Hello and Welcome to my new readers!

The idea of security drives much of human action and directed behavior. The search for security can take many paths.  There are different forms of security attached to financial, physical, emotional, relational, and personal safety and various personalities are drawn to various hierarchies of security.  The path chosen will be focused on the core insecurity for the person.

So if you find that being alone is difficult or you have your strongest feelings of insecurity around relationships then it was in that portion of your life that you have a lack of security and a lack of strength.  If you live here then money may not be of much importance but human interaction is a focus of security.  Individuals who live here will say,  “the money will come” but if someone doesn’t respond to them quickly they begin to catastrophize about the meaning of the lack of communication, sometimes even after 15 minutes of waiting.

If you focus on making money and creating financial security then not having money creates an inner sense of insecurity.  If you live here then relationships have less of a pull on you but wealth creation and savings is of great importance.  Individuals who live here easily let go of other people’s needs or requests and in general can survive with few connections but they have difficulty spending the wealth they created.  They may be unable to spend their money even on fairly necessary things because the spending causes them to feel paralyzed by insecurity.  This is an example of someone who has the funds but never spends it – the money in the bank, or in some cases millions under the mattress, creates no sense of comfort except in the knowing it is there.

How a person develops a sense of insecurity is related to his early circumstances, his place in society, his parent’s perspective of security and his personal temperament and skill set.

So an individual who focuses on financial security will usually have a story or myth behind it that describes a powerful point in his life when he was without money and the lack of money felt dire, dangerous, and life-threatening.  The gathering and having of money becomes the object of security.

In a different circumstance an individual who focuses on connection or relationship for security will have a story of being abandoned and the abandonment will feel like a dire, life-threatening situation.  Physical neglect and abuse in early childhood can feel like an abandonment and individuals can develop an insecurity in relationship as a result of this.  The relationship, being connected to someone, is the object of security.

The issue of insecurity is an equation of the experience plus the attached story or belief system connected to a feeling of life-or-death.  So not all individuals that come from poverty or abuse, who have a challenging financial situation or individuals who have dealt with abandonment, will develop this sense of insecurity.

And this sense of insecurity is something that shows up along a continuum, from slight to overwhelming.  On the slight end of the continuum, supportive groups and talking oneself through the anxiety can be enough to decrease the internal reaction or imbalance.  On the more overwhelming end it can be debilitating, interfering with an individual’s capacity to function.

The word security can conjure up many different connotations: a sense of physical safety, inner balance, laws and rules; the meanings are diverse but the underlying concept seems to refer to a sense of balance and safety.

In order to create a sense of security, the work needs to begin at home.  The first step is to build an internal sense of security or self-confidence and inner strength.

Child development theorists talk about this as the first stage of development for children.  It develops out of trust or mistrust of your caregiver. From there, following Erik Erikson’s developmental model, each stage builds on the previous stage.  A feeling of trust and confidence will lead to self-confidence, competence, success in relationships and career.  Creating this pathway for your child is a function of being present and real with her.  Creating this for yourself is a function of returning to neutral, returning to balance, through meditation and paradigm shifting with compassion and lovingkindness toward others and yourself.

Mindful meditation is a useful habit to help create this.

A feeling of mistrust can skew the development of these capacities; it can decrease your chance to develop the positive aspects of the stages.  It can result in a lack of self-confidence, insecurity, timidity, a lack of internal strength, a sense of incompetence and ultimately if enough aspects are negatively affected then insecurity can create an individual who has difficulty with relationships, is unable to make basic decisions, and breaks down in nominally stressful situations.

This situation can be positively affected with meditation, prayer, breathing, and reality testing through compassionate paradigm shifting.

The first milestone to shifting your relationship with security into balance is through the development of self-confidence.

More about how to development self-confidence and stave off insecurity in upcoming blogs.  Also see February 3, 2011, blog instinctive health medicine, self-confidence vs insecurity, and other blogs through the search icon above under insecurity.

See you tomorrow.

Beth