Learn how to teach your children to FEEL loved for who they are instead of relying on the fleeting Imitation Love of physical beauty for their worth.
Timestamps:
00:00 Facebook response to pretty girl crying because she thought she wasn't pretty.
03:30 Comments about beauty are a substitute for unconditional love.
05:18 Six negative effects of using beauty as Imitation Love.
Transcript:
A mother posted on Facebook an image of her daughter looking out the passenger side of a car.
The focal point of the photo was a young girl, maybe 14-15. Her fair hair was obviously meticulously styled, and she had blue eyes, perfect skin, high cheek bones. By the generally-accepted standards of the world, she easily qualified as beautiful.
Being Praised for Physical Beauty = Imitation Love
I observed further that her smile was artificial—or, more accurately, absent—and that her photo could have been used to illustrate the words “pouting’ or “entitled” or “unhappy.”
These observations were not subtle. In fact, if I were directing an actress in a movie to demonstrate pouting, entitlement, or unhappiness, I would simply show her this picture and suggest that she imitate it.
The mother mentioned in her post that her daughter had been crying because she was “not pretty,” so then in support of the Facebook post over 170 comments expressed (within twenty-four hours) statement like, "no she is gorgeous” (or stunning, beautiful, and so on). Those 170 comments were clearly a waterfall of praise as a form of Imitation Love—however unintentionally.
In the picture, the girl proved that she did not feel unconditionally loved, so she felt empty and worthless. But she didn’t even know what that would feel like, so she focused on what did make her feel worthwhile—her physical appearance.
When that feeling wore off, as it always does, she focused on how she was “not pretty” enough, honestly believing that enough physical beautiful would bring her true happiness. The attitudes of society—as portrayed in magazines, movies, and more—would certainly confirm her belief.
For her, being praised for beauty was the closest thing she could hope for to make herself feel worthwhile and lovable.” She’d never seen or felt unconditional love, so of course she yearned for comments about her beauty as an obvious substitute—superficial though it was.
If you don't have Real Love, then every morsel of Imitation Love becomes important, so you grasp for them, beg for them, work frenetically for them.
This kid obviously looks at herself in the mirror all day and sees that she's deficient, having NO idea what she really needs. Her assessment of her beauty is actually harmful, because how can she improve it?
She has worked diligently on her appearance, and it still doesn’t make her happy, so she obsesses about it and complains to herself and others that she is miserable BECAUSE she isn’t sufficiently physically attractive. She is well and truly stuck.
The Effect of Believing Physical Beauty Defines You
Her mother’s post on Facebook was begging for more Imitation Love for the daughter AND vicariously for herself. And the daughter sees it all happening right in front of her eyes, further confirming this awful lie. What is the overall effect of this Imitation Love festival?
- The daughter becomes, essentially, a prostitute. I don’t mean that to be offensive but merely descriptive. A prostitute sells herself for money, and this young lady is selling herself—body and soul—for a piece of praise. She's selling her body so people will like her. How do you think that's going to escalate over time? She'll be having sex with everyone interested—if she’s not already—and sinking deeper into despair as she discovers that it never, never lasts. It’s also never enough. I have counseled magazine cover models, and I assure you that they all describe the tremendous work involved to achieve the expected appearance. And it’s never done. They’re always trying to look better. None of it actually makes them happy, Never.
- Her mother is actually ENCOURAGING this, making it nearly impossible for the daughter to see her appearance as anything but her salvation.
- With her appeal for public approval, Mother is also trying to rescue her daughter, so the girl feels even more entitled to require other people to make her happy.
- Mother becomes even more invalidated as a potential source of Real Love to the daughter, because she's TELLING her daughter that Imitation Love is the way to go. Mother is weak and worldly, essentially the daughter's pimp, and the daughter is watching all this Imitation Love commerce and accepting it as normal, even commendable
- Mother gets 170 people to say that her daughter is beautiful, but the girl is still miserable. So now look at the daughter’s situation: she’s utterly trapped in a cycle of looking for praise all her life, finding it, feeling briefly flattered, then falling flat on her face with the realization that she STILL isn't happy. Then she'll have plastic surgery, Botox injections, more sex, and on and on, to get those brief moments of praise that never satisfy.
- Daughter will focus on her appearance—and the praised derived from it—instead of education, kindness, and responsibility. She will be so pre-occupied with SELF that she will be intolerable in relationships. She'll end up old and alone. I wish I were exaggerating, but I've seen it over and over.
Our Society is Obsessed with Beauty
Our society has valued physical beauty to be such an essential quality that not to have it is to be considered marginally worthy and basically unlovable. The reward for beauty is praise and this praise is almost the highest stature that a person can achieve.
Because of this setup we basically have to find something physically beautiful in everyone and comment on it when we see them. “You really look great today.” “Nice hair.” “Is that a new outfit?” Blablabla.
If we can’t find something, we fake it: “There’s something different about you, can’t quite put my finger on it.” (Then the other person has to come up with something: recent haircut, lipstick different, something)
Which dilutes the "beautiful" comments to meaningless.
The 170 comments on FB were meant to be supportive of the girl—I get that, even though it’s mostly a social, superficial convention—but all they’re doing is enabling her need for and addiction to praise.
Somebody who saw this post and sent it to me asked:
"Would people be better to respond something about how she is focusing on the wrong things or she needs to be unconditionally loved?"
(me) "While you are right about her need, On FB, praise IS the coin of commerce—that is what people exchange in that environment—so No, not on FB would you say such a thing.
"If you said anything to contradict the praise train, you'd be vilified as uncaring, shot as a heretic, and nobody would understand you anyway.
"If you were talking to the mother in person, AND the mother asked you about her anxiety about the whole appearance obsessions of her daughter, YES, you could try to teach her something about what matters."
In a Perfectly Loving World, Beauty Would Not Be Praised
It was a Man who sent me the post. He said:
"I have my own bias toward physical beauty, I admit. But I am honest about it, and I feel bad how much I value it. It does not seem fair we judge people based on something that they can not control. I am sharing this because I am interested in your perspective on how much our society is obsessed with beauty. "
Greg: INSANELY. It's stupid. You can be sure Mom is utterly pre-occupied with beauty too, and you can be sure that her daughter has watched that.
Man: In a world where Real Love is the norm would physical attractiveness just be a normal characteristic such as so and so is tall or so and so has brown hair?
Greg: YES. It's irrelevant. And when it comes to things that matter, NOBODY really cares. Think of people who are nearly universally regarded as great—as having made a positive contribution to our lives: Gandhi, Churchill, Einstein, Lincoln, Marie Curie, Rosa Parks, Rachel Carson, Golda Meir, and on and on. Look at the people who have made a difference in something that matters. Which of them was physically beautiful?
Of all those I just listed—found on everybody's list of making a difference—NOT ONE would be found on the cover of Vogue or Cosmopolitan or any magazine that was selling beauty. Zero. In fact, being beautiful is ENORMOUSLY distracting. The praise would strongly motivate you to go down that road of trading, and you WOULD tend to focus on whatever made you more beautiful and acceptable to others.
That WOULD mean that you would tend to study less, work less, and accomplish less—far too busy trading your appearance with people. That is a FACT, to the point that a "worldly beautiful" surgeon or lawyer or mechanical engineer is quite an oddity.
Man: With Real Love would we even consider how much someone is "beautiful" or how attracted we are to them when choosing a mate?
Greg: VERY little. One day out of the blue I asked myself if my relationship would change with Donna if she were a completely different height, weight, and race. No. I would not care.
In a perfectly loving world, we simply would not praise physical beauty. It WOULDN'T even MAKE SENSE.
Imagine that today I make an observation that you have a gorgeous fifth metacarpal (a bone in the hand). You might have one, but what in the world does that have to do with who you really are? And the fact that the metacarpal reference is absurd points out—convicts us, really—what we are focused on what when we say that someone is beautiful. Are we referring to their architectural beauty? The beauty of their physical engineering or their organic chemistry? No, it's all about SEXUAL attraction. We're pretty shallow and narrow-minded.
This is a very important concept for us to consider when we think of someone as being beautiful, or say something about it.
