Written November 15, 2014. Age 28. Sixteen years after eating disorder onset, four years since my solo trip to India. Just starting work after internship and struggling to understand and escape my critical, conditional relationship with myself. This analogy of an internal parent relationship was likely sparked by a book or podcast I’d heard, but I can’t remember exactly now.
Realization: Everyone needs to feel acceptance from an internal parent relationship.
The fear-based father figure lives in the brain and his conditional acceptance is of the brain’s self concept which is dependent on external measures as dictated by society and others. He looks at you from the outside and makes positive or negative judgments, and his criticism and rejection and shaming of you is so unpleasant that you push and push yourself to meet his expectations to win his approval and avoid his rejection. Even when you win his approval though it never feels lasting as it can be taken by the next disapproval. It is extremely conditional and allows no room for error. It is like the father pushing his daughter to get into Harvard, out of care based in fear, that if she doesn’t get in she won’t survive, get a job, get married, fit in or be happy. It is a fear-based caring and need for survival, and the father is so anxious about her performance and gets so upset when she ‘fails’ that the daughter will do anything to please the father and get into Harvard.
The heart-based mother figure loves the daughter for who she is on the inside, her spirit, her uniqueness, and doesn’t care if the daughter gets into Harvard. She wants her daughter to feel loved no matter what, find her passion, be completely herself, and be happy unconditionally. She is like the mother who encourages her son to take ballet or poetry classes if it makes him happy rather than play on the basketball team. She loves him no matter what for who he is on the inside, despite what other people might judge him as or for.
My self-acceptance has been solely dependent on my inner father figure relationship, and in order for me to be supported from the inside unconditionally I need to convince him that I’ll be okay even if I don’t get into Harvard and even if others disapprove of me or I’m not perfect in my self concept and from the outside. If he thinks that my not getting into Harvard truly means I will be rejected from society and never be happy, always alone and miserable, he will never allow me to listen to my mother and explore who I am from the inside and build a relationship with her. I have to convince him that he can relax and that I can survive from the inside!
Everyone needs the support and acceptance from one of these figures. The father props the self up from the outside shell, and it is a very fragile sense of self and sense of acceptance, always frantically trying to patch itself up from the outside. It feels like a hollow clay statue with no inner support that is always on the brink of cracking and collapsing into dust. Being supported by the mother’s love and vision and unconditional care and acceptance from the inside feels fluid and full and generous and authentic and overflowing and connected and loving and real. It never feels frantic because there is no fear of cracking and crumbling into oblivion. It feels like light, and nothing can break light.
But until this relationship begins to grow on the inside so that you feel something inside other than hollowness, the outer shell will not crack and let the inside you shine out or grow or develop at all because it has no sense of self yet. You have to ignite the inner self, introduce the child to the mother, and start that relationship before you can expect the self to begin defying the father, or the father to begin to let go of expectations and control. He wants you to survive, and knows that without anything on the inside of the shell, or so it feels, that you will feel miserable beyond imagining, so much so that it’s worth being miserable to constantly keep the cracks patched up, whether this is an eating disorder for approval from that standpoint, workaholism for approval from that standpoint, perfectionism for approval from that standpoint, doing anything to get people to like you, and so much more.
You cannot expect a girl to give up her thinness if it is the only way she knows to win her inner father’s acceptance before she has a strong-enough inner support from her relationship with her heart, sense of true self, and unconditional self-acceptance.