination into a system, designed to create a task-oriented workforce of relatively docile, passive, and obedient worker bees. This is why our indoctrination begins at such a young age, before we can apply any cognitive rationale to it. Initiated by well-intentioned parents and other adults, simply teaching us, not only the way they were taught, but what they were taught, which is, how to be competitive and how to become “essential,” our initiation into a system of pathological thinking begins.
Outside of parents that home school and typically question the rather orthodox, structured, and authoritarian approach to imbuing our children with knowledge, most parents generally believe they are empowering their children by sending them off to school. They are completely unaware of how much the schooling process is arresting their child’s development and their child’s attempts to develop confidence in their own sense of autonomy. With the exception of Montessori schools, school is where most children’s confidence begins to erode.
As children we’re taught how things are, or at least “should be,” how to “properly” do things, and how to prepare for our entry into the workplace environment. We’re spoon-fed a religion, a nationality, a racial and political identification, and gender roles.
We as parents build our child’s entire mental construct of life for them instead of letting them explore LIFE for themselves, come to their own conclusions, and allow them to be whatever they want to be, think whatever they want, and express themselves however they want to. I see this imposed brainwashing every time I see parents dragging their children into churches, a particular social event, or see parents telling a little boy not to wear little girls clothes to fit into a prefabricated gender identification, and cringe at the thought of how the child’s essence is soon going to be strip from them.
Since there’s safety in numbers, children (and even adults) mistake consensus for wisdom and tend to believe what the majority of people around them believe. Slowly, the light of their beautiful uniqueness fades and is lost as peer pressure and the urge to be accepted leads to conformity. In adopting the beliefs of the majority we no longer have the confidence to “go against the grain” of conventional thinking or “think outside of the box.” Afraid to be ostracized, children lose confidence and fear expressing themselves, their thoughts, and feelings, especially if it’s incongruent with what the majority of people around them think. They become afraid to try new things, or do things in their own unique way, feeling everything has to be done a certain pre-ordained and accepted way. As a result, they become risk adverse and lose confidence in themselves, their instincts, and their own creative potential. Seeking the path of least resistance; we conform. I cannot tell you how many individuals I have counseled in their 30s and 40s, who have shared with me that they got married in their 20s because that’s what all their friends were doing and it just seemed like the next logical step in life. Again, this is compulsory behavior and role playing that only leads to our eventual sense of entanglement with another person.
I would love to hear from you and hear your own personal thoughts on relationships in the comment section below. Let me know if the content of this article resonates with you, provides perspective, or helps you see things in a different way that empowers you to make different choices or see life and relationships through a different lens. I value your thoughts and feedback and look forward to hearing from you.
Love & Light to You in your continued Journey of Self-Discovery!
David
