Innocent Aspiration (I)
What is It?
Innocent Aspiration is the Personal Attunement aspiration. As such it has the qualities of the Attunement Aspirations of a soft responsivity, a focus on attracting towards oneself what it deems valuable, and a strong sensitivity towards latent, delicate and idealistic matters. As a Personal Aspiration Innocent shares with Playful aspiration a focus on the agency and priorities centered on oneself in the here and now. This combination leads to Innocent Aspiration embodying a sort of guileless and pure idealism, pouty passive softness, dewy-eyed wonder, and fragile yielding needy delicacy.
How it Presents As Part of Whole Self
Innocent Aspiration is a vital foundation for being a whole person. In it lies one’s sense of soft inner aliveness, and the ability to relate to others from that place of vulnerability. Innocent Aspiration is also core to one’s vibrant sense of subjective embodied presence, authenticity to one’s values and needs, and cherished unadulterated ideals.
A person who has a strongly developed Baseline Innocent Aspiration will have a powerful conscious integration of their vulnerability. This will look like an unashamed embrace of the depths of their feelings and values attached to that, and an ability to request and receive from others in a vibrant yet grounded, interdependent manner. It will be easier to cry, rest, dream about one’s sensitive ideals, and savor experiences. While doing so in a way that is grounded in self-regulation and self-love.
A lack of development in Baseline Innocent will lead to a polarized presentation that is characterized by disconnection.There are two extremes this can present as. The first is a self-agitating and self-victimizing vulnerability. It will look like spinning in inconsolably self-distressing and self-loathing oneself. This is paired with fundamentally pushing away the idea that others can see the importance of one’s vulnerability sufficiently, so this vulnerability must be presented through self-abandonment, while paradoxically relying on others for self esteem. Often vulnerability is not sufficiently or cannot be safely acknowledged by others, I’m talking about a habitual alienation from oneself and others. Secondly, it can look like complete denial of vulnerability, in favor of an armored numb life. Both extremes contain the other. The self-agitation presentation leads to numbness to one’s actual restful, trustful, and tender softness. The disconnected numb presentation leads to a whirlpool of neglected inner life that will bleed into a reactive and antagonistic relationship to the world. Both are a denial of the ability to accept one’s inner life as it is without exaggerating or numbing. Despite drastically different possible presentations, lack of innocent aspiration will lead to the denial of lovingly acknowledging the actual un-tampered states of one’s depths to oneself. This further leads to an inability to share this with others.
How Accentuated Innocent Manifests Across Layers
Layer A: Lifestyle
In Layer A Innocent is characterized by a restful, sensitive, and gentle kind of preferred lifestyle. It is also associated with a focus on expressing one’s inner sensitivities, gentle ideals, and the creativity powered by these.
Layer B: Affiliation
In Layer B Innocent is characterized by one’s comfortable typical presentation being quite delicate and yielding.
Layer C: Intimate
In Layer C Innocent is characterized by desiring to take on intimate roles that are needy, passively soft, and compliantly and sensitively responsive.
Societal Stereotypes
In Western Industrialized Culture Innocent Aspiration is seen as primarily for women, children and the disabled, and stigmatized for men to present as. It’s often something that only the middle and upper class have access to claim. Within this framework, this coercive assignment of Innocent Aspiration onto people comes with restrictive and oppressive standards and elimination of autonomy. Embodying innocence has been seen as a core part of feminine sex appeal and something to ridicule men over. Physical beauty ideals ascribed as expressing Innocent Aspiration are neoteny, youthful hairless skin, skinniness, being composed of small round shapes, and being doll-like. There are also strong racial stereotypes with White women seen as more innocent, and East Asian women fetishized as being innocent(with East Asian men being mocked as such). People who try to express Innocent Aspiration without these kinds of physical features are often judged as out of place. The harassment potentially escalates to even being socially punished, mocked, or attacked from expectations being transgressed. In East Asia the dominant beauty and social norms strongly evoke Innocent Aspiration. It’s evoked in a manner that is simultaneously both punk, rebellious against strict social order and immense rigid expectations, and highly commodified and focused on superficially placating people’s deeper internal needs.
Some Feminist rebellions against these norms, in an attempt to stop this coercive infantilization, have led to some stigmatization of women expressing innocence, even of their own authentic volition. This has shifted and been challenged by contemporary Feminism and youth liberation. Especially among Gen Z the deconstruction of gender norms and norms of adulthood has led to a greater embrace of innocent Aspiration for everyone. Many nonbinary and gender expansive identities deeply incorporate their own flavor of Innocent Aspiration with less traditional associations. Though both Millennials and Gen Z and related social movements have been mocked with terms associated with Innocent Aspiration, eg naive, snowflakes, infantile, or crybabies.
Possibilities
It’s possible to have a society where people of all sorts can express innocence and vulnerability and have it cherished and celebrated. There can be a future where people are not gate kept from expressing both baseline and accentuated Innocent Aspiration based on how their body is shaped or their background. There can be culture and infrastructure that deeply acknowledges and supports the worth of everyone’s needs and the depth of feeling that all people share. There can be a world where it isn’t so hard for people to be soft, and cutely and guilelessly present for each other. It’s possible for the softness society has cordoned off to youth to be reclaimed as a fertile ground for imagination, connection, and seeding new gentler wonder filled futures.
