“The reason why I have no motivation to thrive is that I do not think that it is worth it anymore.” If this thought resonates with you then this post may be for you.

The dependency trap

• “My will to thrive is dependent on the world around me. Especially on people, and people who are the closest to me can have the biggest negative effect on my motivation.” 
• “I get a kick of motivation, go full in on it, and then something happens and I lose it. The main thought I have is that it is not worth it.”
• “I explained an insight that I had to my partner and he/she did not understand or was not interested in it. It made me angry and then later depressed.”

If the above examples trigger you or you find a resemblance of some sort in your life then it can be that you are in a stage of what is called co-dependency or counter-dependency. To make a long story short, it is a normal stage of development and one of its main characteristics is that we are emotionally dependent on another person and we want the other person to satisfy a need we have. It is normal and healthy in the sense that we all go through it early in life and it is not normal in the sense that most of us stay in these stages in adulthood. It is so widespread that we do not realize that it is not normal. 

When I am in a “dependent state of mind” it is because I have a need from an external source. There is nothing and nobody in the external world who can always give me what I want and is always trustable. So it is properly easy to lose motivation in this state of mind. 

The good news is that even if you are in this state, there is nothing wrong with you, however painful it may be.

Internal motivation to thrive and the True Self

There is such a thing as internal motivation. This comes from my True Self. My True Self is independent. And it can choose to be mutually dependent with others on top of its own independence.

I know when my motivation comes from my True Self: It feels so easy, it is very alive, it is strong, it is happy, it is natural to me. It doesn’t tire me like a motivation that comes from my False Self. I barely even can or want to rationalize why I want to thrive. I know that it is my natural state.  

(I think that all motivation is internal ultimately. We just may have some glitches here and there.)

Does my ego or my True Self motivate me?

You may not subscribe to the above explanation of “dependency, stages of development, and unmet needs”.

Maybe this one is closer to you: The ego isn’t real. And so its motivation to thrive isn’t real either. Even if I thrive through the ego, it will not last. The ego works with our fears and so its function is to keep those fear “alive”. So the ego will just not let true motivation and true success last because that would mean an end to its existence. On the other hand, the True Self can only work with true motivation. And that does bring the ultimate happiness that I want to experience through my successes.

Since the ego wants something completely different than my True Self, I shall not have such a strategy that I am ok to have a bit of both. 

A way out that worked for me

I am the type who always wants to figure out how things work – and why they don’t work and what is the problem. And I have always wanted to ‘pass’ on what I learned as this is giving me the biggest joy. Pretty early in life, I bumped into this pattern of mine that “I am excited to share something and happily acknowledge that the other person received it and got equally happy with it, but instead I get non-understanding, non-interest, ridiculing, and alike.”. (This is a sort of “Drama of the Gifted Child”. I am not gifted more than anyone else. We are all gifted and it is so frequent that we lose it.)

So I developed this mindset where I felt that all my life was about waiting for something to happen, and probably I don’t have much value in what I think and do (and ultimately in myself). So you may imagine I was jumping between trying to do it “better” or getting depressed. 

Until I could finally see that the source of most of my problems was that I chose not to live out of my True Self. This came when I understood and decided that the only choice I have is to live my True Self. A couple of other things also happened – maybe in parallel or one after the other, I don’t know: I understood that there is nothing wrong if people do not get as equally excited about what I am describing them. Nothing wrong with them and nothing wrong with me. I also developed more resilience. Painful things do not touch me as hard. I enjoy being my True Self more and more by the day.