“What makes you not nice, is the fact you were told you weren’t.”
– And when you heard it, over and over again, there was no choice but to believe it. From the all-powerful all-mighty parents who know better. But you were. You were always nice. You were told a lie.
Early on, you were told lies about yourself – in the form of abuse (action) or neglect (inaction). This made you feel not good about yourself. Made you feel defective. Not good enough. Unworthy. Unlovable. Perhaps weird, maybe selfish, (…). Let’s group this all into “not-niceness”.
To overcome these lies, you adopted different behaviors other than your authentic ones. After all, your authentic ones are the cause for your not-niceness, you were told. So you need to fake. You need to act in ways that don’t come naturally, because what comes naturally is not good.
This fakeness is almost always unconscious. It has, unfortunately, also been normalized in society – this focus on changing someone’s behaviors. A behavior is just the superficial manifestation, the result of an emotion. But due to our fast-food, superficial, productivity-focused society, the short-term results-driven thinking is to change the behavior. So you adopted other ways of behaving. Acting. Even though you didn’t know you were doing them. You grew up in the midst of this. You didn’t know better. This is how you came to believe it is to exist, to be human.
Anyway, this fakeness manifests itself in several forms. People pleasing. Often acting weird and “off”. Maybe anger, lots of it. This fakeness takes a toll. It’s tiring, it’s exhausting. The brain wasn’t made to process all of this. Many people end up being easily distracted or clumsy. And of course. They aren’t clumsy. But a brain can only process so much. And if you’ve learned that faking is the only way to survive, then you bet the processing power is going to be diverted from other areas, including focusing on the environment.
This fakeness can often be felt by other people. A feeling that something is off. That they’re strange. Or too intense. Or that there’s something going on behind the scenes. And they’d be right, because there is. Paradoxically trying to fit in, makes you less likely to fit in. But this is only true in non-abusive environments. In abusive environments, it is the opposite. After all, this was learned as a coping strategy. Hence why it often can feel more relaxing, in a weird way, to be in an abusive environment that mimics the abusive environment you grew up in. The coping strategies will fit right in. You won’t be seen as weird, but like a puzzle piece that just cozily fits. Even when it keeps hurting.
As time passed on and you grew, you came to associate yourself with these learned coping strategies. You came to see them as part of you. As your personality. And of course you did. This is how you grew up. How could it have been any other way? The thing is, these coping strategies due to not being authentic, can never allow you to connect to others in a proper way. They don’t feel natural. They come off wrong, because they are wrong. They are not you. They are not what a normal human would grow up to be in a healthy environment.
The things that make you not good to be around, are learned. They don’t belong to you. They are unhealed wounds, scars. When you’re rejected. You aren’t being rejected – your trauma, your wounds are.
You, your core, who you really are beneath those wounds is good, and always was. That is what you’d believe had you been given unconditional love. And that would have been truth.