Why Do We Get Confused About Who We Are?

First let's be clear about what confusion means. "Con" means with. "Fusion" means to pour together. "Confusion" means putting things together that don't go together.

Our root confusion is confusing the worth of Being with our level of performance at Activities.

The formula is so simple and straightforward that people are often puzzled by it. "Why do we do this? And why do we keep doing it, even when we know better?"

In a nutshell, we keep confusing our Being with our performance of Activities because as children most of us were thoroughly indoctrinated to reject our inherent joyful and intuitive being. And then we began automatically rejecting it, ourselves.

At some point, our joyful being and the activity of its natural exuberance was no longer adored. From that time on, we learned to believe that the worth of our being depended upon our performance in activities –– and how it was judged by the giant gods who ruled our world in those days: our parents and other adults.

We may have been mocked, punished, shamed and/or abused for our innocent activity of expressing our delightful being. Fueled by our survival instinct in the face of these attacks, we passionately created and rehearsed a bundle of inauthentic beliefs and behaviors (masks) which make up the so-called ego. The ego's purpose was to suppress our joyful expression in order to avoid being attacked.

We became so good at suppressing our natural being-ness that suppression became automatic, second nature, and invisible to examination. The false collection of beliefs and behaviors became our "reality" -–– what we came to believe was our "defective" self.

Habit and Familiarity are not Reality

The experience of childhood programming, getting criticized for things you did, and the subsequent withdrawal of a caregiver's love and support convinced us that "we must be unworthy or it wouldn't be happening this way." As a child, we didn't have a cognitive faculty before the age of seven, so we couldn't recognize the obvious fact that we were blameless. The giants are telling us we are to blame! This message teaches a child to take everything personally and suggest to the child they are unworthy of love. Tragic, and all too common.

If a parent, or any adult, got mad and yelled at you for spilling your milk, as a child you didn't think, "Back off! This is an innocent learning curve I'm entitled to. I'm just learning to hold my cup without spilling." On the contrary, when those powerful giants yelled at you or got angry, you thought, "Spilling my milk proves there's something wrong with me."

When you're a gullible, naïve, open little child with no critical faculty to reject such ridiculous suggestions, you readily accept them. At that point you had no critical ability to see that they were false. Plus (always remember the source!) giants were telling you this is the way it is," so you quickly learned not to cross them!

Anything we do or experience repeatedly becomes habitual. Now consider for a moment how many thousands of times a child may receive such messages before the age of seven, and it's easy to understand how deeply habitual these confused false beliefs can become.

When an activity becomes deeply habitual, it becomes invisible to our examination. By the time we grow up enough to develop a critical faculty, we have already accepted all those false suggestions of our unworthiness as the truth. We don't think to apply our critical faculties to these truths. That would be heresy –– and a betrayal of our parents, the god-giants. It feels somehow dangerous even to question what they taught us.

This is why, when we encounter the idea that the worth of our being is not determined by the quality of our activities, we are astonished. How could we not know this simple wisdom in the first place? Because the obstacle to our knowing it has been invisible to us all this time!

The Remedy is NOT "Building Self-esteem"

Why doesn't it help to "build up our self-esteem"? The very idea of self-esteem is itself a judgment, so receiving praise or other accolades cannot remedy our judgment of our unworthiness. You can't stamp out a judgment with another judgment.

Who we think we are, good or bad, is a concept; it's not who we really are. So when parents are telling children positive things about themselves based on their activity, they're building up the child's concept of self. That's different from encouraging the natural expression of the child's actual self.

Unless that encouragement is unconditional, the self-esteem-building message carries a hidden agenda: "I'll encourage you –– unless you cross me."

When parents try to build self-esteem by telling a child they are great, it won't help if they also criticize things the child does in a shaming, blaming way that the child interprets as "I'm not good enough." Such inconsistent messages create emotional turmoil in the child. On one hand, the child is getting messages that hurt their heart, convincing them they are not lovable. On the other hand, they're being told, "You're great, you're special, and blah blah blah," which results in a painful inner conflict.

The real remedy is to break the confusion that creates that conflict. This remedy happens to be the same wisdom expressed in the Golden Rule of Parenting: "Love the child, encourage and support the child, as you guide them toward kind and effective behaviors, as you set healthy boundaries with patience and respectful guidance." In this way the child learns not to fear making mistakes, because their parents never withdraw loving support. Instead, they always communicate love and respect.

We may not have had such a perfect parenting experience in our childhood, but we can re-parent ourselves now. How do we do this? By transforming our inner critical voices to encouraging voices.

Practice speaking to yourself with kindness, respect, and encouragement. For example you might say to yourself, "Maybe I didn't do that perfectly, but I'm a human being, always learning, always growing. I've learned something from this, and I have the power to do it differently the next time."

Practicing kind speech is a most worthy endeavor.

Good luck!