All problems are interpersonal relationship problems.

~ Alfred Adler

I’m a big proponent of simplifying life, which is in itself an act of defiance in a world that constantly tries to convince us that we’re always running behind, we always need more, and that the answers always seem within reach even though they always remain elusive. In this post I want to simplify the most important, and most confusing, relationship a human being will experience in its lifetime – the relationship with “myself.” To come to this simplicity, we first need to take a very long trip through the darkest parts of the forest that is our shared and individual unconscious. Consider yourself warned.

The Bond Mechanism

I will start with a very unscientific explanation and definition of a core mechanism of life as a human animal. I call it the bond mechanism. This is completely intuited knowledge, but I’m sure I’m not inventing anything new here. I just found some puzzle pieces that seem to fit together wonderfully well. And to preface all that comes next – I will be talking about unconscious forces until the very end. Keep that in mind, as it is crucial to the point I will try to make.

***March 2023 update : I have recently discovered the existence of the polyvagal theory, which is the scientific framework this blog post apparently is based on. Don’t underestimate the body’s wisdom and intelligence.***

The bond mechanism is the primal driving force behind social cohesion in most higher life forms. This is especially true for mammals, and by extension also in humans. It is a pre-verbal system that operates on the emotional level, its job being social bonding to create strength in numbers. It is a natural intelligence that governs the acts of sharing, nurturing, protecting, teaching, learning, giving and receiving. To call it a survival mechanism would be partly correct, but would also be a cynical and reductionist view. The bond mechanism, in its natural form, is what creates and sustains the extended social family in all the social species. As humans, we know this mechanism through how it manifests as the emotions and sensations of warmth in friendship and kinship, safety in our tribe, and the feelings of peace a trusted bond with another being can evoke.

With the definition out of the way, let’s shift gears. Babies are stupid. They are mentally incapable, helpless and fragile beings. But they feel everything. Unlike most mammals, who have some level of physical autonomy within the first hours or days after being born, human puppies are completely dependent on their social family, for years. Going back to our cynical outlook, the bond mechanism is the most important tool to the newborn human’s disposal to secure its physical survival. Social intelligence, a function of the emotional system, comes online before birth in many animals. In humans it also comes online years before mental intelligence does. This delayed onset, and the fact that the first few years of our lives are navigated purely in the emotional, non-mental and non-verbal realm, is an important key to understanding what comes next.

Evolution happens in layers. We might consider ourselves the pinnacle of biological evolution on our planet, but every higher system still obeys to the laws of the lower system. This is an inescapable fact of life on planet earth. Go back down enough, and our body is just a bunch of cooperating cells. Go a few steps up again, and we’re just a collection of organs and bones, governed by an autonomous nervous system. And all the way at the top of the pyramid – or that’s what it likes to believe at least – is the thinking mind. But introduce a disruptive single cell organism to this system– bacteria or virus – and that whole illusion collapses. Nobody feels supreme dominance over nature, or absolute enlightenment, when on the toilet with violent diarrhea. But I digress. The dynamic inside this hierarchy that is most relevant to our conversation, is that the mental faculties are bound by the laws of the emotional world.

How Not To Like Yourself

Which brings us to one of the key differences between human beings and all other social animals. Somehow, our more evolved intelligence has given us the capability to exploit the bond mechanism. This skill has allowed us to exert power and control over other animal species, those that are also governed by the bond mechanism. This is how we came to train and domesticate animals. This skill is also how we train and domesticate our own species’ puppies. How and why this ability became the reality for the human ape is a conversation for evolutionary biologists and the like – very interesting but not relevant here at all. How this skill is passed on is of far greater importance here : the exploitation of the bond mechanism works through fear. If this fear is never questioned by a human puppy, as an adult this human’s fear is what drives the control seeking behavior when raising its own puppies, which instills the fear necessary for control to be possible. This cycle has been going on for thousands of years – unquestioned.

A side note on fear : contrary to popular woowoo belief, fear is no the opposite of love. Fear requires no opposite and is only the symptom of wounded curiosity – fear and curiosity share the same bed. Love has no opposite, only obstacles to its expression.

Time to bring the conversation closer to home. The bond mechanism is a trust based system – an emotional trust which is never violated in the natural world. It’s a self-regulating system that works beautifully to keep the social family of any species thriving – when it is not corrupted. And this is exactly what happens in humans : the first break of trust happens when the human puppy is taught that this natural bond is conditional. The lesson is simple : the main condition for the bond is behavior. Good behavior will keep the bond alive, bad behavior will sever the bond. This is where fears comes in : the fear of punishment – the symbolic or actual breaking of the bond. The other side of that coin is the anticipation of reward, the confirming of the bond, which seems to happen when our puppy displays the behavior that in the past safeguarded the bond. This is how we raise and have raised our little humans, unquestioned and unconsciously, for all of human history.

A side note on slavery : much of what we traditionally call human civilization and its great accomplishments is built on slavery, of both humans and animals. Those in power control the powerless, or so it seems, when in fact both parties are the two sides of the same coin, partners in the dance of fear. A dance rooted in the exploitation of the bond mechanism.

Good behavior means to act in accordance to imposed rules for your physical actions. This seemingly protects the bond you have with your social family. There are some obvious upsides to this in its natural form, but in many cases, these rules go against human nature. They are the source of the inner conflict between our natural urges and the display of the forced behavior which safeguards the bond. In an almost miraculous way, the human body has the capacity to repress its own natural urges, through physical and energetic constriction, all in the name of protecting this social bond. To remind you of the timeline, we’re still in the pre-verbal and pre-mental stage of development. This capacity to restrict and repress operates in the physical and emotional realm. The human puppy doesn’t need to understand words to be able to feel and fear.

Since the bond is seemingly always in danger – gotta keep them kids in line – the bodily constrictions, which keep our natural urges repressed, become habitual, and eventually unconscious. What also happens is that the fear of rupturing the bond slowly becomes the fear of experiencing our internal, human urges. Urges which by now seem to be the cause of all our troubles. Again – this is emotional reasoning, pre-verbal, pre-mental. Looking at this with educated and experienced eyes, it is easy to see that this simple, almost innocent fear will inevitably grow into the fear of being your own true self. But everything looks easy in retrospect.

Please Like Me

So far we’ve only been concerned with the emotional intelligence of the pre-verbal, pre-mental, very stupid and helpless, human puppy. Let’s fast forward to around age five now, and see how the shit really starts hitting the fan. Here our thinking mind finally comes fully online and starts calling the shots. This is because there is a new sheriff in town : the I-thought. This is the time in a human’s life is when the doer first emerges. The mental concept that “I am an individual person that is responsible for my behavior.”

Two clarifications are in order here. Firstly, human puppies start using personal pronouns much earlier, but this is just pretend play, and a spontaneous expression of our human beingness. The mental mechanism of doership comes later. And secondly, this all happens without any mental understanding of the process itself. No five year old is going to proclaim he’s responsible for his behavior, but in its experience there is now something that it mentally knows and differentiates as I, which relates to other people, whether they are inside or outside his extended social family, real or imagined.

This is not a one day shift, of course. There is a gradual transition period, and in that time, the instinctually and naturally emerging mental faculties are still governed by the underlying bond mechanism, which is a purely emotional and physical system of intelligence. This is the time that simple mental narration starts to become the new guiding force in our human puppy’s life. This mental guidance is completely informed by the previous emotional guidance, as it is built upon this foundation. The mental faculties now come to serve this system, and very crude conclusions are made : I am only good enough to be part of my social family if I don’t break the rules that keep my bonds intact. If the bond breaks, I am responsible, and not good enough to be part of the social family. This is a dysfunctional misinterpretation of the exploitation of the trust bond. It’s a clear recipe for disaster. And it’s been every human being’s reality for probably all of human history.

A side note on bad behavior : sometimes things get even more convoluted when the puppy’s experience shows him that not following the rules actually strengthens the bond. If physical or emotional violence is the closest it will get to intimacy, that’s the action plan right there : misbehaving confirms the bond.

Another mental conclusion which is drawn out of the internal conflict between our natural urges and our forced behavior, is that “I cannot trust myself.” The internal conflict exists because of the steep emotional price we keep paying, as puppies, for expressing our natural urges. Something feels very wrong in this equation, and our instinctual, emotional conclusion is always to take on responsibility for the safety of the bond. This creates a deeply felt mistrust in our own guidance, and a new mental confusion about the fragility of our bonds is added on top of that. This is the soil in which the mental story of insecurity takes root. At first this happens on the level of proto-thought, but as we gain better understanding of perceived social dynamics and a greater mastery of thinking in language, these thoughts take on very clear forms. I can’t. I’m not good enough. I’m not lovable. I don’t deserve happiness, friendship, love, success. And deep underneath these mental beliefs lies the abused bond mechanism.

These mental stories of insecurity are rooted in fear and distrust of your own natural functioning. This is the opposite of emotional self-reliance and conscious self-trust. But to remind you : even though we’re now about age twelve, all of these mechanisms are still operating completely unconsciously and are not only deeply misinterpreted, they are also considered normal. The fact that most people go through life without ever been shown the true source of these stories only creates more confusion. Which brings us to the next layer, when the feelings of defeat and frustration that are born from our stories spontaneously find their own solution : self-soothing.

Fake It Till You Break

The final layer, which is added on top of the stories of insecurity, serves the purpose of escaping from or disproving this sense of defeat and frustration. The best way the crude thinking mind can conjure up to disprove the sense of insecurity, defeat and powerlessness, to itself and others, is through creating external success. This fairly simple mechanism explains why, all throughout history (and your own neighborhood) so many humans have been trying to replicate, in their own lives, what they perceive in others as the proof that they are worthy of their apparent social bonds. Everyone is emulating everyone else’s exterior display of not feeling inferior, which only creates more frustration and confusion. And the engine underneath all of it is still the innocent, natural bond mechanism.

Side note on enlightenment : the most subtle and refined way the mind will try to disprove insecurity is through spirituality. Throughout human history, many have used religion and spirituality as a way to elevate themselves. Especially now, with Instagram being the new church, many woowoo people fall into the trap of self soothing through divine pretense. In a very twisted and ironic way, enlightenment then becomes the ultimate way to prove you are worthy of the social bond.

Chasing confidence, love, acceptance, power, success, material possessions… These are all serving a singular purpose : to prove the inner distrust to be wrong. Escaping this constant state of internal enmity, in whatever way, requires endless and unnecessary effort. It will inevitably lead to dissatisfaction, compounded frustration, cynicism, hardness, lovelessness and hopelessness. The reason I called it the final layer is because there is no more pretense beyond it. Taking this pretense to its extremes, in absence of being shown a better way, will lead to all sorts of mental disorders. But for most people this fragile pretense sooner or later hits the wall of burnout, depression, the so-called chronic diseases or even suicide. These are all solutions to the same problem. But none of them are based in understanding, awareness or choice.

Layers Of Personality

So far I’ve been trying to write out a timeline of the evolution of human mental development as it has been occurring for the last few ten thousand years. This timeline consists of layers, the outer layer being pretense, and the core being the bond mechanism. Each of these layers’ function is to solve the problems created by the underlying layer. Each layer’s raison d’être is to remove the lower one from consciousness. The mechanism at the core of this removing is always the same : the constriction of sensation in the body. This implies that with each layer added, there is less access to the body’s intelligence. This in turn implies that the thinking mind now has to compensate for the absence of the body’s direct in-the-moment intelligence, a job it wasn’t designed to do. This phenomenon is something you’re very familiar with : it’s called over-thinking.

What is traditionally called the personality is in fact the expression of the sum total of these layers, and how they interact with each other – all to serve and protect the wounding inflicted on the natural bond mechanism. This is not who you are. This entity is an unnatural outgrowth of a small mistake that was never understood or corrected at any point in your lifetime. It continued to grow and spread, like an emotional and mental cancer, which is now in control of your life. If you have ever found the courage to let yourself feel how much you are actually disconnected from reality – this is where that feeling comes from. You are not even in reality. You are stuck inside a monster of pretense and have been convinced that this is how things are supposed to be. But do not despair, there is a way out.

The Self Love/Self Help Epidemic

Self love is not that way out. I want to make a clear albeit arbitrary distinction between self love and liking yourself. The phrase self love has been so overused and violated by popular spirituality that it does more harm than good. It’s become a confusing and meaningless phrase, and is in many cases just a way to sell you the illusion of self comfort. In many cases this originates from good intentions. Sometimes, when your pain is too great, and the actual truth about the cause of your condition has no place to enter your understanding, comfort, soothing or consolation is the only thing that is necessary. But these are crutches for very specific moments of despair, and hinder your self-exploration when they are not needed. Self love is external relief. It’s an appeasing balm – even if it takes the form of spiritual practice – and nothing more.

Self Love Side Note : The popular myth that you can’t love someone else until you love yourself may seem to make sense. But like most phrases that sound pretty, even though it contains some truth, the idea is too vague to be of any practical use. A more accurate statements is that, unless you learn what it means to like yourself, you will inevitably and unconsciously find yourself in relationship with people who have a compatible and complementary dysfunctional relationship with their own individual wounding of the bond mechanism.

Self help is also rife with good intentions, but at the end of the day, most of it is just selling you misunderstanding – sometimes for an obscene amount of money. Most of the self-help material in the world follows the same dynamic : a person comes to their inner truth through a long and winded road. They then write out their own mental narration of their personal symptoms of the experience of this universal, inner truth. They rarely make contact with the actual cause – the bodily intelligence which is the seat of this inner truth. A clear give-away is charts. If you see charts or diagrams in a self help book, you are looking at the mental narration of symptoms. That is not to say that these materials are useless. You just have to know how to read or listen through the mental confusion of the author/teacher/coach/guru, and look for the true source of their words inside yourself. In the end they’re just describing the scenery they remember on their road towards self understanding. Their road is not yours, even though the destination is the same for everyone.

Both of these are mental constructs, external solutions . Liking yourself is a naturally occurring symptom. It’s the by-product of thorough, consistent and vigorous self-exploration. This self-exploration is the medicine. It needs to be taken diligently. And going to the root cause of your afflictions requires entering the arena of the body, of feeling, of ancient and formless mechanisms and laws that have been governing you, and all of humanity, for a very long time. If you want to know what true healing is, go inward, completely. But never forget, your thinking mind can’t take you there.

Reaching Out vs Relaxing Inward

Let me re-frame the layer idea by bringing in tentacles. At the center we have the fear of breaking the bond. Around this tiny ball of raw and pure emotion, layers have grown, over years and years. By the time you’re legally considered an adult, this tiny ball has grown into a monstrous mass of flailing tentacles. These energetic tentacles serve only one purpose : to grab onto whatever your individual, illusory solution is to the sense of insecurity, and to relieve you from the unending self-flagellating this feeling causes. It’s a losing game, but it’s also the only one we were taught. Trying to heal this affliction by working on anything other than the little ball at the center will prove to be a losing game as well. And in both games constant effort is inevitable.

To reach and meet the tiny ball of fear at the center of it all requires a different approach. You need to learn and master opening into feeling. To un-constrict and open your physicality, so your awareness can slowly permeate the formerly closed off places in your being, in your body. This feeling of relaxing into the body is the same as the feeling of relaxing into a reclining chair. You let yourself fall backwards – inwards – and you can breathe. Life is still the same, but for a moment you are at peace with it. And you can breathe. A small opening is enough for light to shine in.

The True Meaning Of Joy

The bond mechanism is an inescapable fact of life, and is also not the cause of the problem. The root cause is the distrust that was placed upon it, through having our fear manipulated and used against us, when we were still stupid, human puppies. The good news is that this trust can easily be rebuilt, and over time, will bring you back into contact with your own inner joy. The true, unconditional joy of being.

What is culturally mislabeled joy or happiness is actually the experience of the momentary relief from the habitual restriction of energy flow in the body, seemingly caused by external factors. Outer success, whatever that means for any individual person, can produce this very short-lived sense of relief. Some experiences, whether unintended (the so-called happy occasions) or intended (workshops, programs, therapy) can also produce this relief. The reason this feeling is, in every case, so fleeting and short-lived, is because these experiences don’t deeply change the habits of constriction that prevents your life force energy to freely flow. Life-long habits aren’t magically washed away in a weekend, no matter how much you pay your coach, therapist, shaman or drug dealer.

The true and accurate definition of joy and happiness is hidden in the mislabeled relief. If joy is the sensation of life force energy flowing freely in the body, it is by definition also the absence of whatever prevents that energy to flow freely. The natural human state is a state free of deep and habitual constriction. Through dissolving the habits of constriction, and replacing them with the habits of opening, curiosity and exploration – we slowly but spontaneously return to this state of being, of enjoyment of life, which then becomes the constant background of our reality.

Why To Like Yourself

So far we’ve been mostly concerned with the mental understanding of the past causes and mechanisms that created and sustain this habitual constriction, which is running your life. It is necessary to have some mental clarity into the structure and workings of the tentacle beast you carry around. But mental understanding is not where the solution lies. It can even be a hindrance : there is always the risk that this understanding will only become one more talking point in your mental self-narration. Mental narration is a by-product of the overthinking I mentioned earlier, which is in itself nothing but a by-product of restricted access to the living present-moment intelligence of the emotional and physical systems – your body. And as a species, in this point in history, we put an enormous amount of importance on this mental narration. Which is nothing more than insanity.

A side note on mental health : the roots of modern psychology and psychiatry lie in the understanding and manipulation of self-narration. Simply put, their goal is to change the shape of the outer layer, to mold your pretense into a more socially acceptable one, completely disregarding the underlying causes, and in most cases your emotional well-being, self-reliance and sovereignty. And even though there are some more modern systems that incorporate somatic, emotional and bodily practice, their end goal is usually the same : redecoration.

But what does any of this have to do with liking yourself? Why would liking yourself be a solution to any of these problems? The answer to these questions lies in the present moment. The present moment is the actual arena of life. The past is memory and the future speculation, both functions of the thinking mind. But only the present moment is real, solid, tangible and malleable. And the accumulation of what you do in the present moment is what decides the shape and worth of your time here on earth. But since most of what you do in the present moment is governed by habits, the shape and worth of your life will be decided by all the unquestioned habits that are still alive in you. Many people go through life and die with the habits I described, intact and unquestioned.

A side note on inner child work : a very popular concept in the last decade or so, but which is mostly misunderstood because its name is so vulnerable to mental hijacking. The practical meaning of inner child work is working with the emotion-based choices you made as a child, that are still alive in your life now, as habits. These emotion-based choices were made in your pre-verbal and pre-mental stages of development, and they need to be met in that place.

It is only through exploring and accessing the intelligence of the body that you can understand these choices, and not through mental narration, which is only the habitual distraction from feeling. Inner child work is not about time traveling, revisiting the past, digging through memories or trying to rewrite old stories. It’s about feeling emotions that have been starved from your awareness for decades, and learning to listen to them now, in the present moment.

Your relationship with yourself governs your relationship with life. Your inner state creates your outer reality. Earlier I described how the unconscious and unquestioned need for validation makes people chase many different things, and makes them expend a lot of effort to solve a problem they don’t truly understand. Inner confusion and frustration will create a confusing and frustrating life, no matter how well you decorate it, for all the world to see. But of course the opposite is true as well : inner joy and clarity will create a joyful and effortless life.

The primary function of the bond mechanism is to sustain the bonds in the extended social family of an individual. This mechanism is an expression of love. It is innocent, playful, open, and it are these child-like qualities that will be granted the freedom to express themselves again – through learning to like yourself. Which brings us to the whole point of the exercise : the freedom to truly connect. Since the bond mechanism’s function is connection, the exploitation of its innocence and all the layers added on top, will have distorted your natural ability to connect to other living beings. As I wrote in my previous post, effort is the enemy of connection. And the amount of incessant effort that is required to keep the tentacle monster alive and happy is a formidable enemy.

What is commonly known as “social skills” can then be defined as the skillfully applied effort to create and sustain connection and communication, despite this formidable enemy being in the way. On both sides. We all have things our heart (and other parts of our being) want to express, and we all have layers of unnecessary overgrowth that our natural and spontaneous expressions need to fight their way through to make it into the outside world. Our natural hunger for connection is encased in a prison built out of fear, and whenever we want to truly meet another person there are two prison walls separating you : yours and theirs.

If you find that statement to be an exaggeration, try to remember the last time you tried to connect to a beautiful stranger you felt attracted to. Being attracted to another person amplifies the inner conflict, and raises the threat level in the prison you live in. Our tentacle monster goes wild, our facade of pretense takes over, we say and do things we don’t even understand the reason behind. But this is just the larger than life version of your every day tentacle monster. When these unconscious mechanism don’t really interfere with the practicalities of your day to day, there is no need to question their existence, nor their validity to be called “me.” But even when you find yourself in the proverbial good place, as long as these unquestioned habits run your life, you will always have the vague anguish of not feeling at home in yourself, lingering in the background.

How To Like Yourself

But this state of being is not inescapable, and the way home is a very practical one. The basic premise is simple : you cannot love the parts of yourself you don’t understand. But this is not the mental way of understanding you are so familiar with. This is a meeting that happens with the intelligence of the body, in the realm of emotion, sensation and life force energy. You are meeting feelings, but also the habits of constriction that have kept these feelings stuck for most of your life. Because they have been alive for so long, these habits have become part of your physiology, your body’s makeup, and might end showing up as disease.

But as I keep repeating – the mind has no jurisdiction in the body. A good gym analogy is in order here : you can think about going to the gym all you like, it won’t have any serious impact on your physical being until you actually take it there and let it work. Exploring the body and mastering its language is similar in that it requires you to actively put your awareness in the body, to meet what is moving and stuck there.

Mental description and narration of this process is inevitable, but only minimally helpful. When people speak of “liking yourself,” they are talking about writing and sustaining, through effort, a story that is pleasing to their thinking mind. Something that makes sense. I’m a good person, because this and that. Mental self liking is conditional judgement – it needs reasons and conditions to be true. This will inevitably cause the well-known oscillation between hating and loving yourself, a merry-go-round that is as exhausting as it is unnecessary. When you take the time to truly meet yourself, meet the parts of your being you were taught not to meet, this oscillation slowly fades into a steady hum of feeling truly at ease with who and what you are. The stories you tell yourself, both good and bad, will lose their reason to exist, which is disproving or managing the feelings of fear and insecurity – the first layer. Truly liking yourself, rooted in feeling, is effortless, conditionless and thoughtless.

To become emotionally self-dependent, through emotional self-honesty and emotional self-exploration, is the process of liking yourself. There are a few important points made in that silly sounding sentence. First of all, emotionally self-dependent is what you truly desire and what you want to be. This is the actual definition of an adult human being : a person that takes full responsibility for their emotional world. Secondly, to get to that emotional self-dependence requires honesty and exploration – the commitment to actively seek out and meet those parts of you that have been pushed away for so long. And thirdly – liking yourself is a process, a way of life, an art form. There will never come a day when you can say : now I finally like myself, now my life can begin.

Emotional self-exploration means that you learn how to become intimately acquainted with the natural, universal functioning, as well as with the unnatural, individual dysfunction, of your being – of your human beingness. It is only through this self-exploration that you will find true peace with yourself – your whole self – and with the world you create and live in. And much like any art form, this process is not a linear one. The layer concept might seem very orderly if you take the time to process it mentally, but it doesn’t work in a linear way at all. Things come up in the dance of life – the body and its emotions and sensations are a fluid and seemingly chaotic system. But you always have access to the now, and whatever comes up now wants your loving attention, not your mental description. It wants to be fully felt and experienced, not understood,. This is why the art of self-exploration, how to do it, as well as actually doing it, is the key to simplifying life.

The practical form this exploration takes is something I touched upon in part two of my piece on embodiment, but the basic idea is simple. You learn to like yourself through making contact with the repressed feelings, as well as the habitual constrictions that keep them there, and you allow them free expression in a safe environment you create for this purpose in time and space. By making friends with these feelings and hearing their voices out, you will become your own true friend. And because these feelings no longer need to find indirect ways of expressing themselves, you begin to find trust in how you show up in the world. The inner trust you were robbed of when the bond mechanism was first used against you.

The Holy Grail

Let’s end with a movie reference. When Indiana Jones finally reached the cave where the Holy Grail was kept, he was confronted by a smorgasbord of tacky bling. In this metaphor, the bling represents the pretense of success and confidence most people are enslaved by. Walter Donovan, the bad guy, chose the fanciest cup of the bunch, and – spoiler alert – died a horrible death. But Indy choose the simplest and humblest cup, and was rejuvenated. Learning to like yourself is very much a holy grail, in that it affects every aspect of your life, by bringing you to a life of simplicity, humility and being true to your nature. When the layers of pretense slowly evaporate, your innate lovingness and child-like curiosity will be the guiding light in your life. And this is the simplicity I spoke of in the beginning. Because life is simple, if you know why it is not.