We come into the world hungry to connect: with our mother, our father, other attachment figures, with people, with the world.

We come to love and be loved.

We develop skills that allow us to come into contact with the world and be a part of it. When we are born, attachment is—in the best case—our safe place from which we begin to discover the world.

We are hungry to live and learn.

At some point—perhaps even from the moment we are conceived—many of us experience that we are not wanted, not loved, not protected, not felt, not heard or seen. That breaks our hearts. What we came for—to be ourselves, to develop, to connect—encounters the experience of:

I am not allowed to be there.

Or: I am wrong the way I am. And: I always have to do something to be loved. As children, we are deeply dependent on our attachment figures, so early in life we have to separate from what makes us human, what makes us alive: our feelings, our emotions, our needs. We cut off contact with them in order to be able to stay in contact with our attachment figures.

This separation, these experiences of abandonment, neglect, violence, and insecurity, lead to suffering that can limit us throughout our entire lives. We develop survival strategies that help us survive, but not really to live. We keep these strategies when we grow up. And we are then trapped in them because they prevent us from really being in good, secure contact with ourselves, our needs, our emotions, our bodies, and our fellow human beings. From being authentic.

We know very well how we suffer, withdraw, and shame ourselves. We know about self-judging, self-exploitation, sacrifice, fighting, destruction. But we have forgotten how to feel, to have compassion. To be at peace with ourselves and our neighbors.

We have forgotten how to BE, to BE ourselves.

Because we have learned that we always have to DO something in order to be noticed or valued.