When I think today about when self-manipulation began in my life, I cannot identify a single moment that I could clearly name. There was no conscious decision to trust my own perception less. The beginning lay instead in many small experiences that seemed insignificant at first. A worried look, a warning voice or a reaction that suggested something was dangerous, inappropriate or too much. At the time, I could not tell whether that fear truly belonged to my own experience or came from someone else’s story. I absorbed it because I trusted the people it came from. What they feared had to matter, and what they wanted to avoid soon began to seem like something I too should protect myself from.
As a child, I did not examine adults’ beliefs with the distance I have today. I took their words, moods and reactions as descriptions of reality. If I was given the impression that the world was dangerous, I learnt caution before I had ever had a bad experience of my own. If an adult was afraid of change, I could conclude that safety existed only in what was familiar. If my enthusiasm for something was met with scepticism or warnings, I began to believe that every inner impulse first had to be checked for risk. In this way, I did not simply take on other people’s view of life. I began to mistake it for my own.
The fear that was passed on to me was rarely meant badly. Often, it arose from love, care and the genuine wish to protect me from pain. Yet people do not only pass on their experiences. They also pass on the conclusions they have drawn from them. Someone who has been disappointed may warn against trusting too much. Someone who has experienced scarcity may see security as more important than an untested dream. Someone who was judged for making mistakes may try to protect a child from the same experience through caution and achievement. Many of these warnings were therefore not universal truths, but personal memories passed on in the form of rules. As a child, I could not see that distinction. I did not merely hear that another person was afraid. I learnt that I too must have a reason to be afraid.
In this way, an inner map began to form within me, one on which some paths appeared safe and others dangerous. I learnt which decisions brought approval, which desires caused concern and which parts of myself were better kept hidden. At first, I still needed the external voice that warned me or held me back. Later, the memory of it was enough. I began stopping myself before anyone else could. That was where the first seed of self-manipulation was planted, because someone else’s fear had found a voice of its own within me. That voice did not sound foreign. It used my words and my thoughts. It told me to be realistic, sensible and responsible. Precisely because it sounded so familiar, I mistook my restraint for character, my doubts for common sense and my adaptation for a free choice.
For me, self-manipulation therefore did not begin with an obvious lie. It began where I mistook an inherited belief for my own truth. I did not consciously tell myself that I wanted to deceive myself. I genuinely believed that I was not brave enough, not prepared enough or simply not suited to something. I dismissed some desires as unrealistic before I had even given them serious space. I rejected certain possibilities without ever testing them through my own experience. The inner voice did not need to force me because I had already accepted what it said. That was where its power lay. It did not merely prevent an action. It made me believe that I myself had freely chosen against it.
This mechanism became especially clear to me when my body and my thoughts gave different answers. Sometimes I felt curiosity, openness or a quiet sense of anticipation while my mind immediately began gathering reasons why I should remain cautious. In other situations, a seemingly safe decision felt tight and heavy inside, yet I told myself that it was sensible and therefore right. For a long time, I trusted arguments more than what I felt. I had learnt that thoughts could protect me and that feelings might be unreliable. Only later did I begin to understand that the mind too can be shaped by old fears, and that a convincing explanation is not automatically true. My body was often more honest, but I had also learnt to reinterpret its signals by dismissing tension, tiredness or inner tightness as ordinary stress.
When I began looking at these patterns more consciously, I had to face the question of how many of my decisions had truly arisen from within myself. Some paths I had not taken because I feared uncertainty. In certain situations, I had remained silent because openness had been stored within me as dangerous. I had endured some things because change felt like failure. Yet I did not want simply to place responsibility for my inner boundaries on other people. They too had often been shaped by fears they had never consciously chosen. Someone who taught me to hold back may themselves have learnt that being visible was dangerous. Someone who warned me against closeness may have been deeply hurt. Fear is often passed on not because someone wants to keep another person small, but because limitation has been mistaken for protection.
The cycle only began to change when I stopped automatically fighting the beliefs I had inherited and started questioning them with curiosity instead. I asked myself where a thought came from, whether my own experience actually confirmed it and whose voice I heard inside when I began doubting myself. Not every warning was wrong, and not every courageous step was automatically right. It was about learning to distinguish again. Was my restraint coming from something I genuinely perceived in the present, or was I reacting to an old idea I had never examined for myself? Was my no a clear boundary, or a defence against an experience that might allow me to grow? Did I truly want to let something go, or was I simply trying to avoid uncertainty? These questions did not always give me an immediate answer, but they created a space between the familiar thought and my reaction.
The more honestly I looked, the more compassion I developed for the part of me that had allowed itself to be guided for so long by someone else’s fear. That part was not weak and had not deliberately deceived me. It had been trying to preserve safety and belonging by avoiding everything that had once been described as dangerous. In this sense, self-manipulation was not an enemy, but an old protective system that had failed to notice that I was now able to examine things and decide for myself. Today, I recognise the first seed in the moment when someone else’s fear became a belief within me, then a rule and eventually part of my self-image. But I no longer have to treat every familiar fear as my truth. I am allowed to recognise where it came from, honour it, and then decide for myself whether it should continue to shape the path ahead.