You feel lonely because you build walls instead of bridges.

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Walls around you, walls between your two selves…

But how do you do it, and why do you do it? and how do you undo it?

It all comes from your story. Not what happened, but what you have been saying about it: the story.

I am very aware of my mortality… and my imminent demise. And what I am also very aware of is that no one really wants me to live, other than myself. But is that a story? Or is that the truth… It feels like the truth.

I was pondering this under the covers this morning. How neither of my brothers seem to care whether I am alive or dead. People I help need me because they need my help. But then I started to look at people who help me… and I was surprised to see that they would, at least for a time, miss me, and remember me fondly.

That surprised me.

When I got up the first thing I read was Rob Brezsny’s regular Tuesday email, and he says there: “Recognizing common fears or vulnerabilities rather than differences – – be it with a difficult friend, an abrasive colleague or a noisy neighbor – – calms the nervous system, boosting feelings of contentment and self worth.”

That is weird, but when I see another and I share some weakness, or ugliness, it gives me a sense that ‘I am not alone’, while watching someone superior and better than me: I can’t connect, and I am left in the dust… alone. Feeling that no one cares about me.

Puzzling. Sharing vulnerabilities, sharing faults builds bridges… and yet we all want to look invulnerable and perfect… and thus unapproachable.

Yesterday I muscletested my Playground participants, and 60% of them has a gap of 70% between their real accomplishments and their perceived accomplishments, they fancy themselves a lot better than they are. If I poked into it: these are also the people who have built walls, not bridges.

One of these 70% people wrote to me this morning:

“The Sunday rant call was great…Mike is locked in the jail and no permission to be himself….So am I and all of us…The question that comes up is…who the f… am I then.

I went through the incident again, telling it differently and also telling it in my mother tongue. When I tell it in my mother tongue the words are: in direct translation: I’m not being counted or something like that..I failed to be counted.

I remember now that I’ve always had a distance to my family…and questioning sometimes am I adopted or something…lol”

Yes, exactly. You build those walls, we build those walls with words. With the story. I did…

We make sense of the world, of what is happening by interpreting, explaining, finding meaning, but those words are… 100% wrong. 100% of the time. We actually don’t know, and make us sh*t. Then we ‘honor it’ like the truth.

And we make up hundreds of these a day, and millions over a lifetime… and those words build walls and not bridges.

THEY don’t want me, they don’t like me, they don’t want me to have it… blah blah blah.

He didn’t care, she didn’t take care of me, he didn’t remember, they don’t care, I don’t belong. I was not important.

And because this seems to be human nature, other people, far or close, your loved ones make up the same hogwash, and now you don’t have any relationships, or your relationships are strained.

The son of the student I quote, has already made up that he is worthless… and I quote my student: “I asked him today and he said he wants to feel valued….Shit…seeing that everybody have an ITCH and a racket has shifted my view…Thank you for this Sophie.”

You and everybody around you has a racket, an itch, and a persona that they made up. And they all build a wall. And then you feel alone, not cared fore, not mattering, not valued.

I also saw an interesting thing… not sure if it is accurate, but this is what I saw:

The lower you see yourself cast by others or by circumstances, the higher you fancy yourself in your mind.

Like a pendulum or a swing: the higher it goes in one direction, the higher it has to go in the other direction.

The highest ‘inauthenticity’ score people had the worst sob-stories about their childhood, about their abilities or value.

Neither the disvaluation nor the too high valuation is true. You are and have always been, most likely, just normal. A mistake doesn’t make you stupid. And a good idea doesn’t make you a genius.

The closer to get to normal, the more authentic you can become and the more walls will come down on your side.

Of course walls have an interesting aspect: you build walls and others build walls too.

I am looking at my brothers, and I can see that they built the walls, not me. They probably feel that I don’t care. But unfortunately relationships take two to tango.

In the Playground, our ‘job’ is to get new ‘glasses’ and look at past incidents where we decided that we were put down, slighted, diminished, devalued, ignored, forgotten, or didn’t matter.

And find out the truth about those incidents, so we can change our mind about one side of the pendulum.

If you weren’t stupid, or nothing, or worthless, then you don’t have to fancy yourself a genius, and the pendulum will start swinging low…

The less the pendulum goes into extremes the closer you can behave to who you really are, and you will start tearing down walls, between others and you, between success and you, between you and you.

Suddenly you’ll experience that you don’t have to prove anything, you don’t have to, don’t need to be special… And that is priceless.

You can just be… however you are… And do the things you do.

The less you have to pretend, the happier you’ll be. Guaranteed.

In my Free What’s the truth about you/What’s missing workshop we’ll look at you and at the pendulum that is your life. We won’t go as deep as we do in the Playground: after all we have three hours only. But you’ll get a glimpse of yourself, the high and the low, and the unrealistic expectations you have of yourself and of the world.

I use that workshop to handpick the people who I see would do well in the Playground, the program I train people to become the first human BEINGS on the planet.

But I don’t solicit: people self-select, and ask for it.

If you want to be in the workshop: do me a favor and get your starting point measurements done, if you haven’t yet. It will make it a whole lot easier to see past your pretenses during the workshop… and that is what you want, don’t you?

Go to step 2PS: When you lower the swing of the pendulum (you can! it is you who is pushing it high!), you are also building a bridge between you and you. And when the two yous connect, finally, you’ll never be alone, you’ll never feel unloved, because the team, separated at birth, can now fight everything together. Heaven on earth.