Now, this is where the fun bit comes in. Pay attention to how your brain just successfully defended you against changing your assumptions.

Specifically, the assumption that your parents need to be proud of something... when, in fact, normal healthy parents are proud of their kids when they make mudpies or say "gaga" or something.

To put it another way, your brain has habituated to assuming that your parents' pride is supposed to be conditional on you doing something, and that it's therefore somehow "not right" for you to feel pride in yourself, unless you're doing something that would get your parents to be proud of you.

This is the way SASS imprinting works -- we pay attention to what our parents and peers give us positive and negative SASS for, and then we internalize the algorithms we observe them using, for when to give ourselves (and other people) positive or negative SASS.

This is how we acquire our (effective) value systems, and the way to undo it is by changing the rules under which our self-supplied SASS pellets and shocks are delivered.

Part of doing this is just realizing that it's really you who controls your own SASS allocation. Just now, by me asking you how you'd feel if your parents were proud of you, you began to feel some of the relief that you'd feel if you increased your self-delivered level of Status. (Specifically, in the "pride" part.)

Of course, as discussed elsewhere in this thread, you stopped imagining as soon as you found an objection to the experience.

Notice how you then quickly changed what you were imagining to restore your previous world model -- you were to imagine what would happen if your parents had unconditional pride in you, and you immediately began asking, "but what do they have to be proud of?"

And the reason you're "feeling confused" is because I just asked a question that draws on your brain's information in a way that leads to a contradiction in your current mental model... similar to the confusion a theist feels when an atheist argument hits too close to home.

The response is also similar: defend the existing belief structure by treating the original belief as axiomatic... and the rest of what you wrote is, as you said, "rambling"... a successful distraction to get you away from even temporarily accepting a premise that would annihilate a chunk of your current worldview.

One of the reasons this sort of thing is difficult is because children are wired to believe their parents are intrinsically perfect, and that therefore any negative consequences of interacting with parents are considered to be your fault. If your parents aren't proud of you (giving you Status pellets), then you must be defective.

Of course, later on in life, we do gain the ability to criticize our parents, their values and behaviors. But by that point, the damage is already done: we've already adopted their rules for SASS allocation, tucked away out of conscious awareness. And thus, we rarely question them.

Now, the questions I've asked you are part of the process of pulling your imprinted SASS allocation rules into the light, where they can be destroyed by reflection. They don't work, however, if you back away from the question. Your desire to experience something new -- to learn more of the truth, if you will -- has to exceed your desire to remain comfortably within your existing world view.

If you repeat the question -- and this time, actually allow yourself to experience what it would be like if your parents had always been proud of you... then a portion of your current worldview will die, but YOU will become more free.

And that's because your current SASS rules are over-constrained compared to a normal, healthy human being -- one who knows in the back of their mind that their parents were always proud of them, always loved them... and thus has set their internal Status and Affiliation setpoints to a higher minimum setting than yours.

So, if you've ever wondered what the difference was between you and those other people, now you know. And you also have a piece of what you need to know to DO something about it.

The rest is really up to you.

I don't normally do the sort of thing I've been doing with you, with people who aren't paying me money to do so. But that's not as much a matter of needing to make a living, as it has to do with the fact that people who haven't put something important on the line in order to get my advice, aren't usually that motivated to stick with it through their resistance to the actual process of changing.

When somebody's paying me money, though, they implicitly grant me a role and a degree of Status in their mind that facilitates their complying with my instructions, even when it's difficult. It also allows me to hand them back some of that Status, through my paying attention to what they're saying, and showing persistence in sticking with the interaction myself, even if it's as difficult for me as it is for them.

(This same sort of transaction also occurs in therapy, coaching, and other paid interactions between human beings, btw. Because by default, we assume that at least our Status and Affiliation have to come from other people. The irony, however, is that the people who really have SASS in their lives are the ones who learned good rulesets from their parents for when to give themselves (and others) positive SASS.)

Anyway, now I'm rambling, too. ;-)