6 The origin and outcome of the Idealized Self-Image
Bones
6 The origin and outcome of the Idealized Self-Image
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The idealized self wants to be perfect right now. The real self knows this isn’t possible, and isn’t bothered by this one little bit.
There’s just no escaping our knowledge that unpleasantness is possible. It really happens. Our fear of this is ever-present, and that creates a problem for us… So we devise a countermeasure that we falsely believe will circumvent unhappiness, unpleasantness and death: we create an idealized self-image. In short, this is a pseudo-protection that doesn’t work…
There’s a direct correlation between being unhappy and not believing in ourselves. Our loss of self-confidence is proportional to how badly we feel. Our idealized self-image is supposed to avoid all that by supplying the missing self-confidence. This, we think, by way of our unconscious reasoning, will lead us straight to pleasure supreme…
We simply can’t be more than we really are in any given life situation… What we can do is have a genuine desire to better ourselves, which leads to accepting ourselves as we are right now… Once we’ve done a significant amount of personal work, we’ll start to see the difference between these two things. One involves feeling a genuine desire for gradual improvement. The other is the pretense of the idealized self that just wants to look better now…
Jill Loree grew up in northern Wisconsin with parents who embraced their Norwegian, Swedish and German heritage. Foods like lutefisk, lefse and krumkaka were prepared every Christmas. And of course there was plenty of beer, bratwurst and cheese all year round.
She would go on to throw pizzas and bartend while attending college at the University of Wisconsin, and then moved into a career in technical sales and marketing. She would settle in Atlanta in 1989 and discover that the sweet spot of her career would be in marketing communications. A true Gemini, she has a degree in chemistry and a flair for writing.
One of Jill’s greatest passions in life has been her spiritual path. Raised in the Lutheran faith, she became a more deeply spiritual person in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) starting in 1989. In 1997, she was introduced to the wisdom of the Pathwork Guide, which she describes as “having walked through the doorway of a fourth step and found the whole library.”
In 2007, she completed four years of training to become a Pathwork Helper, and stepped fully into her Helpership in 2011. In addition to offering individual and group sessions, she has been a teacher in the Transformation Program offered by Mid-Atlantic Pathwork. She also led marketing activities for Sevenoaks Retreat Center in Madison, Virginia and served on their Board of Trustees.
In 2012, Jill completed four years of kabbalah training and became certified for hands-on healing using the energies embodied in the tree of life. She began dedicating her life to writing and teaching about personal self-development in 2014.
Today, Jill is the proud mom of two adult children, Charlie and Jackson, and is delighted to be married to Scott Wisler. She’s had more than one last name along the way and now happily uses her middle name as her last. It’s pronounced loh-REE. In 2022, Scott joined her full time in their mission to spread the teachings of the Pathwork Guide far and wide.
