The vital need of each child is to be valued, seen and appreciated. When children are responded to with respect, love and joy, their sense of self and self-worth flourish. If this need is crushed, its unfulfilled anguish drives us into the fog of admiration. Either we turn into self-obsessed admiration-addicts that cannot tolerate in others thoughts and feelings that deviate from what we expect of them. Or we become devoted servants who believe that their life has meaning only when they bestow admiration upon those that crave it. Children's self-worth is crushed and their strength perverted into the coercion to please if they do not receive joyous appreciation. Parts, soaked with the anguish of being unwelcome and rejected since life's beginning, were silenced by other parts that want to protect us from this pain and buy into the corruption that admiration sustains relationships and grants a sense of worth. The experience of love is replaced by the compulsion to admire and the illusion that admiration endows us with love.
http://screamsfromchildhood.com/escape_admiration.html
