I have insecurities. Oh, gods, I’ve got too many of them. Sometimes I’ll try to be mature and fess up and face them, and then I’ll turn right around and lie to myself that I’ve got it all together. It’s so hard, sometimes, to not do the high school thing and do/say whatever it takes to get that all too elusive external validation, the deeply yearned for approval from others.

Self-respect should have the power to negate a driving need-to-please.

Maybe insecurity is a sort of checks-and-balances system hard-wired into the human psyche, to prevent or halt rampant narcissism. My own need-to-please might not be genuinely coming from me, but from some hold-over from social conditioning beginning in early childhood.

Isn’t it social conditioning — family, school, work, et cetera — that installs all those buttons on you,… that everyone but you gets to push?

Every time one of those buttons is pushed, that conditioned reflex gets a fresh dose of reinforcement. Every time one of those buttons is pushed on me, I get to feel stupid all over again, like it’s some brand new, horridly bad emotion, and I don’t know what to do with it. I hate that. I hate that I have a button on me that someone else can push and get so strong a response out of me with so little effort on their part.

This is like a really bad habit, on my part. How do I break myself of it, how do I prevent reacting in the programmed manner? Not being a control freak, I don’t want to be controlled by anyone else, either.

Shouldn’t I be in charge of me?

It’s tough, keeping that single New Year’s Resolution to myself — to rip out all those bloody buttons, one by one. But I gotta to do it.

I suspect that presence of mind is the key.

Hmmm. What would Mister Spock do,…?