Status anxiety, childhood emotional needs, and learning to accept ordinariness through early feelings of specialness and recognition

It's funny you mentioned churches. I mean, the really helpful thing about religions is that they tend to tell their believers that someone really knows them and really cares about them and is looking at them. And if you think about the impulse to be rich and famous and esteemed. It's really a desire that gets soaked up by religions. Religions are saying everybody you know in Christianity every hair on your head is numbered In other words someone really looking at you Someone knows you in the way that a parent a good parent knows a child The great thing about early childhood in a good and loving family is that child is a superstar. They come in, they sing a song, everyone claps, they're happy. In the morning, it's like the little prince has arrived, the princess is doing a pirouette, et cetera. That doesn't make a child entitled. Entitlement comes from deprivation. The ability to absorb an ordinary life comes from early emotional privilege. If the child is able to be the center of the universe in the early years, they will be able to accept, without too much psychological damage, a subsidiary position in adult life. That the need to be always at the center and always important is a compensation.