A defense mechanism gone wrong

I have always hated the suggestion that it’s my outlook on things (the world, the day, other people, activities, life) that affects my experience with them.

It sounds so trite, so corny… so… stupid… kind of reminiscent of people saying that you can “just snap out of” a depression, or that the past is the past and we should just get over it… don’t we all generally agree that those particular platitudes are so wrong as to be offensive? If it were that easy, we’d all just do it and go on with our lives. (Well, most of us would, anyway…) So is it any less offensive when someone suggests that the only thing we really need to fix is our attitude?

Well… it’s probably not the only thing that needs fixing for any of us – but every now and then I am reminded that my approach to things really does make a qualitative difference in my experience.

Generally, I am not a patient person. Just living in the world demands far more patience than I have – which means that I’m generally going through life in a state of repressed (or not so repressed) irritation.
But ever so occasionally, my mood mellows.

Such was the case last week on my way to the gym – and it kind of took me by surprise. I was driving along, stuck behind two slow-moving morons who had to drive slow next to each other instead of leaving a lane open for passing – and I realized that this lack of courtesy, which would ordinarily have me fuming over the whole minute or two it might add to my trip, just wasn’t bothering me that day.

Wonderful realization!

And on its heels came a host of additional realizations. I felt less stressed, less tense, less on edge, less hypervigilant. The prospect of being in a gym with forty or fifty other people was less daunting than usual. I smiled at someone in passing, and they smiled back – and I thought in passing about how smiles are things that get passed around, and if you aren’t giving them out, you aren’t likely to be receiving many of them either. Everything looked different, everything felt different… I actually felt relaxed…

The mellow mood didn’t last long – but long enough to make a clear impression on the day, and on the following week.

It made me think about what I’m putting into my world – not so much into the world at large, although I suppose you could put it in those terms if they make more sense to you – but what I was adding to each of my days and to the environment around me as I move through my days.

There are aspects of my life at the moment and historical aspects as yet unresolved that are going to cause me some stress regardless – they’re just stressful things, and there’s nothing that’s going to change that – but this compare-and-contrast exercise made it very clear that not all of the stress in my life is coming from those things. Actually, I’m not sure it could even be said that most of my stress is coming from those things.

It appears that quite a lot of stress is coming from how I look at the events in my days – large and small. And I suspect that, since the actual sources of stress feel so large or resolve so slowly, I am deflecting that stress onto smaller things, like annoying drivers, in an effort to put some of the stress onto things I can deal with right away.

It’s a defense mechanism – but the unfortunate side effect of this defense mechanism is that I’m spreading the feeling of stress around to all kinds of places it doesn’t belong, and I end up feeling like the whole world is going out of its way to stress me out.

As you might imagine, this is ultimately not very helpful at all.

I might not be able to make the genuine sources of stress any less stressful than they are, nor can I necessarily make them resolve any faster. Some things just have to be taken at the pace they come, and they can’t be rushed along for love or money. But at the very least, I can stay clear on where the stress is actually coming from. I don’t need to spread it around to everything.

I think it’s important to remember that sometimes a defense mechanism, even though on a subconscious level we intend it to be helpful – is not always a real help. Sometimes our defense mechanisms can choose an unhelpful defense, or they can go out of control and run amok.

A defense mechanism, after all, is intended to hide or defuse something that we can’t or won’t look at, in ourselves or in our world – it doesn’t solve anything, it’s just another way of avoiding the truth.

And we’re all experts at avoiding the truth – but part of genuine healing is to avoid it less.

Although, as usual, we don’t have to do this. As usual, we can probably go through our entire lives without delving into our defense mechanisms, without looking at what we’re doing or why we’re doing it or what we’re hiding from ourselves.

Our defense mechanisms might cause us a lot of additional stress and trouble, headaches and angst – and depending on the defense mechanism in question, we might be causing a lot of those things for other people as well – but we don’t have to do anything about it, and in the short run, it will always look easier to just let it slide.

In the long run, though… I’m probably not even halfway through my natural lifespan. And is this the way I want to live the rest of my life? Do I want to go through my remaining decades, habitually spreading a few big stressors around to all the little things that happen, so that every event ends up feeling stressful to me? Do I want to spend half a century being stressed out over nothing?

No, thank you. I’d rather make the effort to deal with it right now, so that hopefully I can have whatever time there is afterwards without that particular problem dogging my heels.

We are not stuck with the default solutions our subconscious puts into place.

Conscious attention and conscious choice and conscious effort can repair and improve on the stopgap answers our defense mechanisms have come up with – and if we actually attend to and resolve the real problem, then the defense mechanism will no longer be necessary.

But as usual, this often involves facing some really unpleasant truths – in this case, usually about ourselves – which can be harder than facing the truth of our various pasts, although in a different way. We are all accustomed to being insulted and degraded and feeling worthless and feeling less than human – but despite all the things that other people have told us and taught us until we believe them about ourselves – there is still something different about looking honestly at ourselves for ourselves, without any of the defenses or glossy lies that make our faults and weaknesses more tolerable to us.

These are the truths about ourselves that are too painful to touch for more than a fraction of a second, and they are certainly never dwelt on… the truths that involve the kind of person we really are, under the social masks and the things everyone else has always told us about ourselves… the reptilian “I” crawling in the sludge at the bottom of our minds, expressing craven desires and black thoughts that are too shameful to allow into conscious awareness.

If they were easy to look at, easy to admit to, easy to accept – then we wouldn’t need defense mechanisms to render them tolerable.

But this is just one more situation where, if we have the courage to face the truth and deal with it, then we can get on with the business of actually living in the way we choose to live, instead of wasting our lives in running away from the truths we can never really escape anyway.