Understanding Causes or Managing Symptoms

Perhaps an alternate heading could be: Knowing Myself or Avoiding Myself 

How is it even possible to avoid me? Why would I want to?

These questions presume a level of insight or control over all our anxiety and stress responses beyond our conscious abilities, particularly during any personal risk. Thus, for example, in times of physical or psychological threat, we screen, disconnect, distort, or totally shut down parts of ourselves physically, mentally, and emotionally to not feel the pain or discomfort so intensely.

We may not be aware of doing so, even in hindsight, or blithely pass off our response or actions as warranted or part of our personalities, and therefore somehow ok, we tell ourselves. As Carl Jung stated, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate."

The truth is I will do what I need to do, what I have learned to do to protect myself if emotions are threatened, and do so unconsciously. What are emotions? Gabor Mate proposed one way to conceive of emotions:

"Emotions are responses to present stimuli as filtered through the memory of past experiences, and they anticipate the future based on our perception of the past." [1]

The anticipation to which Mate refers sets up any anxiety and our response based on the need to protect ourselves. Whether that is good or bad for you, in reality, is immaterial compared with whether some part of me thinks it is the thing to do right now. I will do that under psychological threat and suffer the consequences or have to manage the symptoms in light of our heading, just as I will jump through a glass pane and manage cuts if I have to avoid a snake. I have a problem with snakes!

We shield ourselves in protective mechanisms we are often unaware of as we are too busy living those mechanisms. Unconscious protective mechanisms limit our potential for life and will dictate what we even understand about our life. Insight and self-knowledge, then, is not an aim in itself but a means of liberating the forces of our life and spontaneous growth. 

Exploring and understanding ourselves opens the possibility of change; seeing and experiencing ourselves differently, as a result, is the change process. 

"We cannot hold Truth with words. We can only see it, experience it, for ourselves."[2] 

[1] Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No. Scribe Publications Pty Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[2] Hagen, Steve. Buddhism Plain and Simple. Tuttle Publishing. Kindle Edition.