The Hidden Cost of Conformity
I recently listened to a podcast of one of my favorite physicians named Gabor Mate, a top thought leader in the world of psychology. In the interview he made the connection between childhood trauma and how it often leads to addiction (defined as any human activity that allows us to find relief from pain due to trauma). As vulnerable children, we have two basic needs of 1) attachment and 2) authenticity.
Authenticity is defined as the ability to be connected to ourselves to act on that connection through our gut feelings.
When we encounter stress and trauma early in life, our need for authenticity is sacrificed in order to maintain the non-negotiable need to survive via attachment to our caregivers.
The loss of authenticity and therefore our individuality causes us to live lives of conformity, duty, and compliance toward the expectations of others in order to preserve our basic needs of survival and attachment.
The cost of this loss is significant. We can see evidence of this in the countless people who walk around without a sense of who they are, what their purpose is, and an ensuing void that they so desperately try to fill in all the places that never satisfy. It results in people who constantly question themselves, don’t believe they know the answers and find it difficult to trust their intuitive nature. It is an empty, hollow existence and the only sustainable way to resolve the issue is to learn to reconnect to ourselves.
How exactly do we go about reconnecting to our authentic selves?
Compassionate self-care, practices that release judgment such as meditation and yoga, and the quest for healing in a therapeutic setting such as counseling and coaching are all beginning steps toward rebuilding our instinctive nature that guides us in the direction of wholeness. We must learn to accept and restore our connection to our bodies, our emotions, and our minds in order to find out who we REALLY are and not what society tells us to be.
The outcome of this process is defined as recovery. And what does it mean to recover something? It means to find it again.
What we find when we recover is the rediscovery of ourselves - as whole, healed, complete, and deeply satisfied human beings who know who we are and our unique place in the world.
