What other people think of you

Everybody wants to be liked. During the day, the majority of your activities aims at this aspect. You express this through e.g. your choice of cloths, the words you use, your body language, gestures. Furthermore, you have taught yourself that is is "normal" to uphold a masque in front of others to preserve what you believe is private mental space in which you can entertain your "real" thoughts, while presenting a different picture to the other persons as you find yourself doing something that you actually do not want to do, do not do things that you want to do, painting a picture of yourself or a situation that is not true, etc.

You expect others to behave likewise, and this is the start of insecurity, since you know from your own behaviour that you cannot trust what somebody says, does or lets you know in other ways,. This gives your personality a lot of opportunities to be alert, suspicious, and question what is really going on. Behind the things that you can perceive, there seems to be a whole world of its own. There obviously is something very wrong with you as well, since this all seems necessary and you need these filters in order to function in this world. Your personality wants you to believe that his constant interference is necessary for you to live in this world.

Being liked is one of the basic aspects of your personality. When he has succeeded in getting you accepted in a reasonable amount of situations, then he can get away with it. However, being liked only means that your personality has a preference for feedback that conveniently confirms the picture he has made of himself, so that it can be strengthened through this experience. He wants to feel that his presence matters, that he makes a difference, that he is good the way he is. And yet, he can never be completely sure about this, since he can never trust completely the information that comes from behind the masks of others.

Only personalities make and maintain masks, since this aspect of you interprets each and every situation and upholds a worldview of his own. Now this is only a choice, and a choice can be reconsidered. Whatever it is that you see, hear or perceive otherwise does not mean anything in itself. It is not your personality who determines your life, although he will gladly use every situation in which this seems to be the case as a prove that he is in charge. One day this game will no longer be attractive to you, and once that happens, you start looking for the real essence that is "you".

The origin of your personality can be found in the thought that you could be separate, and different from your inner Self. Now this is a situation that can never really work, since it is only a weak and instable sorry substitute. So stop looking for safety and unity through the worldview of your personality, simply because you can never find it there.

Now what when somebody is not nice to you? Use the situation to practice the remembrance that nice and not-nice are only two aspects of the same principle: judgment.