NOTE: This article is a heavily revised and edited version of the original, which was published 9 years ago.
Understanding the key concepts of the “self” is fundamental in order to really learn how to re-conceptualize these concepts thereby affecting positive change within us because how we relate to ourselves is defined by how we define the self. That is the incredible power of mind, which is the power to create and destroy concepts. Concepts are ultimately what makeup the world that we experience, and so despite the fact that most physical outcomes are simply beyond reach, we do in fact have the power to create the world that we live in. Most people try to change the world by changing it physically, but very often their experience does not change. This is because the world we experience is a manifestation of our own internal state, which in turn is conjoined with our self-knowledge. We are able to recondition ourselves to think better, to feel better, to act better, and ultimately, to perceive and experience the world more truthfully and authentically.
Overcoming low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and all manners of mental suffering has always been understood to be a central premise of all spiritual traditions, often framing it within the metaphysical dimension of the soul or the heart as ethereal immutable realities of existent being. All of us view the world through a paradigm, which can be said to be the perspective of reality predicated on underlying first principles and their resultant cognitive frames and expectation. Paradigms can be said to be lenses, usually tinted ones. Sometimes these paradigms may be such that they diminish our potential experience of the world and of ourselves in ways that create suffering. Explained below is a general and basic framework of how our mental health – the state of our mind – is inexorably tied to our state of being, which speaks to the condition of the [spiritual] heart; it highlights the intersection between the psychological and the spiritual, and then ultimately the physical and the behavioral, and thus then the social, and when there is critical mass, even the political. Taking this framework and applying it to an assessment of contemporary social standards and attitudes, particularly to parenting styles and relationship and social expectations, it becomes very clear how harmful many of those standards and attitudes can be for our health and development. Such conclusions force us to keep in mind a couple of questions related to our ourselves and our relationships: “how is this affecting my spiritual and mental health?” and “how did I come to hold these beliefs, and why?” In terms of our personal development, we ought to ask ourselves, “Is this way of feeling and way of thinking a reflection of who I want to be, of who I truly am, of my potential?”
Everything is rooted in what the Islamic spiritual tradition refers to as our فطرة [fitrah], our primordial human nature. It is an interesting concept that encapsulates both the physical and the metaphysical as the basis of our being. As a sort of blueprint of the human being, it implies that there is a way to live in accordance to nature that results in wellbeing, and thus where deviation away from our nature results in our ill health. Our external life is a reflection of our internal life, and so our relationship with others is often a reflection of our relationship within our own self, and thus, with nature. The inward dimension of the soul, which encapsulates the western concept of the psyche, must be tended to and nurtured properly and consciously. Unless we do this, then we will be forever ruled and guided by unconscious forces within us that may represent what is dysfunctional. When institutions and philosophies, whether religious or secular, neglect attempting to understand these dimensions they produce social structures, attitudes, and norms that are objectively damaging to human beings on a fundamental level. In this case, they tend to cease being spiritual traditions, becoming instead toxic institutions that take advantage of people and their vulnerabilities. What societies label as normative behavior and attitudes may in fact be harmful to us, perhaps not always outwardly but more fundamentally, inwardly in ways that rob us of deeper human dignity and meaning. On an individual level we feel that we have no choice but to endure the suffering they cause in us. The most potent examples that come to mind are the concepts of romantic love and filial love. A cursory look at how contemporary culture, whether it is from within a society that identifies as secular or as religious, portrays these concepts reveals clearly a dangerous confusion between symbiotic codependent arrangements and actual relationships, emotional hunger and love, and validation seeking and affection. But rather than identifying such arrangements, characterized by neediness and possessiveness, as toxic they’re instead labeled as romantic, pious, or dutiful. We become a confused generation that is attracted to what is detrimental to us both spiritually and emotionally, draining us of our resources and disrupting our development and growth along the identity formation pathway. We remain in toxic environments that continually trigger our childhood insecurities making it very difficult for us to develop and mature beyond them.
The Formation of the Devalued Self
As Dr. [Shaykh] Umar Faruq Abdallah said, our parents are like two streams that meet in the heart of the child. If the dynamic of its parents is harmonious, this experience instantiates within the child as its own inner state, and from this the seeds of beliefs about oneself and the world, and one’s expectations, are planted. When the child sees affection between its parents, it feels proud because he or she believes that they were the cause of this. However, if the dynamic in the household was characterized by dysfunction, pain, and conflict, then the child feels ashamed because he or she believes that they were the cause of this. They thus internalize the seeds of devaluation, which manifest as it grows into articulated thought called belief, underpinning what we may call low self-esteem as a dynamic between the concept of esteem itself and the concept of the self. Children are inclined to grow into emotionally hungry adults when they are conditioned by emotional abandonment during early childhood, referred to as childhood emotional neglect (CEN). Emotional Hunger as a concept is understood to be a strong anxiety driven need for psychological validation and love caused by emotional deprivation in one’s own childhood. It is an agitating state to be in, a primitive condition of pain and longing which people act out in a desperate attempt to fill a void or emptiness within them. As complex as our lives may become, as materially successful as we may appear, beneath the surface of these extraneous elements is that same hungry child who does not wish for anything more than the loving gaze of its parents.
When parents are emotionally hungry they tend to seek emotional validation from their children instead of being the provider of it to them, confusing their own intense feelings of need and anxious attachment for genuine love, tenderness, and concern towards their children. A parent no longer sees their children for what they are but instead as something they are not, causing the parent to feel increasingly disconnected from them. It is a paradox for them, one that is rooted in role reversal. This reversal of roles, where parents act out the role of the care-receiver while the child acts out the role of the caregiver, instead of creating closeness through displays of affection or service creates distance instead. Babies especially, because of their vulnerability and innocence, learn to confuse these expressions of emotional hunger for expressions of genuine love, perhaps in the same way that their parents did when they were children, which points to the cyclical nature of intergenerational trauma passed down through learned behavior and a genetic propensity for responding to certain triggers. But, this is not love. This is an inversion of the concept of love, from an unconditional concept to a conditional concept; love is dispensed, and in many cases, can only be dispensed to the child after the child has met the parent’s emotional expectations. This confusion manifests in adulthood and influences the nature of our relationships and the sorts of people we become attracted to, especially in a romantic sense. The core belief that we must prove ourselves to them before they can love us is a common feature, for example. This can rob us of actual healthy relationships that don’t demand from us that need to prove ourselves worthy because, in our eyes, we may deem such dynamics as without value. No doubt a reflection of another inverted concept, namely the inversion of value and intrinsic worth. From a state of bereftness there is born the need to prove oneself as having value, a situation that makes no such demands there, we feel, only leaves us bereft of value. But this belief is not a First Principle. It is an effect of a prior condition within us, which we then must ask, “Why is my self-worth predicated on someone else?”
Validation, in this context, is essentially the attempt at deriving intrinsic human value from what is external to the essential nature of one’s being, especially from the approval of others. As adults, why do we have a strong need for people’s approval? To be popular? For social status? Out of the fear of abandonment and social rejection? These tendencies, although complex due to how their particular manifestations relate to primitive society and survival, ultimately have their origin in early childhood interactions with primary caregivers. These are natural needs for sure, but the idea is that they should be connected only to those who matter, that is, only those who have true authority in relation to us, such as our parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, and role models. When these fail to become integrated in the right way within us, they become generalized to broader society, to institutions, to potential romantic partners, and to one’s peers because in some way and shape and form they have replaced the archetypes of our primary caregivers within us. When children are denied this emotional validation from their parents it causes them to feel a deep sense of abandonment. Because of how vulnerable children are, abandonment equals death and therefore is traumatic. For the child, talk of abandonment is actually talk of death. It activates our survival instincts and so it is accompanied by a deep fear and insecurity. Anxiety is the machinery of fear, and thus the physiological expression of abandonment trauma is an overarching anxiety. This is not to say that parents do not love their children if they don’t give them appropriate validation. There are many reasons why a parent was unable to respond appropriately to the needs of their children, much of it rooted in the systemic problems of modern society that have caused the family unit to become isolated away from a broader communal network. Regardless of the cause, there is consensus among child psychologists that a child needs at least four primary caregivers around them. Traditional knowledge has communicated this already throughout the centuries. We are reminded of that proverb found among the Igbo and Yoruba, “It takes a village to raise a child”. It is expressed in my different African languages. In Sukuma they say “One knee does not bring up a child” and in Swahili they say “One hand does not nurse a child”. The essence of all of these proverbs and lessons is that raising a child is a communal effort. Parents are not perfect, they can’t do it alone.
The first act of abandonment inculcates in us the expectation that our needs will not be met. As Darwin wrote, “We are are anxious if we expect to suffer.” As the child experiences emotional abandonment, the resultant insecurity and anxiety eventually leads to resentment and anger towards the parent. But because the child, out of its nature of vulnerability and intrinsic reliance on the parent, views the parent as perfect since it must, it therefore instead redirects its anxiety and resentment inwardly at itself. This inward direction of anxiety and anger leads to the second act of abandonment, which is understood as the manifestation of a deep seated sense of internalized shame; the child perceives that it must be the one at fault for being abandoned and therefore it must not be worthy and deserving of affection and love and having its needs met.
tl;dr: When emotionally hungry parents use their babies as emotional outlets to pacify their own unresolved emotional hunger the baby experiences abandonment. This abandonment results in anxiety and eventually resentment. The baby directs this resentment inwardly at itself resulting in shame. The baby feels that because the parent(s) are emotional unavailable, it is their fault and that he/she must be bad.
We internalize shame after we have been sufficiently conditioned by it. This is typically what is referred to as toxic shame because of how it soils and pollutes our self-concept, resulting in the Devalued Self. Although it was abandonment that was the requisite condition for devaluation, after the formation of our self-concept, which occurs during the rapprochement sub phase of child development according to Mahler, we feel that it was our inherent devaluation and worthlessness in the first place – as a First Principle – that led to us being abandoned. Thus abandonment is our expectation going forward in life, which expresses very clearly the second half of Darwin’s statement, that “If we have no hope of relief, we despair.” This is the psycho-spiritual formula of emotional hunger, thus the emotional hunger of the parent(s) has been transferred to the child through abandonment trauma. But it is important to remember that just because we feel this way, that just because this may describe our inner atmosphere of emotions and thoughts about ourselves, and even if we can’t help but hold to negative expectations and outcomes, no hope and only despair, the world will not necessarily reflect that. Outcomes, good or bad, positive or negative, desired or disliked, are ultimately beyond our control and therefore there is always hope. That glimmer of hope, like a light, is enough to efface the darkness if we hold fast to it.
tl;dr: When the child transitions into a stage of self-awareness, that shame that was felt since earlier formative phases of development up to now forms the basis of the child’s negative self-concept, or, the Devalued Self. It is an overarching and ever present experience occurring within them at all times that becomes articulated as self-beliefs and negative expectations.
The true state that underlies our behavior is hidden within the realm of attachment system, which developed during the formative years of our childhood. When they are triggered when we instinctively form attachments or bonds with others, especially in a romantic context, our state is uncovered. Our behavioral tendency can perhaps be said to exist on a spectrum between validation seeking and affection giving tendencies; the prior being a reflection of deprivation while the latter a reflection of an inward state of abundance. While it is normal for relationships to include elements of both since as human beings we do have imperfections and brokenness, wounds that need healing, longings that want to be met, and insecurities that may be triggered or grow due to life events. This is completely normal and we should not feel shame for having brokenness or weakness. The problem is when the wounds are so deep and all encompassing due to self-identification that they’ve lead to certain patterns of dysfunction within us. This is the condition of emotional hunger. Emotional hunger maintains in adulthood that childlike need for validation, of acquiring value from what is external to us, in order to alleviate our condition of pain and longing, our sense of deprivation to the point that its become an orienting principle. While this is a normal part of childhood, as an adult quality however, it is a childish need that eventuates in us a sense of entitlement; we feel entitled to our object of validation because we associate it with our sense of self-value, and on a primitive level, even survival. The most potent example of this is an abusive relationship that is characterized by a love-hate dynamic. Out of this sense of entitlement arises the spiritual concept of attachment, especially towards other people. We cling to others and grasp at them as a desperate attempt to validate ourselves, to fill up our emptiness, to give our lives a sense of meaning and fulfillment. When validation is not received, or it finally dawns on us that it does not lead to that vague sense of self-value, we feel empty and numb at best, and resentful and anxious, agitated and temperamental at worst. This tends to be the basis for our unrealistic expectations towards others and how those eventuate in destroying relationships.
The more emotionally hungry we are then the greater in severity our inclination for seeking validation is and the deeper our attachments are to those objects of validation. Out of this Devalued Self emerge the conditioned paradigm and its cognitive frames acquired intuitively during childhood through feelings of abandonment. Such cognitive frames, as articulated intuitions about reality and oneself within it, include the belief or narrative that we are not deserving of having our needs met, that we should not expect our needs to be met, and that we are less precious or valuable than others. The nature of our existence, which manifest especially in our relationships due to the unveiling of our attachment systems, are then governed by a paradox; on one hand we have an anxiously driven need for validation, expressing a sense of entitlement and holding unrealistic expectations towards others. But on the other hand, we neither feel worthy of it nor do we expect to receive it, and so we don’t really work towards improving our situation. Instead, this paradox causes us to exist in a state of limbo, with one foot in and another out, paralyzed by indecision and procrastination, which always ends up making others feel insecure and uncertain. This suppresses and eventually kills attraction, trust, loyalty, and ultimately, connection, preventing any real relationship from actualizing. This paradox characterizes the behavioral and relational dynamic typical of what we may call low self-esteem. There is a sense of being trapped within a perpetual and internalized conflict, maintained by engaging in what is called bottom line thinking, the negative view of your sense of self that is at the heart of low self-esteem. It becomes easy to consciously believe ourselves to be inherently bad, and we may even attribute a metaphysical cause for this state of affairs – that everyone hates us, that we are cursed, or that God hates us. It is a success barrier that prevents us from achieving goals related to our happiness that pertain to connecting with others and, more fundamentally, to ourselves. And this of course represents another paradox because one of the most powerful ways, perhaps in some ways the only way, to connect to our own essence is by connecting with others. A sense of need combined with the expectation of abandonment and loss is the cause of this existential sense of anxiety.
From this pattern of bottom line thinking arises the narratives or cognitive frames that interpret our conscious experience of the world in ways that merely confirm our underlying paradigm, and therefore, this internalized concept of the Devalued Self and its sense of existential undeservedness. Although these narratives vary in appearances and expressions, they all adhere to the Principle of Biased Interpretation. Narratives that arise out of biased interpretation distort the meanings that we attach to what we experience – even if the experience is positive. If anything positive happens to you, you minimize its importance. But if negative things happen to you, you maximize its importance, and thus its internal and external effects. This is all in order to confirm the negative view of yourself, and in doing so, you validate your negative identity, which ironically provides you with some comfort due to the familiar world that we remain within. This is because of that sense of shame at the core of your being that really defines the character of devaluation. You feel ashamed for being abandoned and rejected on one hand, but on the other, it is comfortable because you have self-identified with it and made an identity out of it, a home. But the comfort that you get from this sort of validation is not something that you can rely on to get through life. By validating your negative sense of self you ensure that you remain anchored at that developmental level. One of the manifestations of this is that you are afraid of taking on higher responsibilities in life. Acquiring validation as a supplement can be helpful, but it becomes maladaptive when it is relied upon as a crutch.
Unhealthy narratives arise out of an unhealthy mind, they are basically coping mechanisms. These narratives not only prevent us from holding healthy views about ourselves and our relationships, it also makes it difficult for us to truly hold others accountable for how they mistreat us and how we mistreat others. Therefore, one of the most important aspects of this equation are having weak boundaries since boundaries are a positive affirmation of a self whereas this negative denial of a self is the shrinking away to accomodate everything else at the expense of ourselves.
tl;dr: The Devalued Self, being in a state of emotional hunger, seeks validation from the external world, especially from other people, in order to find a sense of value and worthiness. This is the basis of [negative] attachment. It makes us emotionally needy, having a sense of entitlement towards our object of validation. Despite an attachment to someone, our conditioned paradigms tell us that we are not valuable, unworthy of being happy, and that we cannot expect good things to happen to us, particularly in this dynamic. This results in an internal paradox between our needs and our beliefs, trapping us in a cycle of indecisiveness, anxiety, and suffering, which either prevents relationships from forming or disrupting them, eventually killing them. This characterizes low self-esteem. We frame our experiences through narratives that confirm this low self-esteem, validating the paradigms of the Devalued Self.
The Biological Component of Trauma and Anxiety
This portion of the discussion must be premised with acknowledging the contentions with using the word “trauma” and some of the criticisms of the research presented in Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score. The work by van der Kolk is premised on the idea that traumatic experiences can end up being stored in the limbic system where it remains trapped, yet ever active in subtle or apparent ways, even leading to catastrophic physical health outcomes such as brain damage, until it is released through therapy modalities, particularly body-based therapies and interventions. This popular narrative was widely embraced in 2014 and has played a fundamental role in shaping public discourse around mental health, even influencing an entire genre of socio-cultural health movements and creating an entire industry around this notion of trauma. However, it is seldom subjected to systematic critical evaluation, both in terms of peer-reviewed processes or philosophical based analysis that question its principles. As mentioned in the Cambridge University Press, the commentary presented by Michael S. Scheeringa has synthesized the evidentiary basis for these claims as a counterweight to this influential narrative by situating findings within broader discussions of neuroscience framing, cultural appeal, and evidence-based communication, underscoring the need for rigorous, balanced engagement with widely disseminated mental health narratives. He found that the major claims that underpin van der Kolk’s narrative, particularly those concerning trauma-induced brain damage and the unique efficacy of body-based treatments – are not supported by the current weight of research.
This does not negate the understanding of the relationship between the physiology of our nervous system and its manifestation through survival pathways that generate fight or flight responses, the machinery of such fear responses being anxiety that can become chronic when rooted in self-perpetuating perceptions. However, it does highlight why we must be careful around the use of the word trauma when talking about deep seated dysfunctions rooted in how our attachment systems were conditioned during early childhood. We can choose to call this trauma bearing in mind certain caveats, or we can refer to them in more nuanced terms, as long as we acknowledge the mechanisms at play here. There should be caution and hesitancy with using the term trauma because of how reductive it is and also because of how the word has been transformed into a pseudo-identity, even to the point that if one claims one has trauma, one expects and often does receive social validation from others. In this way, it has become a highly performative identity that simultaneously devalues mental health while also using it as a crutch to receive emotional validation from others. But for the sake of simplicity, the word trauma will be used as an overarching word to reference a disruption to one’s attachment systems through catastrophic emotional disturbances, particularly during formative years of childhood. Because this challenges and disrupts one’s sense of self, especially during adulthood when the attachment systems that are actively repressing such emotional and psychological wounding are activated, it can be terms as trauma in reference to the definition provided by Judith Herman, namely with regards to the erasure of one’s sense of a self such that one’s organizing principles that make for a coherent sense of self are untethered and we have that sense of losing who we are. We see this especially in romantic relationships where a person who is identified as deeply anxiously co-dependent loses their self in the fires of dysfunctional love for the other.
The earlier and more deeply that the brain has been conditioned by emotional trauma, then the more abstract and vague the sources of anxiety felt later in life will be. This is because early-life adversity disrupts the brain’s ability to discriminate between real danger and safety, effectively blurring the lines between the two. The brain is actively creating links between traumatic memories of the past and the present situation it’s in, a process that research shows relies on generalizable cue associations immediately after a traumatic event, which can cause the fear response to become overgeneralized to anything even remotely connected to it. This perhaps explains why our brains sometimes automatically enter into that “fight or flight” survival mode for no apparent reason. It is as if an internal “alarm” circuit (such as the interpeduncular nucleus) is sounding even when the brain’s higher regions have determined there is no actual threat. Through associative learning, thoughts and events, even if they are neutral and have nothing to do with actual childhood experiences, can become linked to past trauma or emotionally adverse events, and thus associated with anxiety. In fact, studies show that in individuals with heightened anxiety, this rebalancing process fails to occur, leaving the fear response stuck in an overgeneralized state. When this happens, we think that the occurrence of present events is the source of our agitation and pain when really it’s just an effect, like a neural echo of a past danger rather than a signal of a current one. In this way, the brain has become conditioned or neurologically wired to constantly look for threats. When our attachment systems are triggered, because our early attachments – our relationships – were sources of anxiety and danger, then the fear response predominates in relationship dynamics.
The Canadian neuropsychologist, Donald Hebb, explains two important principles, that “neurons that fire together, wire together” and “neurons that fire apart, wire apart”. Our brain is sculpted by the active creation of links through association of experiences as well as the active destruction of links through disassociation of experiences. If there are two nearby neurons that often produce an impulse simultaneously, their cortical maps may become one. This is an important biological fact to consider as far as understanding the overarching neurology of experience and healing is concerned.
Neural pathways connect distant areas of the brain, and each pathway is associated with a particular action or behavior. Every time we think, feel or do something, we strengthen this pathway. Because the narratives that we interpret events in our lives with determine the nature of the experience, these narratives can thus deepen or superficiate neurological pathways that associate anxiety with an event or memory. The psychotherapist, Albert Ellis, wrote about how it is our beliefs that determine our emotional response to events, not the events themselves.
Trauma, perhaps as a pattern of anxiety, is stored in our body and neural network, which work together. The intensity and persistence of the anxious response to events and unconscious memories determines how deeply the neural network becomes conditioned toward future anxiety. When this conditioning becomes overgeneralized, neutral present events can trigger past threat responses, making the source of anxiety feel abstract and vague. Beliefs and paradigms, expressed as narratives, determine the nature of our experiences. Therefore, narratives can either exacerbate or inhibit such conditioning; they can sculpt the mind in healthy or unhealthy ways. Neuroplasticity can be either adaptive or maladaptive.
Philosophical and Spiritual Implications
Our core beliefs, our paradigms, and our narratives are reflections of our sense of an internalized self, which operates according to the conditioned self-concept. In this way, the self is a conditioned construct in as much as it adheres to a concept that is rooted in illusions as opposed to first principles that have [true] ontological status. The nature of the self therefore raises certain ontological questions because of their implications, and therefore transcends the domain of mere psychology and into the ever more subtle dimension of metaphysics, which in a more practical and lived experiential form we may call spirituality generally. We should ask not only “What is the nature of being?” but also “How ought the nature of self in relation to being be?” How we perceive ourselves is reflected in how we perceive the world; the mind through its subtle intellective process constructs and defines concepts and projects them outwards, which is what we experience, calling it the world. Rather, it is our perception of the world, not the world per se unless our conceptualization of it corresponds perfectly to how the world really is; this is to say, the more our inner concept of reality corresponds to reality as it really is, the more we experience reality as it is, the more we are a part of reality, the more real we feel as a lived experience; indeed, existential alienation is not just emotional but fundamentally epistemic – we feel unreal because our model of reality is false. All of this is determined by the self, and thus, it highlights the fundamental importance of obtaining to a true self, not the false self of devaluation. In this false state, we are constructing an illusory world by actively connecting constructed concepts with anxiety and fear, creating an increasingly complex web of interconnected thoughts and emotions that results in a very chaotic world for us; the conditioned self is fundamentally a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because, at our core, we expect to suffer, the world thus becomes a place of suffering, a traumatic manifestation and a reminder of our most primordial sufferings, and of the shame of abandonment. In this world, we either descend into chaos or we become paralyzed in place, slowly deconstructing in a way that goes unnoticed until it is too late.
We may go some time unaware of this state, but it tends to manifest in situations where we are at risk of becoming emotionally vulnerable and invested, again, through the activation of our latent attachment systems; often we can feel like we are truly grounded, but once attachment occurs, particularly in a romantic context that promises companionship in this world that appears effervescent because we are effervescent, suddenly the chaos of being becomes exposed and it may be that we no longer even recognize ourselves. Perhaps however, this exposed chaos is closer to who we really are beneath the mask, not in terms of the true self in terms of our true state in relation to our proximity to the true self. Up until now, we confused ourselves with a mask that we wore while looking into the mirror of self-reflection, deluding ourselves that we know ourselves. But its unmasking, this chaos, despite its painful realization, is in fact a step towards truth, and that is a point of optimism. We may cope by latching onto others, neurotically clinging to an external expectation that we have internalized to the point of existential significance, which ultimately leads to nothing but existential collapse. A mere desperate clinging for a new mask to cover up our exposed scars. That is one coping mechanism. Another is its converse, which is to become avoidant completely, to slowly poison our eyes until we go blind and our hearts go numb. Thich Nhat Hanh says that the earliest experience of trauma was being born into the world. That moment plants in our hearts the “seed of fear”, and this is the basis of the ego, our physical existence, which indeed is in a state of vanishing. Without tending to that seed, that fear will largely determine how events in our lives will unfold and how we will experience the world. Tending to that seed means facing the fear directly, not by escaping into attachment or avoidance, but by sitting with the impermanence we so desperately try to outrun. The knowledge of impermanence is in fact a relief, for the pain that lies at the root of our being, in its vanishing, gives way to expansion and a sense of release from tension, and also relief. What then, we may ask, is that relief that we feel within the depths of our being? This is another insight into the nature of being, one that is different and more ontologically authentic than the being of the Devalued Self.
At bottom, this fundamental analysis highlights the path to healing, that healing is not merely psychological adjustment but ontological realignment, a return to reality itself, which is also a return to oneself, and this is called by some traditions as the true self.
It is possible to tend to that “seed of fear”, to transcend our current self-concept to create a more fulfilling and meaningful world for us. A world that is not the purveyor of our punishment but rather a place of growth and of lessons, of fulfillment. How to do this is hinted in Ellis’s explanation on how our beliefs determine our emotional response to events. It means that it isn’t simply the case that the brain shapes the mind, which is a rather materialist position that eschews any agency that belies our inherent knowledge of ourselves as conscious creatures with a will, or a will that can be free. Rather, that the mind can shape the brain by using beliefs and narratives to frame experiences in a way that builds newer and healthier pathways. It means that power does not lie in the world of external phenomenal concepts per se, concepts that were defined perhaps before we could even cognize, but rather within ourselves and our capacity to make value judgments that enables an inherent potential to perceive reality in a different way, in a way that manifests from within an overpowering beauty and deep sense of value that ends our desperate need for validation from other people, from destructive ideologies, from concepts that are mere illusions.
References
[1] “Emotional Hunger Vs. Love” by Robert Firestone Ph.D.
“Notice that a parent’s failure to respond is not an event that happens to a child. Instead, it’s something that fails to happen for a child. Because CEN is not an event, it’s invisible, intangible, and unmemorable. It goes virtually unnoticed by both child and parent. A hundred people could be watching an instance of CEN and not one of them would notice.”
[2] “Helping Parents Distinguish Love from Emotional Hunger” by Lisa Firestone Ph.D.
“Emotional hunger may be expressed in anxious over-concern, over-protection, living vicariously through one’s child, or an intense focus on appearances. Parents who behave in this manner exert a strong pull on their children that drains a child of his or her emotional resources… [Parents] often confuse their own intense feelings of need and anxious attachment for genuine love. They fail to make a distinction between emotional hunger, which is a strong need caused by deprivation in their own childhoods, and genuine feelings of tenderness, love, and concern for their child’s well-being.”
[3] 13 Things to Remember If You Love A Person With Anxiety
[4] How You Can Rewire Your Brain
[5] “How To Stubbornly Refuse To Make Yourself Miserable About Anything-yes, Anything” by Albert Ellis (Author).
[6] “The Will to Power” by Friedrich Nietzsche (Author), Walter Kaufmann (Editor, Translator), R. J. Hollingdale (Translator).
[7] “The Complete Guide to Overcoming Eating Disorders, Perfectionism and Low Self-Esteem” By Christopher Freeman, Peter Cooper, Roz Shafran, Sarah Egan.
[8] “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1899) by Charles Darwin.
[9] “The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation” (1975) by Margaret S. Mahler (author) with Fred Pine and Anni Bergman.
[10] Evaluating evidence behind popular trauma narratives: neurobiological and treatment claims in The Body Keeps the Score: Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2025 – Michael S. Scheeringa
This was so darn well written and clearly explained. I had googled fitrah & childhood anxiety. I myself am aware of the concept of fitrah but wonder sometimes how that concept could be explained for children that are “born anxious” like myself. Seems that you’re saying it’s more a nurture thing which is what I would prefer to believe because life has to be fair right?! Very interesting.
How you feel this factors in ideas like Ekhart tolles concept of too much self identification with mind. Does one get better by just noticing the negative self concept? If you have any book recommendations I would be onterested. Thanks for great article .
Thanks for the comment, Fahd. Yes, I would say that it is primarily an issue of how we are nurtured. At the same time, there are elements of nature, or rather, elements that existed prior to our being that ultimately play a role in how we respond to our environment. Intergenerational trauma, for instance, is also passed genetically and can find ways of being expressed in our lives through triggers that might not exist for others. Ultimately though, trauma is at the core of our being because of it being our state during our point of birth into this world. We store that, and so environments that are unhealthy basically retrigger that foundational state of ours and condition us in that manner.
I agree with Ekhart Tolle that we identify too much with the mind. But, I would instead say that rather than the problem of self-identifying with the mind it is self-identifying with mind-states, such as being depressed, which comes from a negative state of mind. We can get addicted to emotions and thought patterns, which also accounts for their neurological imprinting in our brains. It colors our expectations of the world, and that’s when we become naturally very cynical. We can also self-identify with feelings, such as our anxiety. It becomes ‘normal’ for us, so that in the cases that we’re not anxious we feel a bit weird, a bit off, like we’re missing something.
Identity is a complex thing. It ultimately defines our perception of ourselves, and that perception is what we experience. By noticing the negative self-concept you will become more self-aware of these states, of your thoughts, of your emotions. You can learn how to separate your sense of self from them, one by one. This is detachment. We have to detach ourselves from false perceptions, and that includes thoughts and emotions and their associations. By practicing this everyday and severing attachments to these we come closer to knowing and experiencing ourselves beneath all those false perceptions.
One example is anxiety and distress, and we often hold on to them because of shame. In our childhood past, anxiety was associated with shame because those emotions and states were often present only when we were abandoned in some way, which made us feel ashamed. So then we internalize them. Even when a random occurrence happens causing us to feel anxious and distressed, we might hold onto it and it might start to ruin our mood. But I think if we learn to understand that these emotional states are not us we learn to separate ourselves from it. Eventually, I think we have to learn how to feel our shame at the core of the Self, and learn to dissolve it. We have to learn how to process it, but this is all part of the journey of growth and learning how to navigate our internal geography. It’s very complex, but the path becomes clearer as you go.
One book that was helpful was called “Fear” by Thich Nhat Hanh. He talks about the “seed of fear” at the core of our Being, and how it is the source of all our fears and anxiety in life. Life experiences can grow it, and it can become toxic if left untreated. With the tending to our core of pain, our perception of Self and of the world in general starts to change. Our conscious experience of life is just a reflection of our subconscious state and experience of ourselves. We are reflected in the universe.
Excellent article. Thanks very much for this, it was very helpful. I’m looking forward to checking out Albert Ellis.
Hi, there are lots of things in my mind about this piece of yours, but I don’t know whether and how to discuss them, so just one or two of them:
First: who are you? in person?
Second: I don’t know, if I was reading your text with too critical a perspective or what but it seemed to me, you kind of don’t talk about the solution, other than saying “tell yourself a different narrative”. I kind of don’t feel like that narrative telling ability is so easily consciously manipulable.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts though
Hi,
Thanks for the comment. Feel free to contact me personally if you wanted to discuss anything.
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You are correct that I have not discussed the solutions. This post was written in 2016, and the phase that I was primarily focused on was understanding the nature of the problem. The more deeply the problem is understood, then the more penetrating the solutions may be. The Mind’s focus evolves over time depending on what it is ready for. These days I have been focused more on solutions and implementing and practicing them, and maybe one day I will move into the phase of teaching them more deeply. I haven’t stopped writing, I have a lot of interesting content in the pipeline that I have been working on.
Ultimately though, the idea about narratives has more to do with how we are conceptualizing ourselves, and in turn, the world of experience. I know that it is possible to change how you conceptualize yourself, however, it is as you mentioned. That it’s not so easily consciously manipulable, it requires intense and regular concentration and focus, along with reflection and introspection. The meditative aspect pertains to having deeper experiences, and the introspective aspect is how the rational Mind constructs those experiences into coherent concepts that we can then access more deeply through meditation. And these experiences are real, and because they’re real, we find them convincing. In religion, a true experience is one that brings peace to the Heart. It’s about attaining a perception of the nature of Being such that it actualizes a more powerful and confident version of the Self into the world.
I will eventually write about the spiritual techniques of Divine Meditation, of non-Attachment, of Emptiness. But for now, I feel that there is one more element of the problem that I need to identify, and that is the nature of trauma. Part of the wisdom in highlighting the cause of certain problems is that some people who resonate with what is described will automatically focus on their own lives and what they need to do.
And keep the critical eye open, I appreciate you identifying this.
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