Part of our nature as humans is to develop deep emotional connections to other humans.
When we become emotionally attached to another human, we turn to them for safety and security.
We feel as though the person we grow attached to understands us in ways that others won’t.
Whether it is a friendship, a family member, or a romantic relationship, the connection we have to those we confide in is something that grounds us and satisfies a deep biological need.
Look at horses for an example - for horses, being as that they are herd animals, they have a strong biological need to be a part of a herd because they find safety for survival in numbers.
For humans, we find safety through the emotional connections we develop through social interactions with other humans.
We develop strong friendships and relationships to those we feel we can share deep parts of ourselves to.
What makes humans more complicated than other species like horses is our emotional needs coupled with our sense of identity.
We can refer to our identity as our ego, and when it comes to the human ego, it can often become intertwined with that of our emotional feelings.
This is what makes humans out to be the most complex of all living species on earth.
When we develop emotional connections to other humans, it is hard for the ego to let go of the people that are abruptly removed from our lives.
It is natural for the ego to hold on to the perception of what we build people up to be in our minds.
Anyone who has ever gone through a bad breakup can relate to something of this nature - during a breakup, we tend to only think about the good things we built up of someone in our minds and the feelings we have for them and completely disregard the reasons why it didn’t work out.
We become comfortable in our feelings of security we had with these people.
We hang on to the perceptions of people we once thought were going to be a part of our lives for a long time.
It is an awkward phenomenon for us to experience - spending so much time with someone or spending all of our waking hours thinking about them and getting to know them for them to just vanish out of thin air like a ghost.
While these feelings may seem complicated for us to make comprehensive sense of, having these kinds of feelings just reminds us that we are human.
If we don’t feel anything at all from someone’s absence, then we know our feelings for them weren’t as strong as we once thought.
It is much easier to sit here and tell you to not hang on to the perception you have built up of someone in your mind, but humans are not that simple.
The only way we stop hanging on to ghosts is through productive action towards restoring our confidence.
When we suddenly lose people we once felt secure with, our confidence plummits and we naturally become more defensive.
The more people we grow attatched to that are abruptly removed, the more defensive we become.
We begin to feel as though we cannot trust other people because someone we once built trust in is no longer a part of our lives.
By taking productive action towards restoring our confidence, we can begin to trust ourselves.
If we can confidently trust in ourselves and continue to work on providing value to others, we can ensure a higher probability that the people we attract along the way will have our best interests at heart.
We will begin to understand more clearly what kinds of people we want to have in our lives and remove the ones we don’t.