I’ve noticed this within myself, and can see it in others around me. There’s an insecurity and a lack of confidence and belief in oneself and one’s ability that arises when you are dependent on others. When you depend on others to do basic things for you, like cleaning, cooking, chores, groceries, negotiations, managing outings, etc, you may be getting by just fine, and maybe you don’t even think about it. But when you take care of yourself and your own needs independently, or at least when you learn to do those things for yourself, you acquire a certain confidence in your own ability to do things independently.
This is a very subtle thing. If you don’t know how to wash the dishes, then the idea of making a meal on your own carries a little extra weight. There’s a hesitation, a resistance, maybe you limit the kinds of meals you allow yourself because you don’t know how to wash the dishes. This limits your mind, your imagination, your options, and your creativity and freedom. This happens unconsciously. When you don’t know how to clean, your mind blocks out any options that may require cleaning. Your vision becomes narrower. You only see what you know you can handle. But when you expand your repertoire, you expand your possibilities.
When these things are about your private personal life, it allows you to relax in a way you couldn’t do before. Because it communicates to your unconscious that you’re taken care of. It tells you that no matter what happens around, as long as you yourself continue to exist, your needs will be met.
I call it a lifecycle. When it comes to food, you buy the groceries in the supermarket, store them in your kitchen, and when you want to eat you put the ingredients together into a meal, then wash the dishes and put them back. This is the full lifecycle of food. (We’ll exclude where the groceries in the supermarket actually come from, as that’s part of the lifecycle, but we don’t need to independently go all the way back to hunting for our dinners, this is a good balance.)
If you’re only capable of half this cycle, then you’re limiting your movement and freedom in life.
This may manifest in ways that don’t seem to be related to this. Maybe you’re more irritated than you need to be at a boss who keeps making you feel like you don’t matter. Because somewhere in your mind, in this scenario, you’re thinking that you may get fired, and if that happens you may not afford takeaway everyday or a maid to cook your meals, then you may have to make your own food which you don’t entirely know the cycle of. And this possibility that peeks its head when the boss makes you feel you don’t matter makes you feel extra irritated and extra insecure and afraid of what the boss will think of you.
So when you learn to secure your own needs, especially in your private personal life you’ll naturally acquire a kind of confidence that you take with you everywhere effortlessly. I think this is especially true for people who were infantilized growing up.
You can take this idea into many other domains. A company that relies too heavily on outsourced services to maintain their internal structures have a certain kind of hesitancy built into their organization. When they learn to be independent in how they operate they can be more free and evolve more organically as an organization. This is not to say they’re not allowed to hire services from other companies for example. But the idea is that they’re not reliant on any one company’s services. That if another company stops delivering their services or something, they can independently find another solution for their problems. They can meet their own needs 😀
The Mshary 