Description
But there is another kind of security we are in need of, which is psychological. And this means that we have a sense of well-being inside ourselves through proper adjustment to life and to living.
A vast amount of research has been carried on during the last twenty-five years in this field and a course has been charted, which if followed will help to give everyone an emotional security, a mental poise and balance that will better fit him to live.
One of the interesting things in this research is that they have been able to trace much of our feeling of insecurity to early childhood when we were being conditioned for what is going to happen to us in the future. They have discovered that the infant who feels himself to be a part of the family life, in love and in confidence and in faith, will generally grow up to be a self-reliant person, one who is poised and balanced and who quickly adjusts himself to living. They have also discovered that a sense of insecurity comes from frustrations, probably in early childhood, which are based on a feeling of not being wanted, needed and loved.
If we were to draw a chart and show the main reasons why we feel insecure, it would work our something like this: the first law of our emotional life seems to be that we must feel wanted, needed and loved; that we are an important part of the whole family set-up. And when for any reason we feel unwanted, unneeded and unloved, we have an unconscious sense of rejection. Now, the mind is a funny thing and it can operate against us as well as for us. And if we feel unwanted and unloved and unneeded, then we feel rejected and because of this, in some peculiar way we have an unconscious sense of guilt.
You see, the feeling mind does not reason logically. It just feels. And the insecurity of not being wanted, creates an unconscious sense of rejection and guilt, and the mind enters into a conflict with itself as though it were trying to figure out what is wrong. It has a sense of uneasiness, and this produces a feeling insecurity and confusion. It is this inward conflict over the feeling of insecurity that creates most of the tensions and strains that go with what is called our inferiority and superiority complexes.