Awakening Your Inner Authority

"Knowing grants a sense of safety and certainty. It provides us with knowledge and a degree of control-the direction we believe we need to go and the way to get there. Yet, considering the chaos, anxiety, distress, loneliness, and existential challenges that most of us live with, we continue clinging to what we were taught to believe is "the truth." And while safety and certainty are illusory, we cling to them in powerful ways."

"From a young age, when we were small and vulnerable, we were completely dependent on those who cared for us. We were entirely reliant on our environment to meet our essential physical and emotional needs. When these needs are unmet, we naturally protest. These unmet needs generate intense affect: pain, fear, anger, and longing. Because no caregiver can meet a child's needs fully or consistently, frustration and disappointment are inevitable. These experiences lead us to form core beliefs or conclusions about life."

"We keep expecting, judging, arguing, demanding, and even more, fighting, blaming, offending, competing, and getting angry. We automatically react because this is the familiar way we operate in the world. These primal feelings became engraved in our earliest cellular memory as real survival threats and continue to dictate how we act and react. Folded into these uncomfortable feelings are all the laws and rules, regulations, and decisions that force us to run and hide from our authentic selves in the name of protec"

Ask what is needed in the present moment rather than unquestioningly following learned answers. Learned knowing creates an illusion of safety and control that people cling to despite pervasive anxiety, loneliness, and existential distress. That clinging fuels expecting, judging, arguing, fighting, blaming, and automatic reactivity. Early dependence and unmet childhood needs produce intense emotions—pain, fear, anger, longing—that become encoded as survival threats. Those encoded responses form core beliefs and behavioral patterns. Laws, rules, and decisions built around protection encourage running and hiding from authentic selves, reinforcing reactive, defensive living.

Read at Psychology Today