Where Does Insecurity Begin

Where does insecurity start? Not in adolescence, not in a difficult marriage, not in a disappointing career. It starts the moment a baby leaves the womb.

The First Separation

Before birth, a baby lives inside total security, no want, no waiting, no world outside itself. Then birth happens, bringing the first shock: separation. A baby's first act is to cry, and that cry is a protest against losing complete security. This is the first trauma, before there are words to describe it.

The baby quickly finds a new source of safety: the mother. At this stage the baby's world is small, and within it, the mother is everything. The baby trusts completely that she can handle anything, not through reasoning, but because it has no other reference point. As children, you had no other god except your parents. In that early period, a child even carries something like an absolute ego, certain it's the center of its own world.

The First Humiliation, and the Deeper Wound

Then the ground shifts.

Around age three, a child discovers that mother has her own ego, father has his own ego, so do siblings. All different from the child's own. The child's ego turns out to be one among many, not the center of the universe. This is the first humiliation.

A deeper blow follows. The child discovers the parents aren't infallible. Often the moment comes quietly: the mother calls out to the father because she can't manage something alone, and the child, who believed dad was almighty, watches him fail too. In that instant, the child understands these two people are fallible, like everyone else. The bond of absolute trust breaks. And once it breaks, something in you spends a lifetime trying to rebuild it, searching for someone or something infallible to lean on again. There's a longing in everyone to bond with a being you can fully trust.

This is the exact moment insecurity is born, not as an idea, but as a felt rupture. The baby expected constant, unconditional protection. What it received instead was the ordinary reality of limited, fallible human beings. That gap between expectation and reality is where insecurity takes root.

Stored Where Words Cannot Reach

A baby has no vocabulary for “I feel insecure.” But the experience doesn't vanish just because it can't be spoken. What's too painful to hold consciously gets buried in the unconscious, so the child can go on living, eating, playing, growing, as if nothing happened.

But what's buried doesn't disappear. It continues to shape how you feel about yourself, others, and the world, for the rest of your life. This is why you often feel anger, sadness, or fear that seems out of proportion to whatever triggered it, an unreturned text, an offhand comment, a minor disappointment. These reactions aren't really about the moment in front of you. They're old pain finding a new door. There's always a younger version of yourself underneath the adult, which is often why, past a certain age, the mind seems to suddenly react intensely, old wounds appearing as new problems.

The Baby Monkey and the Baby Human

A baby monkey, without instruction, knows exactly what to do. It knows that letting go of its mother means falling, and falling means getting hurt. This isn't insecurity, it's accurate discrimination, a correct read of real danger.

Human insecurity goes beyond survival instinct. It becomes psychological: I am not enough. I am not loved. I might be abandoned. This is possible because humans, unlike monkeys, have a self-aware ego capable of feeling isolated. Animals, lacking this self-consciousness, aren't insecure this way, a dog that loses a show doesn't experience failure, and the winner doesn't feel proud.

That self-aware ego is what makes insecurity a uniquely human experience.

The Child Who Never Quite Left

That baby is still inside you. Your body has grown up, but a child remains underneath, and at certain ages or events, it resurfaces. This is often why people are surprised by the intensity of mid-life, or by griefs and fears that seem to arrive from nowhere. Present events are rarely the true cause, they're triggers, waking something unresolved from long ago. Anger that erupts over something small today is rarely proportional to today. It's proportional to an older ache finally finding an opening.

Why Nothing Outside Can Finish the Job

The things you run to for security are themselves insecure.

Gold. Imagine being asked to guard a fortune in gold ornaments. You'd wake through the night checking it's still there. Ask the same person to guard an old vacuum cleaner instead, and they sleep soundly. Gold has real value, it can buy real comfort. But once you believe it can also make you secure, that value becomes subjective, and because everything subject to time is subject to change, tying your security to something finite means tying yourself to something already sinking.

The marriage. Suppose an insecure person marries another insecure person, hoping the union produces security. Insecurity plus insecurity doesn't average into security, it often doubles into something closer to double insecurity. Two people leaning on each other for stability are really just two reeds leaning on each other in the wind.

The great subtraction. One man, believing possessions were the problem, gave away his house, business, and savings to live near a teacher, hoping removing things would deliver the peace that having things never did. He didn't know the teacher was insecure too, quietly anxious for more disciples, chasing students, nagging them to stay. The man had simply traded one attachment for another, still missing the same thing. If addition never solved it, subtraction wasn't going to either.

The crutch. No one wants to need crutches, yet the more a person accumulates, the more insecure they tend to become. Money is a crutch. Reputation is a crutch. Fame, power, belonging to the right community, all of it can become a crutch, which is why every cult and closed group tells members some version of “you are special”: it's selling the crutch of belonging. The real question is not which crutch to reach for next, but whether you actually want freedom from needing one at all.

A Couple of Ways to Work With It

Two simple techniques can help:

1. Name it, don't become it (cognitive defusion). When an insecure thought arises (“I'm not good enough,” “they'll leave me”), notice it as a thought rather than a fact. Try silently prefacing it: “I'm having the thought that I'm not good enough,” instead of just “I'm not good enough.” This creates space between you and the thought, so you can examine it rather than be swallowed by it.
2. Trace the trigger back to its true size. When a reaction feels bigger than the situation calls for, ask: does the size of my reaction match what just happened? If a minor comment leaves you shaken for hours, it's worth asking what this might be echoing from earlier in life. This isn't about blame, it's about sorting what belongs to today from what's old weight being carried into it. Seeing the mismatch clearly is often enough to loosen its grip.

Source: BG home study of Swami Dayananda Saraswati

Based on the Teachings of Dr. Tina Rampadarath