Sensing yourself as a “self” through achievements or the responses of others instead of a healthy abiding sense of being who you are. See also Direct Relationship with Self
When you sense your self through the responses of others to your actions or behavior, you have an Indirect Relationship with whatever it is that you call your “self”. It’s indirect because you are not in touch with your Real Self/Authentic Self. A Sense of your Real Self never developed due to a lack of the right kind of affirmative feedback from your primary caretaker. You were forced (by Nature) to develop coping mechanisms which over time you identified with as being you.
However, in this case your personal well-being is not your basic concern in life, nor is it being served by your actions. (In fact, you are out of touch with your real needs and desires, having adopted instead the need and desire to do whatever brings you approval.) Instead, your motivation in life is to accomplish living up to a set of conditions and requirements you have (subconsciously) accepted. This is to achieve your Hidden Agenda and get your caretaker’s approval plus the resulting “Feel-good-about-Self” that functions as a place holder for your missing Sense of Self.
So instead of your own person being the touchstone of your existence, you experience whatever passes for a “self” via your achievements: conditions to fulfill, tasks to complete, trying to be perfect in order to get the “Feeling-good-about-yourself” sort of ‘high’ that serves only as your (Substitute) Sense of Self.
This is a dramatic condition in which you are actually skipping life altogether, although that is not apparent to the outside world, nor to your Self actually because you are too busy juggling your Ego-References with their Hidden Agenda’s to even notice.
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