During a very enjoyable conversation I had with a good friend of mine about self-growth, an interesting question arose. He asked:

“If you could give advice to someone who is just starting out their journey towards self-actualization, what advice would you give?”

At first, I dodged the question. “I wouldn’t give any advice unless they asked.”

He responded playfully, “Hey, that’s cheating!”

“Fair enough,” I conceded.

I then began to think of all the things that have worked for me and that have helped me to achieve some progress, but I began to wonder if there’s anything I could recommend that might be beneficial to anyone.

What came to mind, which I think is universally essential and helpful for anyone who is interested in self-knowledge is this — to seek interactions, a support group of good people, a therapist, conversations with friends, and to avoid isolation at all costs.

There certainly can be a case made for the benefits of alone time and spending time with yourself, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Choosing to be alone as oppose to spending time with good friends is not the same as isolation because you still have good friends with whom you can share intimacy. Isolation is not the absence of people around you. Isolation is the absence of intimacy and truly positive, meaningful relationships.

Inner Critics or Alters

So, what happens when we’re enmeshed in dysfunctional relationships, as we often are prior to therapy, and surrounded by negative people? Abusive people? People who downgrade our ambitions? People who mock our passions? People who scorn the things we love? People who try to infect us with their insecurities by nitpicking our creations? Or people who are just indifferent to us?

When you are in contact with abusive people, you set up their images in your head as a defense mechanism. In other words, if your mom screams at you for setting a cup on the table without a coaster, then what happens is that you internalize her screaming. Then the internalized mother in your head screams at you first, so you stop putting the coaster on the table. This keeps you safer from the real mother in the real world. (See videos below for more about this.)

For this reason, when you’re in contact with harmful people, you can’t fully relax or have a good time. It’s like trying to relax in a park when you know there’s a lion in the bushes … or Darth Vader.

If you talk honestly and openly with these abusive people about how you feel, whether it’s with your mom, dad, brother or sister, and they don’t change their behavior or they won’t reform, then I think it’s critical — for the sake of your future happiness — to give yourself that pause and get them our of your life. Because if you’ve grown up with abusive people, you don’t have any real control over our reaction to those people. As bestselling author and entrepreneur, James Altucher, put it:

“How do you write your own rules? It really starts with the basics, which means being physically healthy, such as eating and sleeping well, and being emotionally healthy. And people seem to underestimate this but, you really can’t be around negative people or people who are going to put you down. Who’s going to put you down? It’s not the neighbor down the street, it’s your mother. “It’s true.”

While it is true, however, that being away from your abusers physically is incredibly relieving, the abuser in your head remains. It’s less active, but in familiar situations (trauma triggers), it will become reactivated. So there will be times when your inner mom will start criticizing or screaming at you again.

Stefan Molyneux, from a great YouTube video entitled “The Hidden Origins of Conflict-Avoiding Divorce,” explains this very well:

When your inner mom starts nagging at you, it feels like self-abuse, but it’s there to protect you, like scar tissue. These inner alters, these defenders of the realm, don’t have any idea that circumstances have changed and that we’ve got some sense of voluntaryism any more than our tongues know that sugar is plentiful. The way these defenses work is that they have no idea fundamentally that tomorrow is going to be different from today. Abuser today means abuser tomorrow because we were stuck in these static groundhog day, stupid-ass tribes for 50 thousand years, when nothing changed, so the idea that you would not be around a former abuser or the former abuser would not be replaced by some new abuser, that was the tribal standard, so it’s incomprehensible. It’s got no time-sense.

What does this have to do with avoiding isolation? If a person is just starting self-knowledge and is fresh out of an abusive environment, they are going to have these internalized abusers and hear these negative internal messages (I’m stupid, narcissistic, boring, empty-headed, fat,etc.). Even if it has diminished as a result of leaving the bad environment, it’s still there. It is also likely that as a result of repeated exposure, we come to believe some of these negative things about ourselves, or rather, for the sake of survival, we have accepted views about ourselves that aren’t true. This is especially true if a negative message was told to us repeatedly.

Just as all propaganda can only stick through repetition, however, the truth can also stick through repetition, and thus, through repeated exposure to the truth, we can diminish the power of propaganda.

This is how a friend can help tremendously. Trustworthy friends can help diminish the power of these negative thoughts by giving us counter information, by giving us their third-person perspective of how we land to others whose rational judgments can accurately reflect to us who we really are.

For example, it’s kind of hard to hold a low opinion of yourself, like, “Oh, I’m just not funny,” when your friend is constantly laughing throughout the conversation and telling you you’re funny, especially if it’s not just only one friend, but also your therapist and many of the people in a support group or online community who enjoy your company.

In the same way, it’s hard to hold your own humor in high esteem when you are surrounded by people who scorn and mock you when you attempt make a joke. These types of people only reinforce the lies we were told. As that evil bastard Joseph Goebbels said:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

In this way, by sharing the worst opinions of ourselves with multiple people and by asking for feedback, we are like a scientist putting his worldview to the test. These combined interactions become a kind of laboratory experiment. In other words, we are submitting our hypothesis of “I’m boring,” to the scrutiny of pear review.

Though “blind spots” usually refer to negative aspects about ourselves that we have trouble seeing, we can also become blind to many wonderful aspects of ourselves, especially if we’ve been shamed and told lies about those parts all of our life. The accumulated evidence of third-party accounts — whether from a trusted therapist, friend, or support group — shows us who we are, and can help inoculate us from the infection of historical propaganda and help us see our blind spots.

Such is the power of empiricism and finding one’s tribe.

Further Study

More on inner moms, critics, and other altars: