I met a guy here in Portland. A young guy in his mid 20's and we started having a conversation. We started off just casually talking about the sights worth seeing in the area. After a short time, he decided to confide to me some problems that he was dealing with in his life. He began by telling me that he had a hard time in high school and didn't have many friends. He said that things hadn't gotten much better as he was older. A particular topic that he seemed fixated on was the fact that he had no luck finding a date. He started a lengthy discussion on the matter of physical attractiveness in our society. He felt that because he was overweight, people didn't take him seriously. He attributed his inability to find a date on the fact that people did not find him physically attractive. The other factor, he felt, was that people also looked passed him because he is Asian. He claimed that in American society, Asian men are not as desirable as white, black, and latino men.
His weight seemed to be a major issue for him and he talked about how it was so difficult to successfully adhere to a diet to get closer to his ideal weight. How his bad eating habits seemed unbreakable because they existed since he was a young child. Try as he might, he was unable to get to a weight that he found desirable.
He was currently quite anguished about the fact that he could not find a meaningful romantic relationship. He went on for a while about how society shapes our perception of physical attractiveness and how easily he is dismissed because of his weight and his race.
I asked him, quite frankly, that if he felt his weight was a major barrier to his ability to be perceived as physically attractive, why he did not take the necessary means to lose the weight. He went back to the issue of his habitual patterns of eating poorly and how he just couldn't stick to a diet. I challenged him by asking him if it was possible if he actually preferred the poor diet to finding a partner. He seemed to consider the question momentarily, but then dismissed it and carried on to the topic of race.
He had a number of beliefs about the subtle racism in human sexuality and how white people in particular have certain biases towards other races. How Asian women are exoticized but Asian men are rarely even seen as fashion models. He had concocted a whole story, that seemed quite thought out, about the reasons that he was a social outcast due to society's distorted perception of physical attractiveness. And due to the unfair nature of societal perceptions, he was without any prospects for a meaningful relationship.
My next question was also quite blunt. I asked him if he was abused as child. He seemed pretty shocked by the question. He was quiet for a bit, but eventually he spoke up to say that he was physically and emotionally abused by his mother. The reason I asked him this was because I suspected that somewhere in his life experience, something may have happened to him that made him question his worthiness as a person. Something that tore his self-confidence apart and had him question his value in the world to other people.
I tried to be as open minded as possible and evenhanded while talking to him. I didn't want to sound as if I was trying to figure him out or be judgmental. But I told him that it was my belief that if we have the authentic desire for something in our lives, we go after it without making excuses about why we cannot achieve it. I asked him to consider the possibility that perhaps, deep down, maybe beyond his awareness, he really did not have the desire for a relationship. Or, that his fear that he was not worthy of another person's affections actually outweighed his desire for a relationship.
People that are abused, or made to feel somehow less than worthy as children, have the tendency to form a particular belief about themselves that is carried with them into adulthood. I suspected that this fear of exposing himself by getting close to another person, and possibly being rejected (as his mother rejected him through the abuse) was so strong within him that he prevented himself from meeting the kind of person with whom he could form a romantic bond. But, in order to conceal his fear, he projected his fear outside of himself by looking for reasons that society was to blame.
This is the insidious nature of fear. It lies hidden in many forms of projection by people unaware that their fear is controlling them. However, this is easily recognized. If you are looking outside of yourself to find reasons why something is not going right in your life by blaming or concocting stories to confirm a belief, consider that the real answer could lie within you.
When I asked this guy to consider the idea of his own feeling of worthiness, he paused for another moment and said, "I am afraid that I have become transparent and am really uncomfortable right now talking about this. Let's change the subject."
Now, I really could never be certain if my assumptions about anybody else are true. But, his response definitely made me suspicious. He had the classic signs of fear denial. Fear denial often takes the form of blame. Blaming an outside force for whatever situation that you find undesirable in your life. I found that when I looked at my life from an internal perspective rather than an external perspective, I could see that I was concealing some kind of fear. A fear that could easily be dispelled if I acknowledged it and recognized it's influence.
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