“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Children were urged in one way or another to be aggressive, competitive, and generally to fit the conventional idea of the extrovert. It often seemed that there was no in-between point, and if you did not fit one mold, you must therefore take your stand and be the other.

You believed that you should be outgoing, vigorous, somewhat competitive, and you believed you should be socially oriented, while at the same time you believed that those things conflicted in a basic way with other drives. You felt you should be introverted, have periods of isolation, time to sit and think, to write and paint, to look inward rather than outward. In periods of intense inner activity that were enjoyable and productive, you disapproved of yourselves because you were not at the same time socially oriented, vigorously involved in exercises, or physically oriented pursuits, and so you disapproved of yourselves.

Give us a moment.... Some of your inner feelings are difficult for me to express, because they are in so many layers that I am not sure of their relative importance. To some extent, again then, the sale of a book, a new sale, is somehow connected in your mind with disapproval of yourself, Joseph, in that Ruburt seems able to express what I think you interpret as competitiveness, that you feel you are not expressing—and you add that to your arsenal of disapproval. (Very good.)