Statistics show that nearly 100% of the population is addicted to the approval of others, yet few of us are aware of it. And for average person with modest goals, it doesn’t really matter.
The problem arises when an ambitious person decides to build a career, business or pursue dream that requires substantial exposure to rejection. Studies show that over 80% of these people abandon their ambition within the first 12 months due to the pain of daily disapproval.
This is how Approval Addiction shatters dreams.
Approval addiction comes from the misunderstanding and the distortion of what the Tree of Life need, the need to meet the expectation of others tells you.
Fulfilling that need enables you to live in society, to live in a community relatively smoothly by acting civilized, and lawful, by following the main dictates of a society or civilization.
It is different in China, Canada, or South America. Simply: When in Rome do as the Romans do… 1I have had immigrants living in the United States and Canada suffering from not fitting in. What they are missing is the thorough understanding that societies do not tolerate, and punish you behaving in a way that is not acceptable for the majority of people in that society.
This inability or unwillingness (ultimately a lack of intelligence!) is the cause of most xenophobia, and a lot of unhappiness. You can fit in without giving up your racial or ethnic identity. It’s a behavior issue.
This article is when you go a step further: the approval need… the need to be approved within… your thoughts, your actions, your dreams, your aspirations, and who you are. Whereas acting civilized is one thing, and it’s conscious, and it signals intelligence I am still learning, needing approval is a disease. Needing to be liked is the same…
If you need the approval, the support, the agreement of others in all areas of life, you can never become a person.
And, between you and me, not being a person is the most painful thing a human can experience.
Why? Because it means that you have no one to talk to who loves you, who thinks that you matter, who wants the best for you. Yourself.
Every person’s life, views, and advice centers around what is best for them, even if it is really bad for you.
You are your only friend… but if there is no you… then you are alone. And aloneness or loneliness or isolation is violating the need for group, one of the hardware type needs, essential for survival.
What no one seems to say is this: you can and often violate the hardware type needs when your software type needs are out of whack, when you live your life on the Tree of Knowledge.
I have students and clients who are stingy with themselves, punitive (meaning self-punishing) and deprive themselves of fulfilling their basic needs.
Reminder: the basic needs are
- the need for sustenance
- the need for information
- the need for procreation
- the need for safety
- the need for group
Different soul corrections find a different made up reason to deprive themselves. It’s all made up, it is all Tree of Knowledge, mostly religious b.s.
So as long as you don’t fulfill your basic hardware type needs, you are also going to skimp in software type needs… Meeting the expectation of others is a software type need. Meeting your own expectation is a software type need. And the need to grow to become the best and most you can be, is also a software type need.
It is also true in reverse. If you don’t take care of your five basic needs, you can’t take care of your software type needs either. And if you don’t take care of your software type needs, you’ll neglect some or all of your basic needs.
If your deserve-it factor (deserve to live) depends on others’ approval, you are going to find that the world is not friendly to your ideas… you’ll meet disapproval.
You will feel wrong, or wronged, and will punish yourself.
You won’t drink or even make your Energized Water. You won’t eat enough, or the right things. You will withdraw and isolate yourself.
My take on this is that you are always doing this to yourself, meaning it doesn’t happen to you. You are doing it.
You make yourself fat. or you make your self skinny, stupid, victim-like, or weird, or needy. You may start to stutter. You may start to wet your bed, or fantasize about getting sick so someone takes care of you. You may try to buy love…
Love is not for sale. Approval is not for sale.
You need to love yourself and you need to approve of yourself to become a person.
If you are not for you, who is for you? If not now, when?
Your idea about other people is deeply flawed.
By nature, selfish genes make the human selfish. Nothing wrong with that, this is how it is.
The way nature designed humans is to be self-caring. And then, when they took care of themselves, physically, emotionally, spiritually, then be part of a group, from which they only need division of labor, companionship, and security.
Only then the need for group is fulfilled.
If you “join” a group to get love, approval, help, you won’t be accepted. And you’ll suffer. Or you’ll be exploited and abused. By group I even mean a marriage…
This is the Nature of Reality.
If you try to change it, you are delusional and truly belong to a loony bin.
So pull back all your power, all your energy to yourself and start filling yourself up, so you can have a Self… a Self that can take care of you.
This is how to develop a self, in spite of society’s tendency to claim its right to judge you. This is how to be able to be a person.
OK… risking that you can’t be with the controversy and ambivalence of what comes, if you are a TLB 1 you can stop reading here…
There is a level above this.
I almost ended the article at the end of the politically correct part.
But politically correct means: that genius, real achievement, has no room…
Why? because as a genius, as a high achiever, you need to be willing to stand out, to be weird, or to be a geek, or be judged crazy or unhinged.
You cannot be reasonable, you cannot do the reasonable, you cannot fit in.
I watched the pilot episode of an Amazon.com show yesterday, about a Jewish woman whose husband leaves her and she needs to, for the first time in her life, make a living.
She is quite weird from the beginning, because the creators of the show wanted her to stick out of the mold from the get-go.
Because it would be too much if she could, at age 30-ish, re-invent herself as a stand up comic, would not it? a hilarious and successful stand up comic…
99% of humanity would be offended.
Because it takes tremendous courage and a channeling of your natural talent into something so not politically correct.
So this part is for those who are willing to go beyond just doing good work, or having a good life, and a developed self.
The few…
Your soul correction has, pretty much, limited you to a certain type of person. It shaped you whether you are willing to be who you are… and willing to be that unabashedly.
- Whether you are willing to hone your talent or skill… the grind.
- Whether you can take hardship, bad surprises, rejection in stride, as a feedback on where you can improve, or whether they diminish you and send you back to your hole.
- Whether you are willing to spend most of your time getting knowledge into your head, skills in your body, so you can do what you need to do well.
But most importantly, your soul correction has made you lean towards a low TLB or a high TLB.
So no matter where you fall, no matter what is your soul correction, if you want to grow, you want to grow your TLB… the capacity to be with ambivalence and contradiction, with things that taste bad, feel bad, look bad…
Without that you can’t grow. Guaranteed.
OK, I re-read that article from 3 years ago to get what you are saying.
I pointed out the fact that she was Jewish because if you are a Christian this probably can’t happen, because Christians don’t have to go through being different, as a rule, being hardly tolerated, having to be inventive: for a Christian it is par for the course to be sheep.
So for a Jewess, standing out is at least one step closer than for a Christian, or a Buddhist, or a Muslim.
I am a Jew… and I know.
I appreciate this insight. However, it wasn’t necessary to point out the woman’s religion in the story about make a living on her own, the religion did not seem relevant??