Before this beautiful and tragic “life awakening,” I use to be highly insecure. Before I go into the description, let me emphasize the “beautiful and tragic” part about the life awakening. The reason why it’s tragic is that you begin to see things how they are. The misperception about people and the world around you becomes hard to face as the denial you had your whole life becomes a hard pill to swallow. You see just how sinister human nature can be based on the temporary gratifications people settle with to console “ego-defense” mechanisms. But at the same, you gain an understanding through accountability and the lessons you learned through gaining empathy and, above all, self-love and self-efficacy.
The reason why I emphasize ego-defenses is that many people react in specific ways based on the traumas that they experienced in the past that develops their dislike or avoidance of certain people, places, or things. But this usually occurs in the act of displacement and the things they do on fight or flight when someone sees a perceived threat that they have most commonly been avoiding regardless of what someone tells you as denial is one of many common trauma responses that people use to avoid facing their greatest fear that may have been triggered in a post-traumatic experience.
The reason why I know I was insecure was based on the cluster of my defense styles. If you don’t believe me, look up a specific trauma and the common defense mechanisms that those who experience trauma use. Each one has a particular way of coping with the immediate dangers through the various types of defense mechanisms. The fact is that we all have done it based on avoiding reliving those moments of fear, trauma, and pain. In essence, it’s the way we react to keep us safe and sound, but it can turn sideways very quickly when you refuse to heal from these past events. The more you limit yourself in achieving new experiences, that opens you know yourself. And in turn, you’re able to not only emphasize but find a balance in being to establish boundaries. That results in those in denial of their defense styles, and the trauma begins, the more you begin to see just how genuinely insecure the world is.
One of the things that I began seeing is that bullying others and talking wrong about others were the coping mechanisms to feel better about myself. Considering that I have been bullied myself horrifically, it became my way of inflicting the same pain others did to me back then. The irony of it ended because those who triggered that action reminded me of those who did this in the past. Which, in my displacement, ended up being a shitty thing. Although being caring and having a good heart when I wasn’t triggered, I would ask myself the question, “why do bad things happen to bad people.” But after my life awakening, I began to see it differently “how could I expect good things to happen when I did the same shitty things that were undeserving to others?” It was a paradox. I’d you think about it because if the first shot was fired and I reacted defensively from something that I refused to resolve, “how did I seriously expect to have good karma?” Even if I was 90% a good person with having no intention of at least trying to be a good person 100% of the time.
This led to me seeing my actions and the type of defense style I had. I mapped out the reactions based on scenarios. I began to see many consistent patterns, which steered from triggers of feeling incompetent, a response that developed an obsession to be right and using scare tactics to validate my opinion as truth. A behavior we see more consistently in current times. I was needing to be praised and liked, which came from being the outcast of school and from my childhood abandonment issues that caused a hell of a lot of other sabotaging behaviors. But through that tragedy gave me the courage to change and show the compassion and kindness that others need to empower themselves to want to change. We all make mistakes, and we all can learn from them. But how can anyone want to change if they feel that forgiveness could ever be granted? Because another way people commonly cope is by running away from their problems and the pains they refuse to resolve. Because it’s easier to run from the issues and start from scratch. Or at least I thought it was?
Houston was something that needed to happen because things never changed. I realized in my life awakening that I ran away from my problems, moving to Houston and having my guard down from the new start I thought I had. I ended up opening a new door of the issues that stemmed from the ones I ran from. All derive from not resolving my unresolved issues and indulging in getting what I thought I wanted and needed. The friends that I had, of course, ended up appearing to be fake, telling me what I wanted to hear that enabled me to refuse to change my behaviors. The truth was in getting what I wanted, I lost a sense of self-respect, tolerating shitty behaviors, and keeping my head down. Seeing others go through what I went through started to not sit well with me. But the truth was I was afraid to speak up, something that became the biggest fear of my life, after slowly resolving things within myself unknowingly through the positive things happening during my living there. I conquered my fear, and thanks to already identifying defense styles, something I learned about in reading more about psychology and now studying it. I was able to fight back efficiently and effectively, instead of the hot mess I used to do through defense mechanisms, which made me a significant threat. I was told through conversations I still have with some of the genuine friends I still kept in touch with.
The truth is we all have something that has us react the same but at the same time differently based on what we went through in life. The fear and anxiety are not who we are as a person but the aftermath that we react to for one reason. To move on with life, but without going through the grief process in the person, you lost in those moments. How do we expect to find this new version of us if we refuse to live in the past? Because through the self-medicating in filling the things we feel we need based on what our old selfs wanted? Because getting everything, you want when you are still haunted by the demons of the past only leads to never feeling the happiness that our evolved selves wish to when we don’t embrace the power of healing and self-evolution.
Frieda The Writer 