The most important period for the formation of our beliefs is the period of early childhood. This is why children need love and affection. Psychologists say that the crucial period is from the fifth to the seventh year, where this seven-year cycle (the first seven years) is copied and repeated throughout life. As a child, we immediately function as a small machine that only eats performs physiological needs, and sleeps. Our parents caress and love us, but we are not aware of it. We are in a transitional period between the sphere of the unconscious where we came from and the sphere of consciousness into which we are just immersing ourselves.
Love and Affection Are Something That Children Need the Most
Adults treat helpless creatures in such a way that they feel the need to protect them; later, when these helpless creatures begin to express their needs and desires, they become overwhelmed and expect obedience from them through which they find their peace. Later, that little being towards whom they showed warmth and protection, in the moments when he becomes aware of himself and realizes that something is happening around him, begins to lower his first conscious impressions. Here, children experience real emotional pain for the first time through rejection in moments when he needs a mother, and she does not understand their needs or devotes himself to something “much more important” at that moment. Maybe the mother is burdened with personal frustrations and messy relationships with the father, financial situation, lover, watching a series, or something else, so there is no love energy to dedicate to the child. Still, her communication is reduced to “obligation” to feed and change, waiting for the child to fall asleep to “get rid” of his crying and demanding attention. When a child calls the mother out of bed at night, and the mother does not respond, the child gets a reprimand and even a beating; there is a rift within the personality. Here the child creates the first belief, which reads: “When I want something – I can’t get it.” It actually needs love, so the belief at the same time is “I need love – but I can’t have it.” This is where our unsatisfied hunger for love begins. But since we are rejected, our desires are not granted, and because of the enormous pain we feel, we become liars to survive. We try to bury ourselves, forget the pain, and start imitating life.
As an Adult, We Have a Fear of Love and Affection
Because of negative experiences, we stop calling the mother and asking her for attention. We continue to be lonely and numb because we have learned that it is something that is followed by pain and rejection, and we feel nothing about it. Much later, we are not able to form successful love relationships. We have a fear of intimacy and emotional opening because we are afraid of rejection and hurt. Our behavior and way of life depict a constant search for love “that is not there,” and that emptiness stands like a wall between our partner and us. At the same time, through them echoes unpleasant memories from which our unconscious can draw the pattern “I am loved and protected only when I am powerless” and attract illness as a way to become powerless and provoke the need for a partner to protect us. That impotence can be any kind of inability to go through life for a partner to stay. That is why capable, strong, and independent women sometimes unknowingly “drive” their partners away from them.
A Hunger for Possession Is Nothing but the Need for Love and Affection
We often try to compensate for our need for love by frantically buying various things, but hunger for possession is nothing but the need for love. We have the desire to own some material good – a car, a cottage, clothes – but at the same time, we have in our subconscious the answer that we can’t have it because a car, a cottage, clothes – in fact, “love we can’t have” is the answer from the crib, every thought and desire includes an automatic answer “there is no chance that you will get it,” because “you are not worth it” – the desired object simply rejects us.
An Imitation of Happiness Continues Persistently
In fact, we move throughout life as lonely and rejected people with a developed defense mechanism. We are an imitation that skillfully hides buried pain inside. As long as our defense mechanism works, we are socially acceptable people. We become dependent on the opinion of society. While we manage to maintain financial balance, marriage, family, and work – others tell us, “what you want, you have everything you need for a happy life, and you are dissatisfied again.” Our imitation of happiness continues persistently so that we don’t stick out and be funny with our emotional needs. We are unacceptable as emotional beings, and aware of this; we become very polite, civilized, and urban. We fit into fashion trends and social events. In one book, Osho remarked that petty civilization takes us away from our animal nature, which is a true part of us and which we persistently try to suppress and disguise, which is why we cannot live in a relaxed way.
In the End, We Lose Ourselves
People simply believe that one can find a thing that will make us happy, we just need to have it in sufficient quantity or long enough, but we are always bound to every such notion by the ever-present fear of loss. All we can lose cannot make us happy. But the worst is when we lose ourselves, as happened the moment we became an imitation. To find our way back to ourselves, we need to wake up from a dream; we fell into a long time ago.