6 The origin and outcome of the Idealized Self-Image

There’s just no escaping our knowledge that unpleasantness is possible. It really happens. Our fear of this is ever-present, and that creates a problem for us… So we devise a countermeasure that we falsely believe will circumvent unhappiness, unpleasantness and death: we create an idealized self-image. In short, this is a pseudo-protection that doesn’t work…

There’s a direct correlation between being unhappy and not believing in ourselves. Our loss of self-confidence is proportional to how badly we feel. Our idealized self-image is supposed to avoid all that by supplying the missing self-confidence. This, we think, by way of our unconscious reasoning, will lead us straight to pleasure supreme…

We simply can’t be more than we really are in any given life situation… What we can do is have a genuine desire to better ourselves, which leads to accepting ourselves as we are right now… Once we’ve done a significant amount of personal work, we’ll start to see the difference between these two things. One involves feeling a genuine desire for gradual improvement. The other is the pretense of the idealized self that just wants to look better now…

Listen and learn more.

Bones, Chapter 6: The Origin and Outcome of the Idealized Self-Image

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #83 The Idealized Self-Image