Hurrying
Let’s state first that there is a Quality-of-Life aspect to ‘hurry’ which reflects the need to be on time, get things done, not let others wait. This is a normal part of everyday life and is perfectly fine psychologically, in terms of mental health and wellbeing. This aspect of hurrying doesn’t cause the unhealthy stress that we want to eradicate. It is based on agreements plus the fact that the time it takes to do things is unpredictable, and hurrying now and then is therefore necessary to make society and companies work and be productive.
Cause: Dependency on a Substitute Sense of Self for Self-experience.
What I refer to here is the unnecessary, unhealthy, and devastating stress that comes from a dependency on a Substitute Sense of Self. We experience an amount of stress that is not congruent with what presents itself as the cause of it (on the Quality of Life level of Experience).
It is the striving for approval that will give us our ‘Feel Good About Self‘ which is our Substitute Sense of Self that is experienced as a matter of life or death that lies at the root of this stress experience. Not being able to refuge in the shelter if our own Self we continuously are after: feeling safe, feeling alive, get a sense of belonging, all aspects that were missing in our childhood and that deprived us from being able to develop a healthy Sense of Self.
However the criteria we use to feel safe and/or accepted by others are still the ones that are based on our Early Childhood Survival Strategy, and we need to see (it is difficult!) that they are no longer valid and based on our caregivers personal needs that often times were totally unhealthy. Those needs we needed to fulfill in order to get what came closest to ‘parental love and appreciation’ were not geared toward our well-being but towards theirs, and sometimes were totally unrealistic or even sick. To free ourselves from, and eliminate, the addicted need for unhealthy substitutes for acknowledgment, we need to
- connect to our body and realize that ‘Yes, I already AM, I already exist. As much as we did feel ignored (non-existent, not acknowledged) if we were unable to comply with the ‘conditions’ of our parents ‘love’ – or what they erratically used to call that connection they thought they had with us as their children – in the present, NOW, we don’t need all the virtual approval that is reflected in this so desired ‘acknowledgment’. It would be an approval long past due and based in the past anyway.
- We don’t have to continuously improve our Ego-References with which we were focused on having more chances to realize our Hidden Agenda or Goals (and Substitute Sense of Self), feeling-good-about-ourselves from receiving their (virtual) approval internalized by us.
- We don’t have to select our ‘Vehicles‘ in daily life based on the hope and compulsion for them to facilitate our improving on our Ego-References, thus ultimately giving us a better chance to realize our Hidden Goal (and Substitute Sense of Self), the parents’ virtual approval internalized by us.
- Whenever we notice that we are stressed and hurrying (not in a Quality-of-Life – mode) we need to STOP and pull up from the depth of our being ‘our real self’ by wondering ‘What do I actually think of this situation, authentically myself?’ By asking ourselves what we are actually after, we might discover it is ‘approval from our parent and through that the sense of acknowledgment’. All those questions, and our seeking and finding the answers, will have a healing effect on our lives.
