Defense Mechanisms

Learn How You Unconsciously Split Off Your Awareness Of Environmental Problems

Photo by Jack Balmer, Pexels.com.

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.

Photo by Egor Kamelev, Pixels.com.

HumaNatureConnect Activity

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. Lastly, write down what you want your actions or reactions to be next time. Consider what you can do to overcome any defense mechanisms you may be using as a way to split your awareness (to keep yourself from seeing the affects of your actions, for example) and, thereby, do things that are harmful to the environment.

Photo by Joel Zar, Pixels.com.

Nocturnal Pilgrimage

After identifying and rectifying your defense mechanisms, you may feel a bit disjointed because your old ways of relating in and to the world will be seen as less than ideal. The defense mechanisms pertinent to the world and your place in it tend to give you and other modern urban people the notion, popular in modern science, that the world is not alive. Since this notion will impede your progress to Gladandgreen Junction, ways have to be developed to rid yourself of pertinent defense mechanisms that hide your primal relationship with the living world. We also need to develop, or I ought to say redevelop, a worldview that “playfully and soulfully sees the world as alive and always dreaming” (Aizenstat, 2009, p. 144).

Having already practiced at ridding yourselves of defense mechanisms, it is time to concern yourself with the development of a worldview that counters your view of the world as anything but alive. Continue with this series of courses as you:

1. perceive the surrounding natural world as endowed with meaning, meaning whose significance is at once personal and galactic

2. work to develop the sense that the world is ensouled; and

3. perceive how the world communicates (often in dreams) and has purposes.

One has to both rid oneself of defense mechanisms that distort one’s fullness of self and experience the waking reality and dreams of a living world or one will not be able to recover what is likely to be a fundamental More-Than-Individual aspect of oneself. One has to bring defense mechanisms to light while also turning to the dreams of the world in the dark. Do not let the brilliant glare of your rational thinking prevent you from gleaning the benefits of the instincts, emotions, imagination, intuition that lurk in the darkness as one dreams. “To be stuck in one mode of consciousness (waking consciousness), all the time” writes Aizenstadt, “is a kind of pathology, just as if night were to disappear and the world was left to burn under the unending glare of the sun” (2009, p. 148)

Halt your rational thinking for a spell. During the day, let the living presence of the world you behold communicate with you, and hold you. At night, sleep. Dream. Each morning, tend to your dreams before getting out of bed (see related Protocol). Then serve others, especially those called “underserving” and those without a voice. Do not be one of those who support under-serving the so-called undeserving, for you will not be able to feel the joy of knowing that all people and all non-people are dear just because they are here.

Make Your Dreams Come True

Here’s another thing to do to increase the effectiveness of your intention: clearly visualize what you want. If you cannot visualize it in your mind you will likely not see it in the world. Your vision needs to clearly be a picture of your desire coming to fruition.