Everybody has a life theme, a significant psychological issue which they are working out in this life. Your life theme is created when a powerful emotional chord is struck in your childhood, and it is reinforced when similar events — events which carry the same emotional charge — reoccur throughout your life.
If, as an infant, you were left out screaming on the porch because your mother thought you'd grow up spoiled if you got attention every time you wanted it, you very likely experienced feelings of abandonment. Fast-forward a few years, when your boyfriend takes his third business trip in a month and then forgets your birthday, you "suddenly" feel like screaming because you feel so abandoned.
The Six Major Life Themes
Although each of us has our own personal variation, life themes fall into six broad categories, and generally, a single theme is most significant to your development. The major life themes are:
- Neglect
- Abandonment
- Abuse
- Rejection
- Emotional Suffocation
- Deprivation
Each of these themes has a powerful effect on how you feel about yourself. In childhood, it was the reason you thought you didn't deserve to be loved; in adulthood, it becomes the basis for your inability to love yourself.
Abuse by abuse, disappointment by disappointment, you create a self-concept based on your life theme and in time you will confirm your life theme by doing to yourself as an adult exactly the thing that was done to you as a child.
Your Life Theme and You: Cause and Effect
Your life theme is intricately intertwined with the way you treat yourself now. When you identify your life theme, realize how it affected you in the past, and notice how you tend to perpetuate it in the present, you begin the healing process that will allow you to learn to love yourself.
Neglect: If you were neglected, you tend to feel unworthy of the good things life has to offer and you tend to neglect yourself in the same way you were neglected early on.
You feel bad that you can't seem to get yourself to the gym — and, most likely, you also beat yourself up for not giving yourself more or better attention.
Abandonment: If you were abandoned, you tend to abandon yourself — that is, not stick up for yourself in situations where you should clearly speak or act out on your own behalf.
In general, you tend to be in relationships where people, for one reason or another, aren't able to be by your side or won't be loyal to you; and you very likely think that somehow this is your fault.
Abuse: If you were abused emotionally, you tend to pick on yourself, be critical of yourself, put yourself down, and not feel that you deserve love, consideration, or care from others.
You allow yourself to be treated poorly emotionally by others — let them run over your feelings, be critical of you; and you probably beat yourself up for allowing this to happen.
If you were physically or sexually abused you very likely perpetuate this abuse by not being kind to your body, not feeding it well, being overweight, having addictions that are physically destructive, or forming relationships with abusive people. You likely also blame yourself.
Rejection: If you were rejected, you are likely to be self-rejecting, good at finding fault with yourself, and unconsciously seeking out experiences where you are not valued.
You have difficulty feeling valued, feeling that you deserve to belong.
Emotional Suffocation: If you were emotionally suffocated or had to serve as a surrogate spouse to one of your parents, you often feel overwhelmed by people's desire for contact, and you are very likely commitment phobic.
You find some way to blame yourself for the fact that love eludes you.
Deprivation: If your life theme is deprivation, you "do without" and feel that this is enough for you, that you don't deserve more.
You may keep to yourself, not allowing yourself to receive from others, and then feel the reason you don't is that somehow you don't deserve it. You feel that you should provide better things for yourself while at the same time blaming yourself for not doing just that.
Compensation and Your Theme
Your theme profoundly affects the way you feel about yourself. It also leads to the creation of a whole slew of behaviors you don't even realize you're developing. That's because one way or another, you start adjusting your behavior in response to your theme.
In psychological terms, this process is called compensation. Some children compensate for the fact that they're being treated imperfectly by trying to be better and better, by saying, in effect, I'll do everything my mother and father want — maybe that way they'll love me, maybe that way our life will improve.
People who compensate in this way try to perfect their behavior in order to get loved, to resolve the painful issues that have contributed to their life theme.
But some children take another tack. They go along with the way they think their parents feel, and decide that their parents are right — they're not worth loving. In this kind of compensation, this child adopts a damaged and unloving view of himself.
The problem with all this behavior, of course, is that it, too, is unloving. It often results in people giving up on themselves — acting out, becoming rebellious or self-destructive.
Patterns of Behavior Can Be Changed
Whatever your form of adaptation, instead of retaining the sense of yourself as whole and worthy of life and love, you have compensated for the fact that you were treated imperfectly. You've learned very well how not to love yourself.
In this way your childhood, and especially your life theme, has set a pattern that can make it very difficult indeed for you to love yourself. But remarkably and wonderfully, this pattern can be changed.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Conari Press,
an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. www.redwheelweiser.com.
©2004, 2012 by Daphne Rose Kingma. All rights reserved.
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When You Think You're Not Enough: The Four Life-Changing Steps to Loving Yourself
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About the Author
Daphne Rose Kingma is a psychotherapist, lecturer, and workshop leader. She is an author, speaker, teacher and healer of the human heart. The bestselling author of Coming Apart and many other books on love and relationships, Daphne has been a frequent guest on Oprah. Dubbed "The Love Doctor” by the San Francisco Chronicle, her extraordinary gift for sifting out the core emotional issues in any life situation has also earned her the affectionate title “The Einstein of Emotions.” Her books have sold more than a million copies and been translated into 15 languages. Visit her website at www.daphnekingma.com
