Whenever something happens that is not in alignment with what we want, we usually judge the situation as “there’s something wrong”, feel upsetting emotions, and then unconsciously find ways to cope with it to feel better. These coping mechanisms usually come in the form of 1) Maintaining your upset with the world and becoming aggressive (the blamers) 2) Pleasing others in the hope that you won’t feel bad or disappointed again (the pleasers) or 3) Withdrawing from the world and building a wall around you to protect yourself from feeling hurt again (the numb & detached).
In all three cases the upset hasn’t left our system and our strong defence mechanisms slowly become a part of our identity – we become known as ‘the angry one’, ‘the reserved one’, or ‘the pushover’. The issue is that none of these coping mechanisms truly work to make us feel better, because they are born out of an upset. Instead they become self-sabotaging, and keep bringing us the same upsetting situation over & over again and makes our defence even stronger! The only way out of this rat race is to acknowledge the original part of you that was upset, and allow that part of you to re-interpret the initial painful situation through the lens of acceptance instead of judgment. This subtle but powerful gives us immediate relief and can collapse our entire defence-mechanism, so we can be more present to life without the need to protect ourselves from our own mental projections!