Over life time, I’ve been searching for answers and understandings the phenomenon of seeking for approvals especially in people’s life and relationships.  My divorce has brought up an intense emotional confusion.  Like most people, I was a fundamental source of love for other half, especially during my childhood and my marriage.  Which over time I’ve learned numerous ways of conditional love and unconditional love, as I constantly manage to gain everyone’s approval?  Although this changed over time and I expanded certain aspects of approval seeking from my parents and specifically my in laws, I end up realizing now that I was conditioned to others approval.

The mockery had nothing to do with my ex or my ex-in-laws. While I grow up with other peoples strong opinions, like most of us, I’ve dealt with my fair share of conflicts and challenges that end up affecting my relationship with others. I never questioned anyone’s love, commitment, and loyalty to me.  Much of the “conditioning” in our relationship (i.e. me thinking I had to act and believe a certain way to be loved and accepted) was voluntary.  As I’ve grown up and began searching for deeper answers, I come to realize the truth about all of the relationships in my life – family, friends, clients, and more.

One of the greatest book I read was “Will You Still Love Me if I Don’t Win?” by Chris Andersonn, and I believe the book was written specifically for parents of young athletes, but has a much extensive and larger message about parenting and life – it’s really about how much pressure most of us feel as a child, that affects us throughout our lives, when expected to make our parents and others proud.

It’s the burden to achieve and to “live up to other people’s expectations” that creates an enormous amount of anxiety in our lives.  Obviously there are strong expectations and positive forms of accountability that benefit us (i.e. when people around us expect success, integrity, accountability, kindness, excellence success, that can empower us in a positive way). However, instead we confuse it with a great deal of pressure on ourselves to act, look, and “achieve” in specific ways that we trust we “must do” in order to receive the love, approval and the acceptance we want or even worse we need it from others.

Unconsciously and consciously we tend to ask ourselves questions like, “Will you love me conditionally or unconditionally.”, or like the book suggests, “Will you still love me if…”

• I gain weight or my physical appearance changes
• I tell you how I really feel
• I change jobs or careers
• I disagree with you about important or sensitive stuff
• I don’t succeed or produce specific results
• I want to alter or renegotiate the nature of our relationship
• I don’t live up to your standards or expectations

These and many more questions like them create an intense forceful of pressure in our lives and relationships.  In many cases, like I’ve recently realized with my ex-husband, ex- in laws, we create most of this pressure ourselves using our own imaginations.  Often in a place where unconditional love is missing most expressively is within us. We have a tendency to be really hard on ourselves and to have lots of conditions in place for our own approval. This demand from us to be perfect which always sets us for a failure.

What if we stop conditioning and just loved and accepted ourselves and others unconditionally the way we are right now? Acceptance isn’t about notification, it’s about freedom, inner-peace, and appreciation of ourselves and others. When we train our mind with unconditional love and acceptance it helps heal, no, it doesn’t mean everything is “great” or that nothing will go wrong, it just means things will change in the right direction. Though, love and acceptance means appreciating the way things are and trusting that we are “good enough”.

Teaching our children from early age about unconditional love without seeking for approval of others is something most of us can benefit from it.  When people are seeking for approval it becomes problematic, and fairly damaging if we don’t consciously pay attention to it and eventually change it.

Here are three things you can do to loosen the grasp of approval seeking:

• Pay attention – to your approval seeking tendencies.  In what relationships and situations does this show up most often for you?  Like most things in life, change starts with awareness, so paying attention to when, how, and what specifically it is that you do or say (in your head or out loud) when it comes to seeking for approval is the first step.
• Talk about it– when you share it with other people in your life it impacts not only you but your significant other, your family, your friends, your co-workers, your boss, and your clients. Because when we share start that we’re activating out imagination to add more pressure on ourselves, which most likely pointless.
• Self-love– which in most cases it means acceptance. When we’re looking for acceptance from others we are depriving ourselves from the unconditional love we deserve. When we love and approve ourselves, we become less needy of other peoples approval, and start receiving the acceptance from those without digging for it.

While this may seem as an easy task, it’s actually tricky for many of us, because we have been programed from childhood to certain things that it becomes a real conflict between our subconscious mind and our conscience desire. Therefor working with a good hypnotherapist you can benefit greatly into accepting and loving yourself unconditionally without the conflict.  When you work with a trained hypnotherapist, you start working on the important internal dialog, and it’s necessary that we’re gentle, kind, and compassionate with ourselves.  Keep in mind that the love, acceptance, and approval we’re truly seeking is our own, we’re reminded that the answer is right within us, like it’s always is.

Ask yourself:

Where do you place conditions on your love and acceptance – for yourself and others? 

How can you let go of these conditions and start accepting yourself and others unconditionally right now? 

Share your ideas, commitments, thoughts, dreams, conational love and unconditional love for others to learn from.