Feel Good About Self
‘Feel-good-about-Self’ (-as Substitute Sense of Self)
This ‘feel-good’ state is an internal ‘green light’. In words it might be ‘Wow, I succeeded!!’ (in living up to the rules and requirements for behaviors or feelings which were subconsciously self-imposed in childhood. This state is experienced subconsciously by the person (for as long as the mood or state lasts) as ‘I am safe’ and ‘I actually exist in some way’. The state functions as their Substitute Sense of Self and is often accompanied by ‘butterflies in the stomach’.
The state, no matter how ecstatic it feels, is always highly charged with fear. Therefore it leads to high vigilance and need to control the outside world because the person can’t afford to let this state be ruined by external or internal factors. It is the state she most desires in life, the reason for living.
Therefore, anything that is perceived to be, or is, threatening to the attainment or continuing of this state so highly depended upon, must be controlled. The person will do just about anything to avoid being plunged into the lurking terror of losing the SSoS and feeling out of existence again, no longer ‘allowed to be.
Therefore, in addition to terror, both anger and rage are also intimately involved in this state of so-called ‘happiness’. There is also a great need ‘to celebrate’, to not let the moment pass by without the experience of ‘High’ or Reward.
When the psychologically unhealthy person who took care of them as an infant (and distorted their psychological development) is still alive this state also feels good because it ‘means’ to the person they now deserve to be regarded as OK by the parent or caretaker.
Getting those ‘good vibes’ were, in childhood, the goal of accepting all those requirements/constraints/limitations, because those vibes originally gave them a sense of their existence as some kind of ‘self’. For the person with this dependency on the approval of the parent it is all about gaining that feeling of having deserved to be allowed into the (Castle of-) Enmeshment
The ‘feel-good’ state is induced by a sense of ‘I managed to ‘prove’ myself through successfully carrying out one of my (self-imposed but based on deductions in early childhood) conditions/tasks/requirements for how to behave or feel. The person senses subconsciously (not in words), ‘I am now (virtually) ‘in order’, ‘normal’. The task has fulfilled its purpose of serving as a ‘vehicle’ to get me to my goal
of feeling ‘allowed to be’.
The ‘feel-good-about-Self’ state is discussed most thoroughly here.
