Can You Reach Wholeness Without Others?

Image by PIRO4D from Pixabay

Many people tend to believe wholeness is the ultimate measure of their emotional health. They like to link it to their success in destroying their limiting beliefs about themselves.

They define their wholeness by the migration from their insecure attachment style — whatever it is — to the secure one. What if we start by exploring what characterizes this latter style?

Secure Attachment style

You build healthy emotional boundaries

A quick tip to know whether it is the case could be how you handle some beloved person’s request, which will make them happy, but which is annoying you. It’s not that you don’t feel like doing it. It’s not about time or enough energy. Something in the favor is in phase-shit with your core values.

If you do it anyway, you can be sure you have some work to do concerning your self-respect. Pleasing people whenever is possible is lovely, shows you value the relationship and care. It can even be done with strangers. Thus, I will never stop recommending it.

Doing it at your expense, though, is not healthy and will only leave you with resentment instead of fulfillment.

Keep in mind that those who would be mad at you whenever you start standing for yourself and setting new rules are those who were enjoying taking advantage of you having no healthy boundaries. You will not lose them because they didn’t deserve to be in your world in the first place.

You listen actively

Instead of listening to respond, you listen to understand. Instead of listening to the words, you listen to body language and emotions. Instead of listening with the ears, you listen with the heart.

This skill is the combination of your empathy and a mindset shift known as “Seeking first to understand, and then to be understood”. How is that even possible?

Your subconscious program is simply your friend. This makes you able to be present instead of being anxious and self-absorbed. This makes you curious to connect with the person instead of involving your autobiography and making it about yourself.

Ralph Roughton said it best:

When I ask you to listen and you start giving advice, you have not done what I have asked. When I ask you to listen to me and you begin to tell me why I shouldn’t feel that way, you are trampling on my feelings. When I ask you to listen and you feel you have to do something to solve my problem, you have failed me, strange as it may seem. Listen! All I asked was that you listen; not talk or do — just hear me. I can do it for myself. I’m not hopeless. Maybe discouraged and faltering, but not hopeless. When you do something for me that I can and need to do for myself, you contribute to my fear and feeling of inadequacy. But when you accept as fact that I do feel what I feel, no matter how irrational, then I can quit trying to convince you and can get about the business of understanding what’s behind this irrational feeling. And when that’s clear, the answers are obvious and I don’t need advice.

You are successful in getting your point across

You know exactly what you want and what you don’t and can convey it effectively. This includes being able to clarify your expectations from a relationship and asking for the other party’s ones.

The ability to express your thoughts and convictions transparently and plainly is not the only ingredient in getting your point across, though.

Being a person of integrity, and consistently walking your talk contribute to triggering those with whom you’re interacting to make the effort and complete the image themselves, even when you’re at your laziest state of mind and struggling with your eloquence capacity.

They walk the extra mile for you because they know who you are on a deep level and that you deserved their trust!

You attend to the little courtesies

If you are a person with a secure attachment style, you know that the small things are the big ones in relationships. You know how to make a person feel seen, validated, respected, understood, and valued.

You share yourself completely. You follow up on your real soul discussions, or on some events impacting them and which matter to some degree. You offer your support before being asked for it.

Even when you offer gifts, they are meaningful and personalized. It is not about fancy cars or trips or houses. It is about a deeper connection and creating another magical moment of intimacy through the gift!

You keep your promises

People tend to build their hopes and decisions around promises — especially when it comes to their basic livelihood. And even when it’s about a less vital need, keeping your commitments is showing you care, and this could build bridges of trust that span the gaps of understanding.

You will not be able to understand people from the very first interactions. It takes time, and that’s okay!

You are vulnerable and apologize quickly

It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s heart rather than out of pity. The internal security coming from your original Center the principles — by definition unchangeable and timeless — is stable and becomes limitless gradually.

Your Center is the foundation of your love manifestation. If your Center is your children, the love that manifests from that will mostly benefit your children. If your Center is the Principles, the manifestation of your love will benefit humanity.

You are not afraid of people taking advantage of your exposure and vulnerability. You won’t care because your self-love value is courage replacing the unhealthy ego need for protection.

You are an unapologetic truth-teller

You don’t need to twist the truth or wear any mask. Manipulators lie pathologically to deceive and exploit. When it comes to the kind souls, they cannot confront, stand for the right thing, and speak their truth because they lack bravery, internal security, and character’s strength.

They are too afraid of being rejected. They need to fit in. They need to be accepted for the sake of feeling their self-worth from the external world. Their intrinsic one has been discriminated against.

When you have a secure attachment style, you speak your voice no matter what. You don’t care about how others perceive you. You know that the right people will always understand. You know your voice needs to be heard and might help someone; thus, you don’t hesitate to talk about critical topics publicly, not even for a second.

You can make people feel an uneasiness because of their denial coping mechanism and how hard it is to break it. But the good news is that, even when you tell the truth authentically, you will not offend. Downgrading others, stigmatizing them, giving subjective opinions fueled by the distorted lens is not part of your arena. Your truth is fueled by the principles.

You don’t engage with aggressive behaviors

When you move to the secure attachment style, you progressively develop your emotional maturity. You become aware of the reality that people’s behavior tells much more about who they are than it is personal. David J. Pollay said it best:

Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. So when someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Believe me. You’ll be happier.

Thus, you are not quick to anger with strangers. It doesn’t mean you don’t get angry. The emotion is natural and triggered by your body without you having any control over it. Then, this emotion is sent to your subconscious program.

Depending on the quality of your program, the anger emotion is either transformed into an anger feeling or a different one.

Practicing self-awareness is responsible for creating the space between the stimulus and the answer. It is the possibility to think about your very thought process. Self-awareness is what makes you destroy your limiting beliefs so that your subconscious program becomes your friend and that you set the servant leader in you free!

If it is that amazing, why isn’t that common to use it? Because of a difference between the conscious and subconscious minds: the speed. The conscious mind is the one responsible for self-awareness. It is too slow comparing to the subconscious mind.

Let me give you an idea: the conscious mind operates at 40 bits per sec, while the subconscious mind speed reaches 40 MILLION bits per sec. No — your eyes are not playing tricks on you.

This, according to some serious studies, is leading to operating from your subconscious program — or what some of you are probably familiar with calling on auto-pilot mode at, at least, 90% of our day.

More to the point, for you to use this unique self-awareness endowment and re-write your program, you first need to know about it! Second, you have to be intentional and practice it daily.

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds. ~ Stephen Covey

When you unbecome the filter and move to the secure attachment style, a typical behavior in the circumstances described above is that you would pity those garbage tracks, smile, and move on with your life. Here was a recent personal experience:

“I was on my way back home after two exercising sessions. The traffic was horrible. A guy was trying to get out of a parking lot and join the line. Nobody let him. It was late, and everybody was in their head and, most probably, willing to reach their destination and relax as soon as possible. I stopped my car and gave him my priority. I didn’t deserve any thank you. He was too entitled to even think about it. I felt pity for him, smiled, and drove my car again. Around one-third of a mile later, another guy was trying to get into his car, but it was too tight. Can you guess what happened? Let me help you. I stopped my car again. He didn’t even bother looking in my direction. That’s when I realized he wasn’t waiting for the drivers’ permission; rather afraid of causing some harm to his treasured belonging.”

What about your direct circle? What if you have toxic people in your family or workplace? Unlike what you can do with friends — deciding to go no contact — it could be tricky to opt for the same choice when your survival depends on an abusive family member or boss.

We probably need to clarify some detail here: when dealing with people that you think they love and value you — a parent, for instance — your righteous anger emotion level is way higher than the one triggered by strangers.

Let’s always keep in mind that anger is the emotion of self-preservation. When we feel angry, we want to preserve one of those two elements:

• Our sense of worth “would you please show me respect and treat me as a decent person?”
• Our legitimate needs “Hey I’ve got needs; please acknowledge them, recognize them, will you?”

Interestingly, even when you are a secure person, and that you live by the wisdom introduced above, it could be very challenging not to transform the anger emotion into the anger feeling, no matter how friendly your subconscious program could be.

How come? The healthy belief you have in your program is that people who care would not dare violate your emotional boundaries. They would not devalue you. They would not diminish your needs. They would not gaslight you — make you doubt your reality. They would not invalidate your feelings just after hurting them, and the list goes on. It is the arena of healthy relationships.

In other words, when the person with whom you are interacting is an abuser, the only way to stop getting angry is to educate yourself about the numerous manipulation & abuse strategies. That is you drastically lower your expectations and don’t engage emotionally anymore — at least until you can secure your escape plan.

To give you an example: let’s suppose I confirmed a friend I love was a narcissist, and that I don’t know that narcissists are aware of their abuse and manipulation, that they’re unlikely to seek for help for three main reasons:

• Their grandiosity pattern making them never admit there’s something wrong with them at all.
• Having constant access to their narcissistic supply, which they get in general from their partner and kids (the real reason why they have families) — close friends if they don’t have any.
• Even without the supply, the spiritual ones use the positive affirmations; a topic I explored in detail here.
  
  

Do you think that I could give up on helping this friend until the last breath? Chances are I wouldn’t. I would lose my time, energy, and life for a perpetrator who would continue manipulating and exploiting me.

To come back to wholeness, if you think of it as being secure, you are not alone. I used the same definition here sixteen months ago. Guilty as charged!

It is the reason why I consider humility as the most lovable virtue of all. We are continuously unlearning and learning again from experts who spent way more time reflecting and working on some topics of interest! My legendary mentor of all times was the trigger to review my definition of wholeness.

Wholeness

Pay me fairly, treat me kindly and respectfully, use my mind creatively in doing work that truly adds value, and in doing it in a principle-centered way. ~ Stephen Covey

This definition respectively represents the four basic needs of life — to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy — and deals with the four bits of intelligence — PQ (Physical Quotient), EQ (Emotional Quotient), IQ (Intellectual Quotient), and SQ (Spiritual Quotient).

If you look closer, you will notice two parts in reaching wholeness: your responsibility in developing your four forms of intelligence connected to the four dimensions of life in a balanced way, and the other party contribution.

• Intellectual intelligence: you nurture it through being humble enough to unlearn & learn again. It gives birth to your vision. This part also depends on how much others are willing to use your minds creatively.

• Physical intelligence, whose manifestation is your discipline, also includes being paid fairly for your contributions so that you could live decently and continue giving back to the world.
  
  
• Emotional intelligence is the foundation of your passion and ability to build trust & healthy relationships, depending on the other party’s readiness as well.
  
  
• Spiritual intelligence is fueled by our Principles Center, which is giving you your direction in any endeavor. It is the only one that does *not* depend on others, and is the foundation of servant leadership.

I believe the most challenging one to develop, and which is making you doubt yoursel and feel angst — even when you are confident about who you are as a person — is physical intelligence. Why? For several reasons.

Your high level of excitement and enthusiasm

You experience it when becoming free of the life-time conditioning. You could lose control and fail in channeling your energy and efforts.

You become passionate and driven. You believe in a life mission much broader than yourself. You have such a fire in your heart to contribute to changing the selfish, superficial, and ugly world in which we live.

You want to rescue every person who needs help and prepare a much healthier path for the generations unborn. Consequently, you can easily forget about yourself, as well as guaranteeing enough income to live decently.

I know this from personal experience since more than 90% of the educational content I am producing has been FREE.

The time and help you need to better your inner talents

It takes serious work to find out your inner talents. Even with all the willpower and efforts you put in such a discovery, you may still be unsuccessful, and that’s okay!

Always remember that you were harshly conditioned by the grownups to fit in, to be a sheep, and aligned with the status quo. Your caregivers loved you conditionally and asked you to prove your worth daily.

Disconnecting from your inner talents is a natural outcome. Sometimes, all that it takes is a person who sees the potential and gives you space to do things wholeheartedly, including making mistakes.

Early in my adult life, someone saw the potential within me that far exceeded what I saw in myself. He saw beneath the surface, beyond the obvious and evident. He looked into my heart & eyes & spirit and saw the raw, undeveloped, unseen seeds of greatness that lie within each one of us. So, he entrusted me with a charge and responsibility far beyond my experience and perceived ability. He gave me his trust without evidence; without proof. He simply believed and expected I would rise to the challenge, and he treated me accordingly. It was an act of faith. But that act of faith so affirmed my worth and potential that I was inspired to see it in myself. I aspired to the highest and most noble inclinations within me. I was not perfect, but how I grew! It also became a philosophy of life for me. Affirm people. Affirm your children. Believe in them, not in what you see but in what you don’t see — their potential. ~ Stephen Covey

The calling you have

You would probably get my point much quickly through an example: my own story.

Up to 5 months ago, my life mission was summarized by contributing to reinventing the whole world from within.

I went through some chaotic times — unrelated to COVID-19, and figured out the reason probably a month ago. I realized how foolish I was when believing it is possible to transform the whole world.

It made it crystal clear that MANY people are evil and unlikely to become better human beings. It made my expectations from the humankind much lower. That was liberating!

Very reasonable and realistic expectations are key.

Accepting that only some people would be deserving your attention and investment, the idea that you will be able to impact only those who are ready, and that you’re not supposed to change the world — only BE and let the universe take care of the rest — was empowering beyond my imagination.

The icing on the cake: I finally destroyed my savior pattern. That’s what I find fascinating about the subconscious program. No matter how many distorted algorithms you could have re-written or the level of your reconnection with the original being before the conditioning started, there will always be some unsuspected patterns you discover with some new events taking place in your life without your permission!

Consequently, I adapted my mission accordingly:

• Elevating the global awareness,
  
  
• Educating the kind souls about the danger of their distorted subconscious program in both being too self-absorbed and continuing enabling the manipulators,
  
  
• Implicitly inspiring through walking my talk,

There are so many things I ignore, so many I will probably never know, so many about which I will always have some doubt! But what I know for sure is my being and the power of our energy & free acts of kindness in uplifting people around us and in building trust in the long run.

• Leaving it to others to make their choice and set themselves free whenever they feel ready.
  
  

Takeaways

Wholeness is the fruit of an individual and a group investment at the same time!

Your part is re-writing your invasive subconscious program so that you move back to your secure attachment style and unleash the servant leader in you. Thus, you become what we call an interdependent individual.

When I am physically interdependent, I know that I can do any physical task alone. But, I also recognize that you and I, working together, could do much better than, even at my best, I can accomplish alone. If I am emotionally interdependent, I am emotionally healthy and self-reliant, but I also admit my need for sharing the love. If I am intellectually interdependent, I can recognize that our analytical skills put together could take us to the farthest places I would have never been able to reach alone!

The difference between interdependency and wholeness is the other party contribution, except for the spiritual dimension!