Scarcity Pt. 1

How expectations snuff out love

Scarcity is an oft lauded word that’s rarely defined. Scarcity is often addressed in a financial, spiritual bypassing sense and that’s important but what interests me more is how scarcity influences our relationships, how we receive love, how scarcity makes a home in our psyche. 

From a psychological sense, scarcity is experienced as a primordial insufficiency, the feeling something is “wrong” with you but with no idea what. FOMO, the fear of missing out, is centre to the experience of scarcity. The fear of missing out is nothing more than an existential fear of non-existence - that without the externalized perception of attendance, without the confirmation of the amorphous Other, we are Not. Scarcity means we are “making it work” and “taking what we can get” that’s “close enough” because these are knowable frameworks. 

In contrast, we are ironically afraid of our authenticity because there is no pre-existing framework because the very purpose of authenticity is that it is unrepeatable - because there is no schema, it is unfamiliar therefore unknown and coded in our brain as unsafe (not because it is but because it is unfamiliar). We both fear and desire our authenticity and externalize control and blame instead of recognizing how we hold ourselves hostage to expectations - both our own and projected expectations. These expectations inevitably lead to disappointment because people are just human and messy and our fantasy never happens the way we anticipate in reality. 

A core example of hoarding is time hoarding, expressed most commonly in business, hustle culture, a sense of urgency. This is activated especially under a capitalist culture that connects our worthiness with our activity and productivity. Social media culture is another experience of hoarding, “collecting” likes, followers as markers of validation. The purpose of hoarding is to collect treasures - in Gnostic spirituality, our inmost treasure is the scintilla, our divine spark. Our disconnection from our own Spirit (soul) creates this oscillation between scarcity and hoarding. 

It is expectations that create a need to be in control in order to fulfill the never-ending demands of the persona imago (to fill the empty space). Life’s constant reminders that we are out of control, we are a continual threat of exposing our true insufficiency so we overcompensate with a suffocating grasp to maintain the illusion of certainty / safety. We feed the possession of persona for the false promise of perfection - an infallible love, an oxymoron that negates the reality of true love. We are attached to our expectations as an operating scheme in our quest for certainty. 

In relationships, scarcity can look like not trusting the love we receive, bracing for the love to be taken away. We expect conditional love and mistake it for being safe because it is predictable. If we are in a role, upholding external obligation or expectation, there is clarity in our performance and within performance, it is unnecessary to be vulnerable. Unconditional love becomes a surprise, because it isn’t something we’ve experienced before and our body can mistake it as traumatic. 

Control is the opposite of trust - in fact, control crushes trust. Control is exemplified as a grasping, a snuffing out so there is an engrained fear of being “out of control”, just as a fire can be dangerous when it is uncontained. The etymology of the word “control” is to be ‘restricted’ and to be ‘plucked out’. This is where I love integrating mythology into the therapeutic process. The myth of Oedipus is the quintessential story of trying to control the inescapable. The King Laius tries to prevent being overthrown, the way all the old gods and kings try to preserve their place in power when their destiny is supposed to be usurped. The old gods and the old kings are supposed to be overthrown. 

When we treat other people as projects, we are extending the same conditional love we are accustomed to. To fully accept others is to fully accept our Selves. But how can we accept others in a way we haven’t begun to accept our Selves? This is the ever present question - do we love ourselves first or does our love with others show us how to love ourselves? The answer is always Both-And.

Sometimes control looks like responsibility - choosing responsibility over relationship. This is a coping strategy to avoid the potential pain of abandonment. When we’re responsible, we have clear expectations based on our role, a guarantee of validation and worthiness. But we become overwhelmed with the responsibility we have. This drawing towards responsibility is an overcompensation response to make up for feeling burden. A not-so-fun etymology fact is the origin of the word ‘burden’ means “to be borne” - as in, upon the initiation of our existence, our initial experience of being alive is that of being a burden. 

There’ll be more on this topic next week - following the same thread of control, expectations and love.