Stop Treating Approval Like Oxygen: Self-Discovery vs. Social Conditioning

Although humans are born free, social norms, expectations, and inherited roles subtly constrain women, leading to internalised approval-seeking and suppressed desires. True liberation involves recognising these influences and reclaiming one’s authentic identity and voice.

Inherited Roles and Internalised Expectations

• Assigned Identities: Women are often assigned labels such as ‘sensible,’ ‘calm,’ or ‘non-confrontational.’
• Approval as Oxygen: Praise and acceptance are absorbed until they feel like identity itself.
• Introjection: A psychological defence mechanism where external expectations are absorbed so deeply that they feel like one’s own voice.
  • It is external programming that has been internalised.
  • As a result, choices are not freely made; one follows a script they did not write.

Examples of Introjection

• The Perfume Example:  A person may keep using a perfume because a parent once said it suited them, gradually internalising that opinion and believing it to be their own choice, even without genuine liking.
• Career Choice:  Many women enter teaching or nursing not out of passion, but because society says, “It is safe for girls.”

Reasons For Introjection

• Evolutionary Insight: Historically, Safety lay in belonging to the group or tribe.
• Primitive Reality: In ancient times, expulsion from the group often meant death.
• Nervous System Conditioning:
  • Being agreeable is associated with safety.
  • Compliance is associated with receiving love.
• Psychological Cost: Individuals suppress their true selves to ensure acceptance and survival within the group.

The Result- Emotional Contortionist

• Modified Behaviour: Women learn to twist and restrain their emotions to fit into socially acceptable limits.
• Approval Seeking Behaviour: Social conditioning often turns women into emotional contortionists, where self-expression is sacrificed to preserve approval and avoid conflict.

The Awakening- Lifting The Veil

• Nature of awakening: The shift is gradual and subtle rather than dramatic.
• Common triggers: Living independently, being genuinely seen by another, exiting a toxic relationship, and gaining perspective with age.
• Core realisation: Individuals recognise that they do not clearly know their own preferences or desires. This phase represents an identity reveal, not an identity crisis.

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The Reunion- Transformation

• Transformation: The woman shifts from seeking approval to listening to her own voice. The journey involves moving from politeness, tolerance, and performance towards peace, truth, and presence.
• Emotional phase: Grief emerges for years of performance and postponed passions.
• Quiet Reunion: Women then reconnect with a self that is both new and familiar, and their true identity emerges when permission is no longer sought.

Conclusion

“One is not born a woman, one becomes a woman.” Women must work to “unbecome” the versions of themselves edited by the world.

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