All, absolutely all human beings, have ever worn small coats to protect our integrity, dignity or mental health. These blankets, which we call in the psychology of defense mechanisms, are magical because they seem to protect us from danger, but the fact is that the threat, and the danger in some cases, are usually not easy to combat as it might seem at first glance. In other words, these strategies are generally not as effective as they promise.
So sometimes we cover our ears tightly because we don’t want to hear a truth that we suspect is painful, the problem is that it ends up becoming something real, we end up covering ‘the ears of the soul’. I don’t hear what I don’t want to hear. Something’s so wrong with me that I’d rather live in ignorance. A very dangerous ignorance.
- The problem is that living in ignorance is also a punishment.
- Because what der-do dominates us.
- It will appear a thousand times in our lives until we accept it.
- That’s all? Carl Gustav Jung said:.
“What you deny, you dominate; What you accept, you transform it. ?It is a G. A. Jung-
It seems that life will never turn a deaf ear to our existence and place us all the time in those situations that we avoid to face and accept them.
To help protect us from these much-hurting truths, there are defense mechanisms. Do these truths damage the ego, damage our self-esteem, damage our conception of ourselves?For few people, it’s nice to accept what it has to do with a part they hate about themselves that they will hardly recognize in the mirror.
For example, there are people who assume that their partner loves other people and that bothers them; in fact, they don’t hesitate to throw it in front, when they’re actually the ones who love other people (besides their partner) so it’s your own desire that you project on your partner in the form of recriminations.
Recognizing that we love other people, when we are jealous, is a truth that can be both cause for pain and shame, to assume it implies recognizing that what we are terrified of seeing in the other is what we do ourselves. Anything?? Why do I have to deal with that? We’re ourselves.
Then comes a time when we have to see everything with some clarity and reality to feel one way or another, if we do not accept or recognize what is happening to us we will spend our lives seeing it with sovereign clarity in What we hate about ourselves, we see it perfectly in others, so clearly that we become hard judges and without any trace of empathy for the victim.
This defense mechanism, which somehow protects the integrity of our own concept, is called “Projection” and is one of the most used. Crossing it, we conceived in each other what we hate in ourselves, we alleviate the anguish that this mantle would create in us by seeing it in the other.
The more we project ourselves outwards, the blinder we go blind, the more I put my SOI, the more I blur and the more I lose the ability to act, but gradually we do an exercise in which we recover and save all those arrows that we have cruelly pulled out, we will certainly gain authenticity, honesty and conscience.
The projection is intimately linked to denial. Through denial, we cover something we don’t want to see. We’ve erected dams in addition to the real floods we have to deal with. We don’t want to see the truth or even feel it.
Denial, for example, is one of the steps a grieving person goes through, whether by a sentimental breakup, by the death of a loved one, by a radical and definitive change in his life, denial is a defense against anguish and pain.
But is life a pain, too? And we already know that he goes through it and accepts that we can keep walking. Defense mechanisms are there to help us in many situations, but we must get rid of them if we want to live to our full potential and be true to who we really are.