Human beings get conditioned to survive inside an intricate network of unconscious psychological defenses. In the process of becoming civilized children inherit a rigid mindset for self-preservation from their parents and culture. This mindset is based on primitive strategies that unconsciously control behavior in order to produce a familiar feeling of safety. The “invisible” problem happens when you identify with the defense mechanism that is attempting to protect you. The defense mechanism is your ego and the identity it constructs.
Feeling safe and being safe can be a congruent experience, when verified by your common sense, or as in most cases, two different events, one real and the other imagined. The ego fights to protect its many self-images, which aren’t real.
The belief that safety is the most important aspect of life is inherent in everyone unconsciously. Making every decision based on the need for safety drastically influences the way you approach life. How open are you when having intimate contact with others? How do you experience romantic relationships? Do you feel safe in social interactions?
It is a physiological fact that rational intelligence decreases the more threatened you feel or think you are. When you perceive a threat and your unconscious instincts react automatically, the number of options to choose from are: attack, surrender or running away.
There are parts of your ego stressed because they never feel safe. Many threats you perceive are the products of the way you think and those thoughts generate how you feel. When you are not aware of this you are in the trance of psychological defenses. These mental programs were acquired in childhood and the safety produced isn’t safe, it hurts you and results in many forms of self-manipulation.
· Do you feel uneasy, nervous, and insecure in new situations and with new people?
· Do you become aggressive when you don’t get your way?
· Are you afraid of confrontations?
· Do you become aggressive in confrontations?
· Do you tend to withdraw from others?
· Are you stressed by making mistakes?
· Do you fear failure?
· Do you suffer from indecision?
· Do you compensate for your fears by agreeing to what you don’t want?
· Are you critical and judgmental?
· Are you manipulative to get attention?
· Do you blame and complain?
· Are you afraid of public speaking?
These are all examples of the effects of psychological defenses, there are many more. Until you value being Self-aware and, you master having confidence in you, it is unlikely that you can truly be at ease with yourself and others
The cost of living your life under the assumption that you need defenses to be safe generates a continuous low-level anxiety that feeds insecurity and aggression. Defensiveness leads to either a cowardly or an offensive attitude. The coward seeks to avoid conflicts and confrontations disguised under attitudes such as “being understanding”, “being helpful” or dismissing and diminishing the impact of a situation by believing “ is not that important”. The offensive attitude is always seeking to control and dominate situations.
These emotional attitudes are psychologically and physiologically stressful and affect all areas of your life. Defensiveness does not have response-ability to address the dissatisfaction of a lack of: fulfilling intimacy, enjoyment of life, fear of spontaneity, diminished sexual passion and fear of change and taking new risks. The most detrimental effect of defensiveness is absence of inner peace. All of these compromise your wellbeing.
Defenses act as invisible mental shields made of self-images. They have a built in self-reinforcing mechanism that consist of fear based core beliefs. The origins of core beliefs are repeated experiences where your basic emotional needs failed to be adequately satisfied by your caretakers. This hurts a lot when you haven’t learned to armor yourself or is impossible to distract yourself from how you feel. The survival adaptation to this dreadful circumstance is to protect yourself from the pain of not having what you need by building a personality structure.
The personality is built to adapt to the painful experiences of feeling rejection and abandonment during the formative years. Your personality as a whole is a defense mechanism reacting to the experience of:
1-Physical and emotional pain including the fear of separation and disconnection from others.
2-Existential anxiety from being disconnected from the depth of your being.
A personality is required during childhood and adolescence in order to protect your innocent and fragile sense of self. The self-images that makeup your personality function as a set of instructions on how to behave in all situations. When your behavior becomes the automatic acting out of stimulus-responses you are reduced to a human-doing. You have lost contact with your capacity to be intimate, sensitive and in-touch with the essence instead of the appearance of things. In adulthood believing you are your personality disconnects you from your true and authentic Self, access to your common sense and the presence of being to enjoy life as life is.
A personality is a mental construct that by its very nature resists internal changes to its structure. The core beliefs that maintain the need for protection deny the fact that as an adult you now have the capacity to access inner resources and become what you need. Instead of addressing emotional needs defense mechanisms are designed to distract you from your emotional needs by focusing your attention externally.
Do you have implicit trust that you have internal resources to satisfy everything you need? Can you make clear boundaries with others about important matters feeling confident and relaxed? Do you feel safe with people you don’t know? How do you handle unexpected adverse circumstances?
Adults who live their lives with an unconsciously defensive attitude cannot know themselves or others intimately. Defensiveness/offensiveness are disempowering postures: they attacks in order to protect. This compromises your ability for creative responses to new challenges. By obsessing with safety, your personality succeeds in diminishing your desire for passion and excitement and it makes taking risks a painful experience.
The primary goal of core beliefs is survival based on avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. For many pleasures get reduced to safety, they can only enjoy what they already know. In fact, the need for survival unconsciously focuses attention on safety and security at the expense of personal development and, the pursuit of mature forms of happiness.
When your unconscious goal is to be safe you put all kinds of unconscious limits on yourself and, you create a rigid mind-set of self-control and control of others. Do you enjoy being controlled?
A) Confusing a real need for protection from a real threat in the external environment, with the fear and pain of an internal need not being satisfied.
B) That you identify with the core beliefs in lack that sustain the need for safety.
Your personality is constructed in childhood out of positive/feel good and negative/painful self-images whose interaction ignites a continuous unconscious internal power struggle. Negative self-images make up your shadow, the parts of you that you disown, we all develop this compartment of unconsciousness.
Self-images are how you see yourself and how you believe others see you. Self-images coalesce into sub-personalities that end up disconnected as if they were separate parts acting as separate people in conflict. For instance the function of satisfying the emotional needs of the inner child is in conflict with the function of maintaining safety, this is the job of the inner parent, the conscience who decides what is right and wrong. The inner parent most of the time perceive satisfying emotional needs as dangerous because of childhood conditioning, so it suppresses awareness of the needs.
Suppressing awareness of the conflict between satisfying needs and maintaining safety reinforces the shadow and intensifies internal fear and aggression. This cycle adds another compartment of internal disconnection and separation. These inner conflicts give rise to the voices appearing to be separate people talking in your head.
Anxiety is a by-product of a personality structure that lacks emotional integration and mental detoxification. The ego, your sense of being a separate entity, identifies with the anxiety because of its function, which is to harmonize the overwhelming conflict of satisfying the demands of emotional needs, the acquired responsibilities of life and fulfilling your inherited moral standards, your rules of conduct. Anxiety is a signal that there is a problem and it has to be resolved immediately. In other words, you are cut between the desire for pleasure, the constraint of reality and the fear of punishment for violating moral standards. This is overwhelming to an ego identity that has the resources of a child.
Defense mechanisms protect you from experiencing your inner conflict by making it look like you are in conflict with the external environment. For most people, most of the time, their defense mechanisms are working unconsciously. Defense mechanisms distort reality. They generate an alternate trans-like reality where the world is reduced to the familiar relationship between a child’s needs and his parent’s rules.
Internal self-talk is how your defense mechanism controls how you feel and behave. At times the inner child dominates this conversation, when you are engaged in blaming, complaining and demanding others be responsible for you. At other times self-talk is dominated by the inner parent, when you are attacking you or others by negatively judging, comparing and evaluating against some external standard.
The first step in interrupting your defenses is to become aware of them. Notice the automatic tendency for judging, blaming, complaining, distrust of you and others and all forms irresponsibility. These behaviors are easy to recognize once you commit to be aware! There are specific defense strategies including projection, denial, suppression, repression and sublimation.
The next step is to begin the process of recognizing and owning your shadow. This requires emotional integration and, for most people, healing early childhood trauma. People who live in fear or are aggressive disown their shadow. Integrating your shadow requires overriding your inner child’s drives and your inner judge’s aggression. A well functioning adult trust her common sense, instead of outdated core beliefs. Common sense is a mature source of internal authority distinct from your personality. I recommend the help of a trained professional for successfully integrating your shadow and learning to make rational instead of emotional decisions by trusting the authority of your common sense.
In the process of shadow integration you will be required to adopt the attitude of response-ability. Being responsible for your own needs and aggressive drives will free up your aggression and allow it to mature into strength. You can learn to contain your strength and vitality instead of exhausting yourself by acting out angry outbursts or holding on to unresolved fears. When you trust your inner being you become power-full and act confidently.
The attitude of being defensive requires force and effort. The attitude of defenselessness requires presence, which is effortless by virtue of being powerful and self-sustaining.
Lastly commit to develop an ever-greater capacity for intimacy. True happiness comes from the ability to form and enjoy close loving relationships. Learn to be intimate with you and you wont need defenses. Closeness, togetherness, sensual contact and trust require a willingness to sustain openness. In order to experience these forms of true intimacy there must be a two-way open interaction so that you and those you are interacting with can influence, not control or manipulate, each other. Defenses are barriers to intimacy.
Safety is a concept. In reality there are internal emotional needs to be met and external circumstances that are best resolved by allowing common sense reason and the wisdom of lovingness within you.
Written by Osiris Montenegro
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