The most powerful force for good AND evil in the universe

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Significance. Our second and most powerful emotional need.
AT the end of his life the famous therapist Carl Jung said that 2/3rds of his patients over his career came to him because they had lost the meaning to their lives.

We must have meaning and purpose to be able to go on in this life, we need worth and value to survive.

A mass murderer and Mother Theresa are doing the same thing in this regard, finding a place of significance.
This need is so powerful, so visceral, that we are unable to moralize it when we are broken emotionally, we will pick up a gun or a food parcel, whatever it takes to get noticed.

At less extreme levels, where most of us live, we try to get this need met falsely through placing our worth in the hands of others. We never think we are doing this but we do it every waking moment of every day.

We find significance through our job, business, family, some group like Rotary or even sports clubs.
When we do this we are putting our value in the hands of other poeple. We need them to be constantly telling us we are ok. And to ensure they keep telling us we are OK we give them more adn more power. We turn a 40 hour a week low paid job into an 80 hour a week low paid career because our boss owns our significance so we cannot say no.

As we scatter our significance amongst others we then have to learn to control them more and more to keep teh right messages coming. An impossible and exhausting task.

And then when we get fired or the messages get turned off, if we are really broken emotionally, we turn up the next day with a 45 and punish them all.

I tell you this capacity is in each and evrey one of us and is the cause of most of the tragedy we read about in our headlines.

So what about you my friend, how are you meeting your need for significance today. Because you are trying ot get it met.
Think about some of the more famous people who post on Facebook or Twitter for example. They are reminding the world of their significance. If they suddenly had no friends or followers, many they would become suicidal, because those people give them their self worth. We even keep friends that we hate because they tell us we are more important than they are.

Where do you get yours?

Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.co.nz