When you are a kid you don't worry about how you are perceived by the outside world. You are guided by whatever impulse arises within you and you honor it through action. You don't care whether what you are doing is consistent with your previous actions or with the image you have projected into the world by that point. People around you will start telling you how you are, but you either don't care much about that or you just don't "feel" that way. This isn't because you don't trust people, but because you haven't developed a strong sense of being a separate entity from the world and you haven't learned how to make a clear distinction between the experience and the experiencer. A label isn't much to a child.
As you grow, you start to adopt beliefs about yourself and about the world you live in which allows you to to develop a sense of identity. The more beliefs you acquire, the clearer the contrast becomes between you and the world. It's like wearing a pair of special glasses that "enhance" your worldview. You assume your worldview is how reality looks like and you don't question whether your glasses are adding any effect to what you are perceiving. In fact, you aren't even aware that you are wearing a pair of glasses, that is the difficulty of it. And when you start to figure it out, you don't know how far the level of influence goes.
Identity is a funny thing. You think it is such a positive thing when you are in high school, when you try to define yourself in whatever way possible and give color to your personality. I like this, I don't like that. I'm pro this, I'm anti that. The way this makes you feel is like you've added something to yourself, like you know where you position yourself in the world now. And this is a natural reaction to having gathered your sense of self in relation to your parents up until that point. You want to find out what makes you you. And you explore and you try out different things in order to see what fits. The general way you relate to the world is pretty much cemented by then, meaning your temperament and a large chunk of your personality. It's the outer layers that you are exploring now. You're trying to find your interests, your hobbies, your likes and dislikes.
For me it was music and movies. I was obsessed. I filled my time watching everything I could and I would spend so much time on lastfm that my library grew to large proportions. I took pride in that. I would sometimes, in my more self-aware moments, catch myself listening to music for the statistics only. A purpose was forming in my mind, which was to have a comprehensive collection of music on my channel that showed how well-versed I was in it. I craved the identity that it was granting me.
This was my profile during that time:
https://www.last.fm/user/andreea89
Back then I decided I liked the color blue, and I disliked hard rock, I was pro computer games and anti smoking. I liked basketball, Avril Lavigne and I disliked people that stared. And I was happy to count on that. I was happy when people shared similar "views" and I was even happier when they didn't, because I could practice having confidence which is how being comfortable with disagreement felt like. To me that was a big deal, even if the things I stood up for were completely irrelevant.
A lot of these preferences stayed with me for a pretty long time. Some evolved into other interests, but they were still based on some sort of reaction to something. It was only years after that I realized what I had done. This came with a few dissilusionments in my personal life that made me reevaluate everything. It was as though the ground was falling out from beneath my feet. I had added layers upon layers of self-deception to myself all that time. And somehow, with that new awareness, those things started fading from my personality one by one. I still enjoyed music, but I didn't listen to it that often and when I did, it wasn't with any agenda other than to savor it. Movies, I hardly watched afterwards unless it was something I considered truly worthwhile. And I'm telling you, it's a different experience when you actually enjoy the thing you're doing!
I didn't realize back then that I was removing side effects of social programming. But, compared to what came next, that was child's play. A few years passed and I stumbled into more suffering. And this kind of suffering went through the roof. And I got a glimpse of the fact that perhaps there was more to my conditioning than I thought and that it went deeper than I thought. But it was hard to grasp, just like an amorphous shadow. And I understood that a lot of my behavior was mechanical, it was reactive, it was predictable. I wanted to know why. And that's where the real work began! I was starting to see the outline of the glasses I was wearing.
When you commit yourself to getting to the bottom of your conditioning, that amorphous shadow may in time develop a contour and you may get a rough idea of why you behave in ways that you can't rationally explain. The shadow is that thing that you don't like within you that always leads you to difficult situations, like an inability to say no or excessive anger or being too expansive. In time you may be confronted with things that hold the distinctive marks of the same problem and you may develop an understanding of the kind of things that project that kind of shadow. If you give yourself the time, you may find one of those things somewhere in your past, most likely in your childhood, because that's when things get cemented within your mind as you aren't equipped to assess situations from a strong standpoint nor do you have the awareness that you can subject the people around you to scrutiny. So you unwittingly take somebody else's perception of you for reality and you integrate it into your being. If that perception does not have a basis in truth, then you will relate to the world through a false sense of self. You will have an illusion guiding your choices which inevitably leads to more confrontations in life where that misperception reenacts itself in one form or another. In that way you get a second chance to overcome that illusion that you assumed to be truth all your life. And that is how it works.
For me the problem was that I had difficulty saying no to things even though they were bad for me. I had a basic idea of why that was, but I never seemed to be able to get at the core of it. It took me about a year to realize that someone I knew was taking advantage of this vulnerability I had in order to condition me to into tending to her needs. That allowed me to observe myself and realize that I had difficulty saying no to people and setting boundaries and I seemed to take on the responsibilities of those around me and was kind of a people pleaser. I had identified my shadow. So I took the time to think about it and I could not believe how much I could learn. The way I went into it was like this:
I don't believe I would have been able to identify how I developed my coping mechanisms had I not been confronted with a new situation that challenged me to face my conditioning. It is like life has embedded within it a remarkable feedback mechanism that can help you evolve beyond your limitations and see the truth. And so, life is our ally.
