Who will I be if no one likes me any more?

This is not a frivolous question.  It lies at the heart of all our efforts to please other people.  All of our efforts to fit in.  And yet, it is the exact thing that causes us not to be “ourselves.”  Our true and authentic selves.  We are afraid we will not fit in.  That if they truly knew us, people would not like us.  We see all our own flaws, but not our own graces.

So when we see our own “flaws,” we assume that others see them, too.  And maybe they do.  But because we focus on our flaws to the exclusion of our graces, we don’t notice that other people focus more on our graces and either ignore or put up with our flaws because the graces outweigh the flaws.

But is it an instinctual or archetypal kind of question?  Does it stem from the days when if we were not liked, we would be ostracized from the group or clan and, left to fend for ourselves, we would die.  Or is it a more basic, infancy question?  If mom or dad don’t like me, they will abandon me and I will die?  In either case, it becomes a very visceral fear.  One that we cannot ignore.

Is this fear at the root of the anger and “acting out” that characterizes some Alzheimer and autistic behaviors?  Because I am different, will I be expelled from the tribe?  So the acting out, the anger, are ways of testing these boundaries.  OK.  They didn’t kick me out this time.  But the fear is still there, so I’d better test it again.  And again.  And again.  Because I need to know how far I can go before I get kicked out.

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Eventually the caregivers can no longer control the behavior, nor can they cope any more.  They are burned out and don’t know what else to try.  What else to do.  So they give up and institutionalization becomes a reality.  (Because in our modern culture, if you have money or family, you are not left out in the wilderness to die, but left in an institution to die.  Although if you have neither, you become one of the walking wounded who populate our inner cities, carrying all their belongings in grocery carts or paper bags.)

Where do we go from here?  How do we quiet or remove that fear?  I don’t have answers.  Because I have enough – enough money to live a decent life;  enough food to eat;  enough friends to turn to;  enough intelligence to run my life efficiently – I don’t have to live with that fear.  But if I stop to think about the question “Who will I be if no one likes me any more?”  That fear does come up!  And if it comes up for me, how much worse is it for those with fewer resources than I have?