Abundant reasons to stop scarcely living

In your world, is there abundant room for you and what you need? If not, does scarcity cause you to make your needs teeny tiny? This article will explain how taking space and building internal worth have everything to do with whether you view your world through the “scarcity lens” or the “abundance lens”.

We all walk around wearing many lenses, and no one ever sees the world objectively. That’s not something to be ashamed of, it means that your mind is doing what it was built to do! Our many lenses are adaptations arising though personality, habit, experience, roles, and environment, and mostly they serve as a way of saving us time or protecting us. Lenses influence what we perceive and attend to in the environment and how we interact with it, which then impacts how we feel, function, relate, and live.

Let’s take a closer look at one spectrum of lenses that plays a pivotal role in the building of internal worth: abundance and scarcity

Abundance is when a person goes through life believing there is plenty of room for their own needs. It is an attitude of relaxed acceptance, patience, flexibility, and space-taking. Abundance people celebrate and are unapologetic about asking for consideration of their boundaries and accommodation of themselves. They take their time, embrace spontaneity and tolerate deviations in schedule in order to take room for the “just for me” experiences.

Scarcity is when a person feels deep down that the world has no room for them, nothing to spare with consideration of their needs. Scarcity people constrict what they take for themselves, and feel ashamed asking things of others. They try exert control and micromanagement so that time, resources, and other people’s provisions can be protected, fearing that deviation from schedule or routine will result in harm or loss. This comes from a lack of confidence in other people’s forgiveness, flexibility, or resilience, and an underlying resentment of one’s own needs.

These lenses have a profound effect on internal worth, and I realized that when I was working with a woman who had severe anorexia. The main thrust of our therapy was on embracing “abundance” because she had come to see herself as exclusively a vessel for accommodating other people’s needs, fulfilling roles, and accomplishing tasks. If she had feelings, she didn’t express them very often. If she had a boundary, she often stepped over it so that she could say “yes” to what others seemed to need. If she had her own unmet experiential needs, she saw these as a sign of weakness or that she was letting others down. Because of her scarcity mindset, she felt immense guilt whenever she “took space” in her world, although she was never able to pin down the exact reason for this guilt.

When I first proposed the idea of taking an abundance mindset, she looked at me like I had two heads. It was like I truly didn’t GET IT—her life had no room for her needs, and to think otherwise was just obtuse. This was a similar reaction, by the way, to her feelings about eating normally, it just couldn’t happen because her world wasn’t built that way.

I saw this pattern of scarcity again working with another male client who had depression. He often felt like he has to hurry though his day, and was overwhelmed that there was not enough time to get everything done. When his kids would come to play with him while he was out working in his yard, he felt torn between wanting to have fun and cherish the time he has with them, but being unable escape the pressure of the work, the drive that tells him he is not doing what he is supposed to be doing when he plays or relaxes.

I impress upon all my clients the importance of balancing energy and time between internal and external needs. When internal needs are unmet, dark matter is formed, which is anti-self energy that manifests in various ways—anorexia, depression, anxiety, self-harm, etc. Lenses are reinforced through the flow of energy in the human exchange system. Therefore, the more energy one puts internally, the more permissible and possible a person perceives that to be. By mechanically adding energy to the internal need system, the abundance mindset is strengthened. This improves the flow of energy internally, as what is in motion tends to stay in motion.

Many scarcity adherents fear that moving energy away from achievement and external needs will create unmet needs in those exchanges. Although we must follow the law of conservation of energy, we must consider the efficiency changes in that energy system. If the energy in the system becomes balanced, the unmet needs will be fulfilled, which reduces dark matter. Dark matter creates entropy, so less dark matter is less entropy. The energy system therefore runs more efficiently, and whatever energy is redistributed away from external needs is made up for when the efficiency of the energy system is improved.

So, I explain to everyone who has the scarcity mindset, never fear--all you have to lose is your self-resentment and stress. Living abundantly won’t cost you in productivity, it won’t deprive others, you won’t fail at your various life roles if you take more energy for your internal needs. Take a risk to live abundantly and have faith, there’s room for you in the world!