☘️Honoring Our Reactive Responses & Defense Mechanism

Healing Principles › Self Acceptance › Honoring Our Reactive Responses & Defense Mechanism

💡 Target audience of this post is primarily for people who get frustrated and judges their responses - they get frustrated on what they couldn’t do yet.

Blaming & Judging Our Reactions

I had a few conversations where people get frustrated at themselves with their negative or dysfunctional behaviour.

"There I go judging myself again", "I went hiding again", “I scolded my child again when I didn’t want to” or "I cut off my emotions again"...

Those individuals judge themselves in doing so, feeling bad that they still couldn't respond in a way they thought they could. Fundamentally, it’s a disapproval of what they’re doing, feeling or thinking - and sometimes this gets projected outward as anger or blame towards others.

An Imagery Story

In imagery healing, one of the fascinating thing about working into trauma work is that we get to see these behaviors manifested out as a form of image.

For example, a client may see their wound and hurt in a tower, and there’s this big layer of walls that’s in between where we’re at and what’s inside the tower.

In such cases, I’ve seen many facilitator asked…

What’s the reason that wall is there?
It’s there to protect me.

Then we continue the work from there. Seeing what’s it protecting the client from, and how to work with the wall’s concern.

What does that have to do with what we spoke about?

A possible way to view our reactive or dysfunctional side ourselves too then - it’s there to protect and serve us.

An Invitation: See Their Reason for Existing

All behaviours exist for a reason. I’ve seen cases where…

  • A person would scold and criticize himself first, because once he did that, perhaps when people outside actually criticize him it won’t be as hurtful.
  • A person would start being angry and yell, because the disappointment and hurt inside is too much to bear
  • A person would procrastinate incessantly, because doing the actual tasks itself will bring out a lot of fear of failure and disappointment.

I find that when we see those lens in which how this reactive behavior was a way to protect us from something, we soften up.

We get to acknowledge these part of ourselves for what they’re concern about, and start shifting the behavior. In the above examples…

  • Thank you for protecting me from feeling hurt when you’re scolded.
  • Thank you for protecting me from feeling the disappointment and hurt.
  • Thank you for protecting me from the fear of failure.

Once we see that, we can gradually nudge ourselves and say “it’s safe/okay now, let’s do something different”.

One of my mentor whom I really respect, Feng Yiliang shared a story where he would do what his mom do - slapping the back of his head whenever he felt like he did something wrong.

He find himself still blaming and scolding himself despite not wanting to do so. After he caught himself doing it, he started to tell himself “it’s okay, it’s safe now”.

Eventually, he was able to use his right hand to hold his left hand that was about to slap the back of his head.

While it sounds like he had a split personality disorder, he was just shifting how he treat himself.

At the end, he realize he could actually accept who he’s now.

Thank you for protecting me. It wasn't safe. You've been there to help me through many tough moments. Now, I want to assure you it's okay now. Things are safe now. You can rest now.

Final Thoughts

Granted, they’re a lot of ways to approach this self-criticism.

I just thought seeing the reason for its existence allow us to treat ourselves with more compassion.

It’s also a more humane approach that build up good habit of treating ourselves.