Much of the anxiety that many feel is often a result of the way we have been socialized to seek approval from others. When we worry about what others will think of us, how we perform, how we measure up. When we rely on others for love and approval. When we look to other’s for false safety.
In all these moments, it is as though we are handing our precious inner child to another person, asking them “Do you like me?” “Am I lovable?” “Did I do good?” “Am I worthy?”
When I work with activists, I ask them, “Is this what you would hope someone you are seeking to help was telling themselves?”
When I work with parents, I ask them, “Is this what you would want your child to do or say?”
The answer is always, NO.
We believe in sovereignty. We desire sovereignty.
And yet most of us do this on some level, largely because we have been conditioned to do so through conditional/control/domination-oriented parenting and institutions such as school, church, survival cultures.
Our work in healing is to learn to reclaim ourself, to bring that child back into our arms.
However, I also do not want to pathologize the fact that a part of us orients to others.
All too often western healing constructs carry an individualist, “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” undertone.
But we are designed to seek community support. Dr. Stephen Porges and others have demonstrated various ways that our physiology attunes and seeks support from others first throughout our lives.
Before, fight.
Before, flight.
Before, freeze.
If we had been raised in an intact community where we were held in connection,
we seek help from each other first.
Before the gazelle runs away from the lion, they seek refuge with their herd.
It is primarily when an animal is separated from their herd that they are vulnerable.
In modern society, we are born separated.
We have been separated from real love and offered substitutes in media, consumerism, religions, cults.
We are left with nuclear families that are coming from and replicating historic trauma, cut off from community that heals, and trying woefully unsuccessfully to do the work of a village.
(And that’s if we’re lucky to have anything resembling a ‘family.’)
We are born, separated.
From so much, too much.
So of course, we look “out there” for answers, for wholeness, for belonging.
As we are healing the ways that we create anxiety by handing ourselves to others for love and approval, it is also important to recognize we do so from a place of deep longing, of primal memory of real connection that we have lost.
It is important, as always, to have compassion for this survival part.
And also to recognize that as a loving parent to ourselves, we can cultivate pieces of ancestral community/comunidad.
Though we may not be able to instantly put back together what has been destroyed over many years, we can cultivate ‘familia’ with friends and loved ones. We can honor our beautiful interdepence.
This is also self-reclamation, as we are giving our inner child, a version of the intact community that they deserve and know is their birthright.
This is why even though I celebrate and support each individual in their remembering, on their path, I do so, in community. In circles, retreats, gatherings.
Our multi-faceted, diverse ways of being and needs are a weaving that enrich each other’s lives.
We are not separate from the web of life.
**Beautiful art by Emily Kewageshig