by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Attempting to Justify Your Existence & Explain Yourself Are Almost Always Old Scripts and Programs – Not Reality
There’s a strange but subtle pressure woven into modern life which we can describe as a quiet but constant demand that we justify our existence and explain ourselves.
It shows up like this:
You’re supposed to look a certain way.
You’re supposed to feel certain things.
You’re supposed to think in ways that fit the approved script.
You’re supposed to do things in a certain way by a certain time.
And if you don’t?
Well, eventually is going to show up and ask you something like:
“Who do you think you are?”
Underneath this question (and similar ones) is the assumption that being whatever it is that you happen to already be isn’t ‘enough’, that your existence requires justification, that your choices require explanation, and that your life needs defending.
This article is a reminder that your REALNESS – who you are when you just let yourself BE first and foremost – is already enough and so the need to justify yourself is simply old programming that keeps you disconnected from yourself and life.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Stop Justifying Your Existence & Explaining Yourself: What We'll Cover in this Article
- Attempting to Justify Your Existence & Explain Yourself Are Almost Always Old Scripts and Programs – Not Reality
- The Hidden Engine of Justification & Explanation: Unconscious Guilt and Old Programming
- The World Is Obsessed With Justification
- The Trap: Thinking You Owe People an Explanation
- What Being an Actual Adult Means
- Childhood Programming: Performing Instead of Being
- Performing vs Presence
- Getting vs Receiving
- Why Performance Creates the Need to Explain
- The Way Forward: Grow Real
- The Final Word: Justifying Your Existence & Explaining Yourself
The Hidden Engine of Justification & Explanation: Unconscious Guilt and Old Programming
Many of us are walking around being driven by a subtle but powerful sense of unconscious guilt.
We might not notice it (which is why it’s “unconscious”) but it can shape our behaviour by constantly whispering to us things that make us feel like we’re doing something wrong if we just settle into BEING.
It leads us to live according to a bunch of UNREAL assumptions about ourselves and life:
- “You need to prove your worth before you can feel worthy”.
- “You need to earn your right to exist before you can fully live”.
- “You must justify yourself before you can be yourself”.
- Etc. etc. etc.
None of these assumptions are actually the TRUTH – they’re just conditioning that comes from somewhere in the past (i.e. we had to LEARN them at some stage).
This is because, as children, many of us learned that love, safety, and approval were conditional and so we learned to behave in certain ways to receive attention, acceptance, or protection.
In other words, we learned to perform instead of simply being present and this created a psychological pattern of “I must justify my existence to be accepted”.
Here’s a key insight, though:
This is all just old programming that keeps us locked in unreal patterns by pulling us out of presence, trapping us in the past, and preventing us from showing up as adults who are grounded in their REALNESS.
The ‘good’ news is that once we wake up to this conditioning by raising our Awareness, then we’re finally free to make a conscious choice about how we actually want to show up in our lives and who we truly want to BE.
The World Is Obsessed With Justification
Look around you and you’ll see external pressure to justify your existence all over the place:
You’re expected to:
- Look a certain way.
- Feel the “right” emotions.
- Achieve milestones on a specific timeline.
- Think within socially acceptable boundaries.
- Live according to predefined scripts.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Even self-expression often becomes performance because it’s being filtered through a self-image in the service of the ego that becomes something to construct, defend, and display rather than something to live.
What’s interesting is what happens when you allow yourself to simply BE whatever it is that you already are – when you feel what you feel, think what you think, and do what is real for you.
People become uncomfortable when you start to live like this and may ask you all kinds of questions to try and keep you in your place (according to them):
- “What are you doing?”
- “Why?”
- “How?”
- “Are you sure?”
- “Who do you think you are?”
- Etc. etc. etc.
This reaction is rarely about you and is almost always a projection of their own lack of self-belief and their own need to justify their existence.
Your freedom highlights their conditioning and your presence exposes their performance but if you don’t know this then you might feel compelled or obliged to feed into the patterns and feel like you ‘owe’ them justification and explanation.
(Spoiler: you don’t).
The Trap: Thinking You Owe People an Explanation
If we’re not careful, we fall into the trap of believing we owe people justification and so we can end up explaining ourselves constantly:
- Why we made a decision.
- Why we changed direction.
- Why we feel the way we feel.
- Why we live differently.
But, actually, only real justification we ever need is:
“I am what I am and it is what it is“.
And the only explanation we truly need is:
“Because I want to”.
That’s it.
We don’t need to go further than that unless we choose to – not because we feel compelled, not because we feel guilty, and certainly not because we believe we owe anyone our existence.
This is what it means to be an ADULT.
What Being an Actual Adult Means
Being an adult is not about age, status, or responsibility alone – it actually means something much deeper:
- Knowing who you are in your REALNESS.
- Choosing how you express yourself.
- Taking responsibility for your life.
- Acting consciously rather than reacting from programming.
All of this requires inner work so that we can ensure (to the best of our ability) that our choices come from reality rather than ego resistance, avoidance, or distortion.
But once we’re grounded in what’s real, we act because we CHOOSE to and not because we feel compelled to justify ourselves.
This is actual freedom.
Childhood Programming: Performing Instead of Being
When we believe that we have to justify and explain ourselves as a kind of ‘obligation, then it usually traces back to childhood programming.
This is most often because we learned to perform instead of being present – for example, perhaps we learned:
- To behave in ways that pleased others.
- To suppress our feelings.
- To earn approval through achievement.
- To explain ourselves to avoid rejection.
Over time, we created a self-image designed to secure acceptance but this self-image is often outdated and only serves the ego’s need for validation rather than our realness.
In other words, we become actors playing a role in our own lives instead of actually just living our lives in the realest way available to us.
Performing vs Presence
When we feel we need to justify ourselves, we live in performance mode and so we’re constantly:
- Managing impressions.
- Defending decisions.
- Proving our worth.
- Explaining our actions.
In other words, our perceived sense of our own value becomes tied to performance rather than presence and so we stop being real and start playing a role.
Presence is different (and more real) because it means:
- Being grounded in what actually is.
- Allowing yourself to exist without feeling that you need to defend an image of yourself.
- Acting from reality rather than F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”).
When you’re present, your existence doesn’t need justification because you just let it BE and remember what we said above:
“I am what I am and it is what it is”.
Getting vs Receiving
Getting instead of receiving is another type of programming that creates distortion in our lives – this is because when we feel we have to justify our existence, we constantly try to get things from life:
- Approval
- Validation
- Recognition
- Security
- Love
- Etc. etc. etc.
When we’re in ‘justify’ mode then we end up living in the Void and so we chase these things because we feel something is ‘missing’ (it is but it’s nothing external: it’s a connection to our realness).
When we start to wake up a little and start to find a grounding in our realness (by regulating our nervous system and taking real action etc.) then we start to realise something profound:
Life is always offering more life.
For example, there’s already connection, possibility, and experience available to be received…but we don’t notice this when we’re busy performing and trying to fill an internal void.
This is because – like we said above – many of us learned as children that love had to be earned and that we had to jump through hoops to receive it and so we carry this pattern into adulthood, trying to get what is already freely available.
Receiving requires presence but getting requires performance.
Why Performance Creates the Need to Explain
If you go through life performing and trying to get things, you will feel a constant need to explain yourself because deep down you already know that it isn’t real because there’s a sense of disconnection from your realness and you feel the gap between who you are and who you’re pretending to be.
You explain to keep up the illusion of pretence but this goes against a fundamental fact about life:
Truth doesn’t need justification, explanation, or even proof because the truth just IS and it speaks for itself.
What this means in practical terms is that when you make the conscious choice to start aligning with you realness and expressing it then you can let your life speak for itself too.
(And so you don’t need to waste time justifying and explaining).
Check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to start taking consistent real action in your life and to get in touch with your realness.
The Way Forward: Grow Real
Instead of justifying and explaining, the real path forward is to grow real which means to let the truth speak through your life itself.
This doesn’t mean being passive and letting life “just happen” to you – instead, it means consciously creating with reality (realness) instead of against it (ego).
A practical way to embody this is to follow this simple three-step process:
1. Create a Vision
What does your life look like when you’re living from realness rather than programming? What kind of person are you becoming?
Check out my free 7-day course to go deeper into all this: The 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness & Life Purpose
2. Break It Down Into Goals
Translate the vision into concrete goals that you can start working towards in a specific way.
3. Cultivate Habits
Build daily habits that allow you to grow into the person you need to become to get where you’re going.
When your life reflects truth through consistent REAL action, justification becomes unnecessary and your life explains itself.
The Final Word: Justifying Your Existence & Explaining Yourself
You don’t need to justify your existence and you don’t to explain yourself:
Any pressure you feel that compels you to do so isn’t REAL but is just old programming rooted in unconscious guilt and childhood conditioning.
When you wake up to this, you become free to be present in your own life, to act consciously, and to live as an adult grounded in realness.
When you stop justifying and explaining yourself and your life then you can let the truth speak for itself and actually start LIVING your life.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start living your REAL life and to start taking real action then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start moving.
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