Dear Monica:

* Did you see lost_star’s reply to your recent post on her thread?

You found your validation, the word you used, or self worth (the term I use) in the following: your grades in high school, your physical appearance, your brand name/ expensive clothes, material belongings and travel habits, your parents’ well off financial status, guys’ interest in you, others’ respect and envy of you (because of these things I just listed).

In Korea, you no longer stand out in these ways that I listed, and so you lost that validation, or self worth. Gyunnie, a Korean, a Business major, the president of student council, chose you as his girlfriend and that meant a whole lot to you. I can understand better right this moment why you profusely thanked him for bringing up your sense of self worth:you felt  worthy by association with him.

You shared before that when you returned to K university, after the summer, and Gyunnie was no longer attending it, that he is a Nobody there. He was a Someone before, in K, but is a Nobody now. Similar to how you lost your Someone status when moving to Korea. You too were a Someone and now are a … Nobody, correct?

You wrote: “I grew up with stability. Besides the fact that my mother ‘did not accept’ me thing that we have talked about”- notice how you minimize her rejection of you, not even convinced it is true, placing quotation marks around it, calling it “thing”, rejecting the concept of having been rejected.

You wrote: “My parents never once abused me physically, they rarely got mad at me actually”- somehow though, the fact that they, or your mother,  did not accept you harmed you.

You wrote: “me and my parents relationship are ‘good’ before I went to Korea”- you are not convinced it was indeed good, hence the quotation marks.

Also: you filled in their expectations, respected their value of status (looked classy, achieved great grades), so why wouldn’t the relationship be… “good”?

You wrote: “My parents told me that they are very proud of me for being a good student during high school. It was a good times”- as children we take in any love we can get, any validation. Their validation was based on you filling in their expectations, and as long as you did, you were “accepted”.

My summary: your parents’ love for you is conditional, it is a Conditional Love; their acceptance of you is a Conditional Acceptance. This is Reality. It was this way for a long time, maybe from the very beginning. It is just that you noticed it lately.

I understand the need for food, shelter, physical safety and necessary physical comfort, these things bought with money. This is what makes sense about having money, being able to take care of one’s physical needs.

Money does not deliver self worth because it has been proven, again and again with the reality of the millions of very wealthy and very depressed individuals, and the long list of very wealthy individuals who have chosen to not live at all.

Having money and the expressions of it will bring you respect and envy, but not self worth. It will bring you a very good feeling here and there, intoxicating perhaps, but it is The Conditional Element in others’ respect, others’ envy, guys’ attraction toward you, that conditional element that negates true self worth.

The intoxicating pleasure dissipates quickly when you see others expressing even more wealth, and when lying in bed alone at night with only your thoughts and no one to impress.

Making your brain congruent with Reality means to see life as it is, abandoning previous assumptions, previous beliefs and looking around with new eyes, seeing things as if for the first time. Get curious and interested in what is really going on. This kind of curiosity will carry you through the distress of seeing.

anita