Substitute-Sense-of-Self-oriented Goal
Some people lack a natural sense of being an independent person, because they didn’t feel acknowledged as such by their primary caregiver, in infancy. Their consciousness is forced by the laws of nature to develop something which is unhealthy but feels vaguely the same as being a real person.
The ultimate goal a person with a Lack-of-Sense-of-Self has is to undo the heritage of the past concerning his issue with not feeling ‘acknowledged’ by the primary care-giver as an independently-existing autonomous Being. He does this through actively trying to comply with and live up to the conditions of the ‘conditional’ love of this care-giver.
While still a child, maybe even a young adult,* he hopes, in this way, to gain the missing aspect of being seen and treated as ‘an independent, autonomous human being’ at long last. As he grows up to be an adult though, the striving and the goal are internalized and become ‘one with him as a person.’ By now he gradually has learned to ‘feel-good-about-self’ when his inner judge (really the voice of the caregiver) approves of him and this stage now brings the desired ‘emotional high’ that functions as a SSoS. The SSoS-or system is now in place totally and will have him repeat the same patterns over and over again (unless awareness is created. Only then change is possible.
SSoS-oriented Goal and Hidden Goal/Agenda are covering the same aspect in the theory but in SSoS-oriented Goal the emphasis is on the function of the root motivation of what the SSoS-oriented is based on: the approval or virtual approval of the caregiver. The Hidden Goal describes in ‘what general way’ the person tries to get the approval.
Thus the ultimate goal of the person’s life becomes trying to compensate for this lack and achieve the substitute by actively trying to recreate their behavior or state that evoked the ‘conditional’ love of this caregiver. Success in complying with the requirements or conditions generates good vibes from the caretaker (or later in life from the internalized image of the caretaker) and those good vibes produce a good-feeling emotional ‘high’ which is about as close to feeling like a ‘real person’ as this person ever gets.
*) In my own life I have distinguished a period in which there was a break in this ‘trying to comply with’ the caregiver’s conditions to give way to an opposite attitude: rebelliousness. Now it is rather objection against the caregiver’s conditions and questioning them. I haven’t taken this period into account in describing what the process of ‘living up to the conditions’ looks like. In my life it happened that I got back to ‘living up to the conditions’ and even in a more religious way around age 33, when I saw my life wasn’t going where I wanted it to go.
