Early Childhood Survival Strategy
A child’s subconsciously-adopted methods for getting achievement-based approval in order to get the emotional ‘high’ that is their unhealthy substitute for an abiding sense of being real and having a right to exist as who they are.
Some infants are treated like pawns in their primary caretaker’s psycho-emotional games. They experience an inner vacuum because they can’t develop a natural, healthy sense of being who they are. This inner ‘black hole‘ is experienced as intolerably terrifying.
Nature guides them to begin to seek some way to fill the black hole.
The child is behaving in certain ways, and notices that some ways bring approval vibes, and some don’t. This approval makes her ‘feel good about herself‘ which is as close to feeling ‘real’ as she ever experiences, so it becomes a sought-for emotional ‘high.’ Getting the approval feels like a matter of life or death, because of the terror of the black hole.
Therefore, the child subconsciously begins to not just notice which behaviors result in approval, but to behave those ways deliberately, and more often. This ‘trying harder’ has a desperate, compulsive character, and becomes pathological in goal and in intensity. Getting approval vibes from the primary caretaker becomes an unhealthy substitute for an abiding sense of being real and having a right to exist as who she naturally is, without having to conform to someone else’s needs and desires.
Through subconscious trial and error, the child subconsciously adopts ‘strategies’ or methods for trying harder to feel good about herself. Her behaviors are no longer toward any ‘natural’ goal, they are in the service of another goal.
That is when a possibly healthier kind of altering of behavior to get approval becomes a pathological ‘strategy’: It is repeated, compulsively, to get something desperately needed but not being supplied in the normal way (by being respected and treated as a distinctly-existing Being.)
Getting the achievement-generated approval feels like a matter of life or death, because of the terrifying black hole and Fear of Annihilation, so the strategies are experienced as about survival. That is what gives them their compulsive, addictive quality.
These ECSS become what this theory refers to as Ego-References: Conditions and Requirements of behavior and ‘being’ certain ways which must be fulfilled in order to get approval. The strategies further develop, over time, into the entire Substitute-Sense-of-Self-oriented System.
