Early Deprivation: Can Someone Use Success To Try To Be Accepted If They Were Not Affirmed As A Child?

In general, someone could spend most of their life doing things, and this can mean that they are fairly ‘successful’. So, they could have a well-paid job, an expensive car, and a big house and they could have a desirable partner.

If this is the case, they will look as though they have it all together and they will be seen as having made it. However, there is the chance that although their life looks whole and complete on the outside, they don’t feel whole and complete on the inside.

Slightly Different

And, even if they are unable to relate to this type of success and have a number of areas of their life that are going well, they could also be in the same position. Still, they could do their best to keep their ‘negative’ thoughts and feelings at bay.

Thanks to how they live their life, that’s if they are practically always on the go, this is unlikely to be difficult. Staying busy and working towards other goals will allow their mind to be distracted and out of touch with their inner material.

A Battle

Sooner or later, though, they may arrive at the point where they are no longer able to run away from what is going on inside them. This could be something that occurs after they are totally exhausted, after having worked too hard.

They could then find that they don’t have the energy or the desire to carry on behaving in this way any longer. Yet, there could still be a big part of them that is unable to surrender to what is going on and wants them to carry on as before.

Inner Conflict

Part of them will then be able to see that living in this way is causing them to work too hard and neglect other areas of their life but a bigger, stronger part of them will be holding on to how things were. If they were to think about living differently and not being so focused on being ‘successful’, they could end up feeling low.

What could gradually stand out is that in order for them to feel good about themselves, they need to work hard and be seen as ‘successful’. This will illustrate how empty they feel and how reliant they are on the doing side of their nature to experience ‘positive' feelings.

A Human Doing

Naturally, if they feel empty and being in doing mode and achieving things allows them to feel good, if only temporarily, it is to be expected that they would have typically acted like a human doing. This will have served as a defence against their real feelings.

As they don’t feel whole, this is likely to show that they don’t have a felt sense of worth, enoughness, or lovability. They are then going to look whole on the outside but that won’t be how they feel on the inside.

Backwards

As a result of this, what they do will have largely been a means to a hoped-for end; with the end being a time when they will finally feel valuable, enough and lovable. But, as this will have been something that was taking place outside of their conscious awareness, they won’t have been aware of this.

They might have believed that they solely behaved in this way because they wanted to and that the purpose of life was to be successful, for instance. The needs that they were not aware of, then, would have greatly impacted the needs that they were aware of.

The Healthy Approach

If they did feel whole and complete what they do would largely be an end per se. This would allow them to freely express themselves as opposed to continually trying to earn approval from others.

But, as they will know, through having been this way for however long, is that no matter what they have done or how much approval they have received, it hasn’t changed what is going in inside them. From this, it will be clear that they have been playing a game that they will never win and will only be worn down by.

What’s going on?

If they have been this way for as long as they can remember, there is a chance that their early years were anything but nurturing. Throughout his stage of their life, they may have been neglected, and perhaps physically and verbally abused.

Regardless of what happened, they are unlikely to have received the attunement and the affirmation that they needed to develop the being side of their nature. Consequently, their physical and mental self would have grown but their emotional self would have stayed in an underdeveloped state.

Self-Alienation

As they were egocentric at this stage, they would have personalised what took place. It was then not that their parent or parents were wounded, or anyone else for that matter; it was that there was something inherently wrong with them.

Also, the pain that they experienced and their developmental needs would have ended up being repressed. Many, many years will have passed since this stage of their life, of course, but most if not all of the pain that they experienced will be held inside them.

Awareness
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If someone can relate to this and they are ready to change their life, they may need to reach out for external support. This is something that can be provided with the assistance of a therapist or healer.