Are You Staying Small In Order To Feel Safe?

Staying small so others can feel big. What a way to stay safe.

It’s a brilliant strategy to appear invincible, be accepted and be well-liked by everyone. Everyone but ourselves. Underneath the pattern is a wound of feeling extremely useless and insignificant, like being in the way all the time.

This pattern is common when our childhoods are filled with different forms of neglect.

We grew up with the message that confidence equals arrogance. But arrogance is when we think we are better than everyone, it’s more of a cover-up for low self-esteem. Just like staying small is.

Becoming more self-confident won’t make us very liked by everyone, but we will feel more comfortable in our own skin.

A narcissistic person lacks self-esteem on a deep level. Anything that threatens that lack of self-esteem, will get punished. If we as kids grew up with this type of adult, in the end, we get the message, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

No one. So we become no one.

Staying small is a way to hide and stay invincible. It is a way to make sure we camouflage so well with the environment so that we never have to worry again.

If the environment is filled with danger and we can’t escape, what choices are left?

When we were kids we were severely lonely and probably an outcast. Many of us felt like we never fit in anywhere. We watched everyone else make friends, have fun and belong. And we were trying to figure out why that was so hard for us. Some of us were bullied. This leaves many imprints on our being.

So when manage to get some friends, we want to make sure we never lose them again. Or should I say, we make sure to never feel so excluded again?

So we start to pretend like we are a more compact version of ourselves. We make sure to blend in so well we never stick out too much.

The older we get, the more this takes a toll on us. It feels like we are choosing between living our full potential or belonging.

I say we can fulfil our true potential AND belong. It just means we need to be willing to see what is on the other side of that equation.

We hit a wall eventually.

On a spiritual journey where we uncover all sorts of parts of our being, we get to know this long lost self that was ripped apart at some point. We start to gather the pieces and put them back.

That’s when we start feeling this pull between I want to be accepted and I want to be myself. Because of the way we were taught, both cannot be true at the same time.

Start small and be kind to ourselves in the process, we only know ourselves so much and we always evolve. Life is meant to change and evolve. We are not frauds, we have simply done the best we could with the options we had.

People that get triggered by us being different, are also people with horrible self-esteem, just like mentioned above. They feel that anything different from them means there is something wrong with them. It’s the same feeling we struggle with, just turned around.

Have compassion for them because their pain is understandable.

But people will eventually need to face their wounds to heal them. We are not doing anyone a favour by staying frozen and small forever.

We also believe that we are doing it for someone else’s benefit. This is the story our egos try to tell, to not face what is uncomfortable. To feel like the good guy.

A little tip for dealing with people that are low on self-esteem but appear arrogant is to give them a genuine compliment. Something they really are good at and watch them shine up like a little child that got a gift for the first time. It will make them feel appreciated and it will show.

Since this reality is governed by mirroring, this is also complimenting the part of ourselves that feels low self-esteem. And we get closer to that oneness that is at the core of our beings.

We are doing it to stay safe. We know by experience that if we stand out too much, we are vulnerable like prey.

The more we heal the more our confidence and self-esteem grow. Being ourselves fully is always a risk but staying small is an even bigger risk.

Maybe, instead of feeling like the prey, we start noticing that we can make a difference. We inspire the people around us. That is when we understand that the biggest risk is being trapped in everyone else opinions about us.

People will have opinions whether we try to do everything right anyway.