Have You Ever Heard Your Friends Talking About You?

We all like to project a nice, positive image to ourselves and to the world: to our friends, partners, and others. Some of us will take all necessary measures to impress others, "show" them how smart we are, how loving, attentive, caring. Many of us do so not because this is the way we actually are, but as a manipulative way - to get love and appreciation from others; to be adored and admired. Unfortunately, having behaved this way for years on years, we have become unaware to the awful truth - that we are not the way we present ourselves to be; that we are not so honest, authentic and caring for others' well-being, but rather mask ourselves with this image of the caring, the loving, the attentive. The reverse, then, is the true situation: we do whatever we can to attract the love of others; to persuade them to regard us in as much a positive light as we can. We operate from a bottomless need for love, for appreciation, for attention, for praise.

When we behave this way, we think our friends, partners and others "fall" for our good-heartedly behavior; we convince ourselves that they highly appreciate us; that they adore our company, wisdom and support.

What we don't know is, that those of them who are enough conscious and aware, see behind our masks, behind our manipulations, behind our "loving behavior": they notice how desperate we are for their love; how low our self-esteem is; how fearful we are about criticism; and how lonely we feel when alone, not receiving others' love and "appreciation".

But, as ignorant as we are, as unaware as we are, to ourselves as well as to our environment, we keep behaving the way we do, believing that indeed we are what we project to our environment.

However, if we could have had the opportunity to ear-drop into a conversation of some of our friends who might have been talking about us we might have heard their conversation going like that:

"Poor ___; he/she needs so much love... "

"Yeah, he/she is trying so hard to be nice and loving all the time... "

"Sometimes I have to keep myself tight from laughing in his/her face, pretending that I so sucked into his/her attentive ear"

"Yes, that's exactly so: he/she loves so much to impress us by his/her listening ability; being there for us... As a matter of fact, it is so disgusting... "

"Well, I don't want to judge, really, but yes, I totally agree with you: the efforts he/she makes in order to be who she/he really is not... what a shame... "

"Shame no shame, eventually he/she gets what he/she wants... our love and friendship... "

"So do you want to tell me we are just as dishonest as he/she is?"

Silence. And then:

"These are us who might be dishonest for not telling him/her what we really think. But he/she is not dishonest: he/she is just so totally unaware of who she/he is; so totally out of touch with his own needs; so totally unaware of his/her ways of unconscious manipulations".

How would you react if you have listened in to such a conversation about yourself?

Would it trigger in you any reflection, any desire to look inside, observe yourself, attempt to see if there is any truth to what you have heard, to what they have been saying about you?

Or would you assume that it wasn't you they were talking about, but someone else... ?