Breaking Free: Redefining Love and Belonging

This article was originally posted in 2014.

I know that title is, well, heavy. What do I mean by “dog collar” exactly? Who is wearing a dog collar? I’ll get to the point soon.

First, let me show you my direction.

I’m going to discuss Abraham Maslow, his hierarchy to personal freedom, and how he has erred; identity, individuality, independence, self-worth; the ideas self-belonging and self-love; and how the erroneous mental mistake of “belonging to something or someone” causes insecurity, dependency, and mental enslavement. I’m going to tell you that to free your mind is to free your being. I’ll give my personal testimony and how I discovered the truth.

Now to begin.

I don’t know what it is like for a man, a woman or, well, any person other than me, but most of my post-puberty life I thought I needed a man to love me in order to fulfill my existence — until now.

My Early Story

As a teenager, I remember driving down the road trying to imagine myself in a white wedding dress and I couldn’t imagine it— that might have been a foreshadowing of future events. When I met my husband I was glad that a male took notice of me— my Sophomore English teacher said it would happen, but until that moment I had been sure my teacher was wrong.

After my divorce, one of the most emotionally traumatic things a woman ever said to me was, “Maybe you were meant to be alone.” Her comment was sincere and stated with the best of intentions, I am sure, for I have replayed the memory scores of times, but I was emotionally devastated by the dismal prospect that I would spend my days as a spinster.

Later in life — early thirties — I was irritated when a woman stated, “God has someone out there for you. You just haven’t met him yet.” That was an unwelcome prospect,  because at that point in my life I had decided I would grow old as an independent and emotionally unavailable woman. Spinster or emotionally unavailable woman; is there a difference? Well, at least my attitude was evolving. Whatever I was evolving into it was better than my father’s patriarchal view that women are property. Three little words for that narrow view. No. Thank. You.

There is much talk about love in the movies, in books, in music; any person I talk to — young or old — for any given length of time ends up telling me about his or her love life. And do you know what the two common denominators are in most hours of conversation I have spent entertaining these dialogues? Disappointment and misery, that’s it. Most often, I don’t hear people telling me how happy and fulfilled they are with their partner; I hear about how he or she isn’t doing this or that. I’m not saying that fulfilling relationships don’t exist. I’m just saying that no one is telling me about them. In the face of all this unpleasant business — and because I like to ponder the mysteries of the universe — I’ve asked myself the following questions and pondered them for hours, questions like:

• Is love bliss or is it toxic?
• Is love a primitive emotion designed to propagate the species?
• Is love a spiritual emotion that fosters a higher plane of being?
• Is love meant to benefit the recipient or the benefactor?
• Is “to love” altruistic or selfish?

In honor of these questions, I defer to a few “experts” on love:

“There is no remedy to love, but to love more”… Henry David Thoreau; quite sweet, I think …

Or the stoic Biblical reflection, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” to which I then feel compelled to add…and then there is common sense.

There is Robert Downing’s whimsical prompt, “Grow old alongside me, the best is yet to be,” which I find to be, well, questionable.

I most identify with Sir James Barrie who states:

“If you have it, you don’t need to have anything else. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter much else what you do have.” I’d like to explain why I subscribe to this mentality — and I will — but first let me shed some loving light on what an expert has to say about love and love’s role in shaping our success.

Abraham Maslow is Wrong

Abraham Maslow was an important psychologist in the 1950’s and his work continues to influence many schools of thought. What Abraham Maslow determined is that successful people — that’s one out of every 100 people according to Maslow — will achieve self-actualization or the ability to reach one’s full potential. Let me first say that the idea of “full potential” is subjective; it’s a utopian dream that I fully encourage every human to strive, however know that it is an unrealistic concept for there will always be room for improvement. Maslow’s idea of personal fulfillment is based on social enslavement and I will tell you why.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow developed a pyramid that illustrates the levels of achievement a person needs to reach full potential; and they are in this order:

1. Physiological — water, food, shelter, sleep, medication
2. Safety — protection, security, order, law, limits
3. Belongingness and Love — family, affection, relationships, work peers
4. Esteem — achievement, status, responsibility, reputation
5. Self-Actualization — personal growth and ultimate fulfillment

Pertaining to Maslow’s first level, the only needs we have are on the bottom rung; everything else is a desire. You don’t need your $350,000 house, $50,000 car, $150 pair of jeans, or that $10,000 diamond on your finger, a husband, children, friends, admiration, love of others, etc. The truth is that you desire those things, and that desire is often motivated by a desire to impress others with those things. So, Maslow is right about needs. In order to successfully function, we require four things, which are shelter, food, water, and sometimes medication (or nutraceuticals).

Pertaining to Maslow’s sense of safety, I will say that it is important for people to have a safe environment to thrive. If a person is constantly looking over his or her shoulder in fear that their being is in danger, it’s safe to say that not much goal-achieving is going to get done. Now. I disagree with the tier “belongingness and love”, and this is where I refute Maslow.

Every patient carries her or his own doctor inside.
— Albert Schweitzer

About Belonging

Maslow was wrong about a need to belong to someone or something. The reason I say this is for two reasons:

1. The only person you can ever truly belong to is yourself.
2. When you try to belong to something or someone, often times you end up:

• Feeling let down because the expectations don’t fit or
• You try to change yourself in order to belong at which time you alienate yourself.

Telling yourself that you “belong” to something, or someone, is a thinking mistake.

Telling yourself that you “belong” is to accept a false sense of security — which then becomes an aberration of Maslow’s rung #2. For example, if the statements are made:

• I belong to [insert person, organization] therefore I will be admired.
  Translation: “My worth is defined by others”
• I belong to [insert person, organization] therefore I won’t be alone.
  Translation: “I feel unworthy unless there are others around to define my worth.”

Do you believe that? Do you believe that you require other people to define who you are?

Don’t lie. I guarantee the majority of the population defines itself through the subjective lens of others and that’s because that is how we are taught. That’s right. We are taught from birth that our self-worth is contingent on the approval of others. In Transactional Analysis that is called positive strokes, which is the act of being appreciated or praised. I want you to learn to give yourself positive strokes and depend on your positive strokes to achieve a positive self-image or the idea that “you are worth it” and to hell with what everyone else thinks.

I’m not saying that it’s bad to be a part of someone or something. I’m saying it is bad to lose your sense of individuality and independence by any degree of obligation because we have the mentality that we are bound to regard others as a source of strength rather than making a conscious choice to regard others as a source of strength. The difference between ownership and complementary partnership is obligation and submission vs. choice and assertion.

Where is Your Worth?

What do you think your worth would be if you had no parents, no spouse, no friends, no children, and no co-workers? What if you were outside the bubble of mankind? What if you were the outsider looking in even as society examined you like a bug under a microscope? Until you can define yourself all by yourself and find yourself acceptable, then you are not free.

In choosing this mentality of “My Being is Defined by Others”, you choose to forfeit your freedom. To belong to someone is to be property. Let me be clear. Ownership of a car is to have property. Ownership of a dog is to have property. We are human beings with intelligence and free-will. You’re not property and you shouldn’t want to be anyone’s property, because to be property is to be less than human, to be property is to lessen your self-worth.

Concerning Higher Power

I have talked about higher power, which I define as a source of strength for self. No pressure on you, dear reader, but personally I identify with God as my higher power, as having supreme and all-encompassing authority, and I say that even God does not own me, because I believe He gave me free-will as a gift and I accepted the gift, therefore I own myself. I accept Him. We have a partnership. I allow Him to lead me. So. If my God will not imprison me then I certainly will not accept anyone else imprisoning me via ownership by saying “You belong to me.”

(If you’d like to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, then click here.)

Okay. So, if you don’t belong to anyone or anything, what is a relationship?

I define relationship as the state of being connected; and to connect is to join, therefore a relationship is a “joining of two people.” I have a relationship with God, my daughters, and my friends, which is a choice not an obligation.

What is right is to complement one another. I define complement as someone or something that completes. Don’t mistake “belonging” with “complementing”; there is a fundamental difference. My God is my foundation for existence. My friends complete the landscape of my living. They are the highlights, the cherry on top of my existence.

To Live as Fact or Fiction

Do you want to truly love, co-exist, and complement another? If the answer to that is “yes” then I say to you that you have a conditional need to learn to love yourself first and to understand that only you belong to you; only then can you truly know what love is and share the precious gift of yourself with another. Some of you know it. I didn’t know it growing up and I didn’t know it most of my life. I know it now.

So back to Sir James Barrie who said:

“If you have it, you don’t need to have anything else. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter much else what you do have.”
Have self-love. Have self-belonging. If you don’t have these two things then nothing else matters.

Start making whatever changes you need to belong to yourself…Now.

Believe in Yourself; You Deserve It!

If other people don’t believe in you, then it is up to you to believe in yourself. Right? Shrug nay-sayers from your conscience. The people who don’t want to believe you can succeed are the people who did not succeed in some way themselves — maybe they are not self-loving, self-belonging — but you are not a reflection of them. You are separate from them. Don’t let other people leech your self-confidence in who you are and what you can do.

FYI: When other people believe that you can’t succeed, don’t show them that you can succeed because you think you have something to prove, but succeed because all that matters is that you do succeed.

In conclusion, the dog collar is a metaphor, yes. In reality, we are all enslaved to some degree. If you pay taxes, then you know what I mean. Everyone owes someone something. No one is above this life law. However, you can be the freest by not conforming for the sake of conformity and only aligning yourself to those principles that ring true to your innate value system.