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10. Love and ‘We’

At the foundation of our symbiotic primal needs to belong and to be welcomed is love. We unconditionally love the community into which we are born and we want to be loved by this collective as well. If this love is met and flourishes in the primal relationship with our mother, then this positive experience is transferred to other relationships and groups of people that are important to us. In this way we experience the quality of our mother relationship again.

We do not want to be alone and isolated. Being an outsider and not belonging is experienced by us as threatening and deeply frightening. Therefore, there is basically a high readiness to adapt to our respective group. Unfortunately, this can also be used to manipulate and harm us.

In 1951, the American social psychologist Solomon Asch19 proved in a simple perception experiment that up to 75% of the participants in the experiment would go along with the obviously wrong group opinion instead of sticking to their own correct perceptions.20 The larger the group, the more likely people are to adapt to the wrong group opinion. The possibility of communication and the presence of having others around us who we know and who also stick to their correct perceptions drastically reduces conformity rates.