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Certain that we are not enough just as we are, we contrive unhealthy strategies (that we dress up as justifiable, or socially acceptable). In efforts to make ourselves more acceptable, more secure, more likely to stay connected we construct fresh forms of confinement: competition and comparison, people pleasing, rules for inclusion and exclusion, perfectionism, or emotional extremism that renders us inflexible and calloused, or perennially fragile. When sucked into the primal fear of unbelonging—being left out, excluded, disowned—we become sick in every sense of the word.