I have been doing a lot of thinking, talking, listening, and writing lately -- which has necessarily entailed a lot of observation on how people act and react and speculation on why we do what we do. I have also been looking through the lens of the Psychology of Selves, about which I have been learning more over the last few months. It is based on the premise that we each have an inner, vulnerable child that possesses very basic vulnerabilities -- which lead to fears -- that make us feel exposed to the world, defenseless, weak. We develop certain "selves" and use them to protect those vulnerabilities like a forcefield.
These selves act and react to the world; they dictate our behavior and our thoughts about,and feelings towards, others. They are the parts of us that hate, love, judge, anticipate, push people away and draw them in, drive us forward and stop us in our tracks. They allow us to achieve our goals, whatever those may be. They let us live in a world that takes little responsibility for protecting the most tender, most pithy part of our humanity. They are what we identify as our personality, our "traits."
Often we forget that there is something beneath our selves -- the reason they exist, the core that they grow around as a shell -- our vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities wear many faces -- they are our fears: of failure, of being alone, of being ordinary, of being wrong. They drive the development of our selves, which in turn drive our outward behaviors. But I think that the most basic fear, our most basic vulnerability as humans, is the same across the board -- the fear that we are unloved or, worse, unlovable. It is the reason that we hang on for dear life to relationships that don’t work, why we strive to be interesting, why we yearn to find “the one,” why we invent religions, why we want to accomplish great things, why we tear one another down, why we lie and cheat and steal -- because we must prove to ourselves and to others over and over again that we are smarter, prettier, stronger, cleverer, more able, more special and unique, more worthy of the praise and admiration of others -- more worthy of love.
All of these different behaviors that seem to be motivated by love or hate or greed or desperation or insecurity or arrogance are, at their core, all truly motivated by the same one fear, the same vulnerability -- that we will be unloved. It makes sense. From an evolutionary perspective, love is what kept us together in the cave and in clans -- it is why we felt a compulsion to provide for our own, what bonded us together as a tribe, a race, a species. It is what drove us to cooperate, to provide so others could thrive, to sacrifice for evolution and advancement. In a way, it is responsible for the entire path forward of the human species.
The desire, the yearning, to love and be loved, is primal; it equates with the desire, the yearning, to survive, to thrive, and to perpetuate humanity. After all, what could be a more basic purpose of existence on this Earth than to continue existing. And so, the most basic vulnerability that we all have – whether we are the artist, the intellectual, the murderer, the philanthropist, the saint, the wife-beater, the control freak, the pleaser, the achiever – boils down to the fear that that we will find ourselves to be unlovable and will cease to exist. In that way, love is the closest to a pure state of “being” that we can achieve.
The connection that we feel with the people around us, the love that brings and bonds us together, is the most essential impulse we possess. It makes us vulnerable. Our dependence on it makes us feel weak. But, it is also what makes us, as people, strong. To acknowledge our individual needs for love -- to recognize how it drives our behavior -- empowers us and allows us to choose the selves we use to protect our vulnerability. It allows us to choose who and what we want to be and to, hopefully, find ourselves worthy of our own love. And, it allows us to recognize the same need in others -- to forgive them for the selves they use to protect their vulnerabilities and to reach out in love to embrace their weakness along with our own.
