I’ve been hearing and reading a lot lately about the human need for love and approval. Everything I’ve said or written relates to that subject more or less directly, but I thought that perhaps I might get more specific.
I do believe that there’s an inherent need for human beings to have feedback from our fellow humans, especially in the formative years. We have to know whether or not we are communicating with our fellows, and whether they understand what we say. Based on the kind of feedback we get from them, our brains come to conclusions about how well we’re interacting and communicating, and in a general sense, about who we are. Our identity grows out of our interaction with other people, and with the physical world, based on feedback from both. We come to have expectations about how other people will relate to us, and how we will relate to them, and whether the outcome will be to our benefit or not.
Unfortunately, it seems that most people don’t understand this process. They don’t understand that their identity and their expectations are products of everything that has ever happened to them, every interaction they’ve ever had. They did not create their identity, their expectations, or their preferences, nor did anyone else create theirs. No one deserves praise or blame for who they happen to be, any more than “Tsunami” deserves praise or blame for the devastation it wrought—we’re all equally products of circumstances. If you’ve been with me for a while, all of this should sound familiar.
So if someone says they love me, or they approve of me, or they think I’m handsome (it happens—rarely—but it does happen :o), what does it mean? It means that the circumstances that produced them, and the circumstances that produced me, happened to converge into two entities which match along certain parameters. Neither of us are responsible for this convergence, and there’s no reason for either to take the other’s reaction as a reflection of our general worth—or lack of it. We can certainly enjoy their response to us if it’s favorable, and can tentatively make projections about the likely course of future interactions. We can also make projections about future interactions if their reaction is unfavorable, but we don’t have to take it personally.
If we truly understand that we are part of the natural world, and that all our relationships with other people are like the relationships between the oceans and the continents—totally a product of circumstances—our anxieties about those relationships can be greatly reduced. This doesn’t mean that we’re not interested in our well-being, or hopeful that all our relationships are felicitous, but we can develop a certain objectivity about how all the world’s processes play themselves out.
Living near the coast, I certainly hope that Antarctica doesn’t melt; but if it does, I won’t take it personally, any more than I will take it personally if that little red-haired girl just doesn’t happen to like me.
This Feather Cares for Me Deeply