Description
When the family is gone, I just have random rants in the kitchen.
If the version of you that people like… isn’t the real you, what’s the point?
This short form video dives into something most of us don’t slow down to think about: how often we trade authenticity for approval.
We all want to be liked. That’s human. But there’s a cost to constantly managing how we’re perceived, online, at work, even in our own homes. We start tweaking how we show up to fit what we think other people want. And eventually, we build an entire identity based on performance instead of presence.
In the book Hold On to Your Kids, Gabor Maté talks about how the more we work to influence people’s opinions of us, the less fulfilling those opinions actually become. Why? Because what’s being liked isn’t us. It’s the image. The curated version.
This can lead to an endless loop of insecurity, approval seeking, and emotional exhaustion.
Pair that with what David Burns shares in Feeling Good about distorted thinking patterns like emotional reasoning and mind reading, and it’s no wonder we lose ourselves in the process. We start to assume what others expect, then behave based on that assumption. We live for an audience that doesn’t even exist.
This isn’t just an adult problem. It’s something we’re modeling for our kids too. If we don’t break this cycle of image over identity, we risk passing it down to the next generation.
If this short form content resonated with you, share it with someone else who might be caught in the same cycle.
And if you’re curious how this connects to parenting and attachment theory, let me know. That’s a video of its own.