1000 Words On: Self-limitations

“Like a plant, which from a seed, becomes an Oak tree, so humans become what we are meant to be…but we get stuck.” Carl Jung

Becoming our whole true self, the fulfillment of a potential we are born with, is not so easy for most of us. Like Jung said…we get stuck. Many of us do not recognize or realize that we are living as an inferior version of ourself, lacking the empowerment to claim the life that is ours. Although we might become accustomed to living within limitations that aren’t necessary, we might also come to believe that we do not deserve, or expect life to be better than it is.

Before we look at what limits us, let’s consider what it means to become our whole true self. Self-actualized is at term Maslow used for those who have attained high levels of maturation, health and fulfillment. Jung called it self-realization, the integration of the self toward wholeness. Ralph Waldo

Emerson said, “Go forward and make your dreams come true.” All these ideas represent a potential that takes shape as we accept ourselves, freeing ourselves to discover who we are. It is our own ideas of what it means to be whole and true to ourselves that matter, the ways we make peace with ourselves.

The foundation of… “becoming what we are meant to be” … is our sense of self-worth. For many of us, our sense of worth comes from ideas we have about ourselves. Often, it is the ways we perform and the images we have of ourselves that determine whether we have gained approval. Approval becomes the substitute for true self-worth, which is not connected to ideas we have of who we are, but rather, a deeper understanding of our essence. Our true value is not connected with how well we do, or how we look, our true value is inherent in every manifestation of human life. Our worth is beyond judgment, beyond the measures of success or failure, beyond ideas of who we are, and connects with the true experience of being human. We are born with worth and we never lose it, although we might limit ourselves without this deeper realization.

When we over-identify with ideas of who we are, particularly our performance and our image, we get caught in self-limiting cycles that is difficult to get out of. Our beliefs about ourselves can be organized

through the lens of approval, the system of proving to ourselves and others that we deserve acceptance, belonging and love. We might work very hard to be good at what we do for the approval it brings us from others…our parents, our teachers, our peers, and the anonymous “others” and what they think. Those of us who do well might develop a strong ego and a persona that wins the approval and acceptance we seek. We might also discover that it is never enough, that we could always do better or that the feelings we have are fleeting and do not really satisfy a sense of our own worth. Our standards might change as we get better at things, or we feel the helplessness that comes from trying to win approval from those outside ourselves, without having connected to a deeper, more experiential sense

of ourselves. What we believe about ourself can often be judgmental, harshly critical, telling ourselves that we do not deserve a life we would want.

Shame and guilt represent the emotions that accompany a sense of low self-worth or low self-esteem. Shame reduces us to feel insignificant, someone who doesn’t deserve joy or pleasure or fulfillment. We

might feel embarrassed easily or fear being humiliated. Guilt tells us that our behavior is bad and we are unable to separate ourselves from our behavior, our performance. We create internal punishments when we carry guilt for being who we are. Without self-forgiveness, we are burdened by limits to become who we are meant to be. Shame and guilt generate fear, the fear that others will disapprove of us if they see who we really are. This fear is the reason we create masks to protect ourselves from the

judgments of others. To others we might appear to be Ok, but internally we have self-deprecating thoughts and self-limiting emotions.

Our sense of self-worth, the negative beliefs we have about ourselves, and the underlying, often hidden, emotions that we carry are the primary factors that limit us from the life that is ours. We behave in line with what we believe. The beliefs we have get re-enforced when others respond to our behavior, reflecting back to us our own self-judgment. This self-fulfilling system creates the behavior that is the evidence we believe. It re-enforces our feelings. It is where we get stuck, not realizing that our self-worth has little to do with ideas we have of who we are. We have become disconnected from our essence.

How do we discover our essence?

When we turn inward to face and identify the beliefs and emotions that are there that we shift from ideas of who we are to the experience of living our inner life. We feel our feelings. We see that we have unconsciously learned to function with these limitations, and that we can consciously move beyond them. We can engage more with the direct experience of life by living through our senses, being in the present in ways that offer us an alternative to what we believe and feel in our hypothetical domain. At the core of this change is an increased ability to understand that our sense of worth comes from the essence of who we are, the connection we have to life itself. We can discover that we have life in the form of a spirit or soul, our sense of self can move from a literal and specific identity to a more abstract concept of who we are. We are free to be the person we are meant to be.

Douglas W. Holwerda, Psychotherapist, Author