Our society is extremely judgmental. Billboards show us how we should look, powerful people on TV show us how we should behave, and from the moment we are born, we are streamed into an educational pipeline which is comparative by design. Living in such reality, meant that my emotional calendar had frequent meetings with inferiority.

The first and intense meeting I had with it was during my childhood. As a child, I loved eating! Not “this-is-a-cool-meal!” kind of eating, but “this-is-awesome! – I have a subconscious need for compensation – so-I-want-more!” kind of eating. Shortly after, the mirror showed no mercy when looking back at me, as my body started to grow “fat-centers” that were located like strategic army headquarters. In addition, being over-weight was a “CPU-intensive operation”, which meant I had very little energy left to paying “basic” attention. Broken flower vases, torn overstepped cables, and many more incidents did a thorough job at making me (yet again) feel bad about myself. However, interesting things started to happen when the headquarters were starting to shut down…

After an intense diet, combined with an exercise plan, at the age of 13, I reverted back to society’s “normal”. As my body was “okay”, my mind was still magnetized to inferiority. And for me, this was a perfect time to deploy the “Covert Messages” (CM) module. The way the CM module worked was as follows: It sent a “normally appearing” message, which contained a hidden message, carrying out what I really wanted to say. When a “normally appearing” response arrived back, it checked if my hidden message was answered with the feedback I really wanted. In such case, the module raised my self-acceptance.

Even after exhausting all my power-point ammo, the CM module is still fairly complex to visualize

After deploying the CM Module, it worked like a charm. The normal messages I was sending were “hey, I’m just acting normal here…” but the actual messages that they had carried were “Look! This is my new body!” The way I carried those messages was by buying tight shirts, and excessively tucking them into my jeans all the time. Needless to say, the responses I was actually hoping to get, were “you have got to be kidding me! What an amazing new body!” (Well, to be honest, I was ready to settle for less…)

Although at first, the module seemed to be working (as I got some positive feedback), over time I felt that its overall efficiency was very low. One reason was, that in addition to the positive feedback, I also got “other feedback” that I have perceived as negative. But more important, the main reason it didn’t work, was that after building such a complicated operation to be externally impressive, the lack of notice was itself a big disappointment.

Only a while later, I realized that the CM module was doing its best while trying to cover a deeper problem. And the problem was, that I had based most of my self-acceptance according to social feedback in the first place! Social feedback was everywhere – in every TV show, in the corridors of high school, and in the (not yet facebooked) internet.

The social link that (should have?) made me tuck in my shirt

Solving the deeper problem seemed easy – “I should just remove these social links, and not allow anyone to mess up with my self-acceptance!” However, removing ANY “social-link” would require me to be in a complete solitary! (Which, I admit, could be pretty productive for my “Command & Conquer: Red Alert” computer game series!). Anyway, instead of removing ANY “social-link”, I found it much easier to just refine it.

The best refinement I found was to keep these links ONLY with the people that I can trust, leaving the rest out of my system. As a result, when the people I trust made me feel bad, hurt, or anything remotely negative – I didn’t need to hide my emotions from them using some secret messaging paradigm! Instead, I could take a more authentic approach, which in turn led to an affectionate response back.

Sorry “other” people, your feedback is no longer accepted

As years went by, I learned to recognize many more CM modules that had been deployed by me in various areas of my life. Feeling low self-acceptance regarding my intellect made me want to sound sophisticated when I really wanted to say simple things. Feeling low self-acceptance regarding my leadership made me try to emphasize my authority where it wasn’t needed, and feeling low self-acceptance regarding my “successfulness” made me emphasize my achievements when it really didn’t belong to the conversation. In summary, every time negative feelings had started to emerge, the CM module requested to take over my communications channel and do it’s “thing”.

As I’m doing my best to release these modules from my system, occasionally, I find traces of them trying to affect my communications with others.

So… in case you find me use them, can I trust you to be direct and tell me?

Thanks in advance,

Guy.