When you are born, you literally can't survive on your own.. you just can't. You need someone to feed, hold and protect you. Your brain at that point doesn't even understand that you are a separate entity from your mom. You feel like you are kind of.... an extension of her.

Now here's this thing. Some people grow up physically but their inner world stays here. How do you know it? Simple, whenever something goes wrong, their first thought is "it's someone else's fault". Their manager is bad. Their parents ruined them. The city is bad. The government is to blame. Scapegoating effect...

Someone is always responsible. And that someone is never the person in the mirror.

The trap of this is that very blame feels like a relief. It genuinely does. But it keeps you frozen.

The exit door here is: stop that blame on your parents. Not because they were perfect - maybe they weren't but because the moment you stop handing them the steering wheel of your life, you start driving it yourself ;)

100 doves on this post and we will see how to tell if you've already left this age behind or not

Now that you pushed away from your parents. Good. That's exactly what was supposed to happen.

But now you're standing alone and it's... terrifying, isn't it? So your brain does the only logical thing, it looks around for a group to belong to. A tribe. A crowd. Anything that screams and says "you're one of us!"

And suddenly everything is about what other people think.

Your clothes,, body and opinions. Even your taste in music. All of it quietly calibrated to one invisible question: do they approve? (a post I made a year ago, highlighted in blue)

Someone calls you a loser in front of people and it ruins your entire week.. You change your style because the group changed theirs. You befriend/date someone not because you like them but because having someone feels like proof of something..

This makes complete sense by the way. You left your parents, your original safe base, and the world felt suddenly cold and open. A group becomes the new warmth and norm. It's not actually a weakness, an ancient wiring so to say. Tribes kept humans alive for thousands of years in fact.

The trap though... is that you start building your entire identity on land that isn't yours. Other people's opinions. Other people's validation.

And people are inconsistent. They leave. They change. They disappear.

The exit door here is the quietest realization: the safety you've been chasing in other people's eyes. It was inside you the whole time. You just never dared to look in there.

150 heart reactions and we will take a look in there together )