Ultimately, it is the collective blunders of your parents (or more likely your mother exclusively), your friends and close relatives, which over the years shaped you in to a manageable, easy to deal with, predictable humanoid who would best allow them to fulfill their respective agendas with as little interference as possible.
This is a controversial topic, and just like everything else, the following should be considered while taking in to account your individual circumstances, but here are a few simple questions:
How did I end up where I am? Who is responsible for creating the current situation? Why was I unable to learn what appears to be essential life skills? Working in a field I don’t enjoy, earning less than what I know I can, not having the surrounding or relationships I want?
The answer is simple but carries with it enormous ramifications. While your previous actions and decisions combined with the environment and situations beyond your control, your actions – individually – are much less significant than it appears at first. The mindsets instilled in you dictate the available pool of actions and so are internalized on a subconscious level. This gives them enormous precedence over your conscious decisions. Or rather, decisions you think are conscious.
I am not suggesting that such misdetections were premeditated. Others in your life simply didn’t know any better, or what is the case more often, tried to provide incompetent help or advice. None the less the fact stands that you were molded in to your present self by others. And even when you arrived in to adulthood and were making “your own decisions” – these decisions were made within the framework imposed on you years and sometimes decades ago.
To even consider such a proposition is enough to shake up one’s perception of people closest to them, and yet if you stop and look around you will notice this in relationships between other members of your family and close friends. By definition a family is designed to remain an organized and self-sustaining group with established hierarchy and expectations of members to minimize disruptions.
And when you begin to grow out of your old shell and begin your journey to discovering who you really are, stripping layer by layer what has been plastered on you by others, you will encounter resistance. One only needs to think back to teenage years and the futile attempts of your parents to keep tabs on you as an example of lengths your closest family will go to, to maintain their hold over your actions. What about when you were three? Or seven?
The reality is that you will be ridiculed, questioned, misunderstood and let known in subtle and not so subtle ways that your attempts at evolving aren’t welcome. There are a multitude of reasons for this, but the fundamental one, at the core is this:
No one else really cares about your success except you yourself.
You parents did their job – and like most they want to think of themselves as successful. It’s no secret that for parents, achievements and success of their children is one of the most rewarding things. They even go as far as to voice it to strangers(!) on a bumper sticker. By implication, if you’re not succeeding and your parents and friends aren’t psychopaths, your actions and attempts are undermining their achievements.
How do you feel when others undermine your achievements?
That’s right – your success means their failure, in their minds anyway. Now, just imagine what parents and siblings/friends will do to ensure they don’t fail at helping and supporting their own. This is the extent of resistance you should expect.
As people who raised you or your long-time friends will remain a predominant part of your life on this journey, it is important to balance their presence and influence so that it doesn’t inhibit your progress. And the simplest way to allow for that is to spend less time in their company, because people gravitate to the average of the environment they are in – and we already know the result of remaining in your present environment.
