Another Aspect Of Your Intensions

Not Using Defense Mechanisms, Not Returning Evil For Evil, And Avoiding Blame, Avoidance, and Denial When Attempting To See Environmental Problems

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Learn How You Unconsciously Split Off Your Awareness Of Environmental Problems.Your job in this portion of the Heartwood Path is to look for ways you, like everyone else, fool yourself into doing dumb things while not feeling bad about doing them. There are numerous ways to fool yourself in this way, but we will consider the identification of ways that you psychologically allow yourself to do things that are harmful to the environment. This consideration is an important step in making necessary corrections in the way you and other Heartwood Path sojourners think and behave.

Sigmund Freud’s object relations theory helps us to understand our impaired relationship with the environment. Like Copernicus and Darwin before him, Freud stopped most people from thinking of themselves as the center and pinnacle of the universe. Freud showed us that we are irrational and biologically determined. He thought that both nature and the inner psychological world are untamable and un-masterable and the best we can hope for are anxiety-based truces and compromises. He offers three principles relevant to our present work along the Heartwood Path:

1. behavior is largely a result of unconscious motivations (both the sexual pleasure and reproduction of Eros and the aggression, violence, and destruction of Thanatos);

2. conflict is universal, chronic, and inevitable;

3. to function effectively, we “split off our awareness of unwanted thoughts, feelings and wishes, and use defenses to disguise and contain them” (Winter and Koger, 2004, p. 30).

These defenses require psychic energy and are established in order to fool ourselves into thinking that we behave for rational or moral reasons, when, in reality, much of our behavior is propelled by subversive, selfish, and unacknowledged needs, wishes, fears, and impulses that are quite selfish and unacknowledged (Winter and Koger, 2004, p. 32). Each person has to divide up his or her psychic energy between the desires for pleasure (the Id), the mechanism that constrains impulses (the Ego), and the mechanism for moral principles (the Superego) (Winter and Koger, 2004, p. 33). With only so much energy to go around, Freud proposes that we defend ourselves from anxiety by “splitting” our awareness so that we can remain essentially unconscious about our instincts without entirely ignoring them. To this end, we build defense mechanisms that come in many forms, including engaging in:

1. rationalization (attractive but untrue explanations for our behavior);

2. intellectualization (abstract but impersonal explanations);

3. displacement (expressing our feelings to a different, less threatening audience as when we, for example, blame others for not recycling when we ourselves could make an even better contribution by curbing consumption);

4. suppression (consciously putting anxiety-provoking thoughts out-of-mind);

5. repression (similar to suppression but done unconsciously);

6. reaction formation (denying an impulse and giving intense energy to expressing in a holier-than-thou manner its opposite);

7. projection (perceiving in others what we fail to perceive in ourselves because it is easier to recognize weaknesses in others than it is to recognize weaknesses in ourselves);

8. sublimation (channeling unconscious anxiety into socially acceptable projects; and

9. denial (insisting that “anxiety-provoking material does not exist) (Winter and Koger, 2004, pp. 33-39).

Now that we have identified the means that you may be using to psychologically allow yourself to hurt the environment, do the following activity to begin the process of working out the remedies that are needed because of your defense systems.

To Ridding Yourself Of Unworkable Defense Mechanisms So You Can Pay Attention To Environmental Problems…

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HumaNatureConnect Activity

Ridding Yourself Of Defense Mechanisms

For this activity, become aware that you have some or all of the nine subconscious tendencies listed above (this is half of the work). Then, write down whether, if at all, the tendencies exist in your life. Next, write down what actions or reactions you are now having regarding these expectations.