From the author: self-deception is a drug for the consciousness of a person who thinks that his situation is hopeless …
Anxiety goes off scale
Anxiety can be divided into 2 types: causal (situational) and unreasonable.
Situational anxiety is considered normal because a person is worried about a specific situation (for example, before passing exams, about an existing ailment or some kind of life troubles).
With an unreasonable anxiety, a person does not understand why he is anxious. Of course, there is a reason for such anxiety, it just does not lie on the surface.
At first glance, it may seem that a person’s life is all right and there are no reasons for alarm, but where does the nervousness, tremors, muscle tension, palpitations, and sleep problems come from? Often anxiety is accompanied by some kind of phobia or several phobias at once (fear of the dark, fear of death, fear for loved ones, fear of people, etc.). It would seem that a person has no objective reason to worry, but, nevertheless, he lives in anticipation of the worst.
The result of increased anxiety can be a withdrawal into destructive behavior – a person begins to look for ways to discharge and more often, for some reason, makes a choice in favor of self-destructive ones (alcohol, drug use, extreme enthusiasm, promiscuous sexual intercourse , overeating, has parasuicidal behavior, etc.) ), and, when nothing else brings relief, may resort to completed suicide.
What are the unrecognized causes of this type of anxiety?
Medical, associated with organic dysfunctions (vascular pathology of the brain, disturbances in the work of the heart, endocrine disorders, etc.);
Psychological. The psychological reason implies the presence of an unconscious internal conflict, that is, some unmet need.
For example, a woman has unrealized professional potential due to the fact that she is forced to be on parental leave. To somehow compensate for this frustration, she begins to lean on food, get annoyed with family members.
As a result, the anxiety does not go away, the woman simply relieves stress for a short time by sticking. After overeating, a feeling of guilt and a feeling of her inferiority begins to overwhelm her (again, she failed to lose weight by summer), which leads to new frustration, and the problem is not solved in any way. There are three ways to solve it:
finally start realizing your professional potential (arrange a child in a kindergarten and go to work);
to change the attitude towards the problem (for example, to think about what benefits can be derived from the need to stay at home with the child – to devote this time to studying in an interesting specialty, to take up your favorite hobby, etc.);
find an alternative to professional implementation (for example, doing business at home, finding remote work via the Internet, going out more often , etc.).
The accumulated negative emotions must necessarily go somewhere. Their accumulation can be compared to overeating – when a person eats a lot and does not take physical activity, then an excess of calories can lead to obesity.
Also with the psyche – the accumulation of negative emotions and the inability to channel them (direct this energy in the right direction), leads to the generalization of anxiety. If a person is in a state of anxiety for too long, it can lead to panic attacks, phobias, mental disorders, and somatization .
But the channeling of anxiety is a method that accompanies the resolution of internal conflict. Until the inner conflict is identified, responding to anxiety through various methods and techniques will be temporary.
However, it is not so easy to identify internal conflict, because a person applies many psychological defenses in order not to face his unmet need face to face. The higher the level of protection, the higher the level of anxiety and social maladjustment.
The defense mechanisms of the psyche are aimed at minimizing negative experiences. For example, a person experiencing social phobia may have an unresolved conflict with his mother, a problem of psychological separation from her, and even anger at the mother, but because he forbids himself these thoughts and feelings, he chooses to be afraid of people.
The most common defense mechanisms that mask an unmet need (for example, for satisfying sexual release):
denial – for example, a man who cannot realize his sexual potential, claims that he does not need sex or that he has no problems in this area, refuses to talk about it;
projection – a person who wants sex complains that everyone is anxious;
projective identification – a person, having an unmet need, not only perceives another person in a distorted way, but also tries to put pressure on that other person to act in accordance with his unconscious fantasy (for example, a man wants sex with a woman, but denies his desire and instead expresses her belief to her that she wants to seduce him and is behaving extremely defiantly);
the formation of a reaction – for example, a woman wants unrestrained sex with a dark-eyed brunette who lives next door, but she suppresses this desire in herself by strengthening its opposite, and pushes out her puritanical qualities, becoming a devout moralist;
sewage (displacement) of aggression on others – for example, a man who has sexual tension breaks down on loved ones;
phobia – a person who is unable to realize his sexual potential, intimidates himself with sexually transmitted diseases, becomes a misophobe , has a pathological passion for cleanliness and order;
intellectualization – a person gives himself an explanation why he denies himself sex (for example, “sex is an occupation for unreasonable people who live primitive, not lofty needs” or “soon I will leave to live in another country, why should I seek sex with a woman in this country, what if she gets pregnant, why should I take her with me? “);
regression – infantilization, the use of alcohol, drugs and other reactions to drown out the call of the flesh or remove the barrier in order to succumb to it;
dissociation – “it was not me who slept with the boss, but someone else”;
displacement – “I danced a striptease in a bar, but I don’t remember it at all”;
depreciation – “it is completely not my taste, and in general, sex is for animals”;
splitting – a person’s personality is, as it were, split into two parts: a light one – and then a person presents himself as an ascetic and a fighter for morality, and a dark part that wants debauchery, but which he does not accept in himself; in certain situations, when a person is in a state of relaxation, alcoholic intoxication or passion, his dark part is released in order to realize himself;
introjection – a person has an attitude “I, as my mother, believe that all women are whores who only see how to drag you into bed and give birth to a child, and then pump out money for their maintenance.”