Getting defensive
Life is painful.
This would be apparent to anyone who witnessed your emergence into the world. Healthy newborns clench their fists, curl their toes, and scream in shock and agony. Life is a gift, the receipt of which none of us is consulted about in advance.
We each find our own individual ways of managing the pain of being alive. As we grow, and the circumstances of our life change, our methods of coping are continually challenged. Sometimes, we encounter a situation for which we have no established coping strategy. This may happen within minutes of being born, or not until much, much later.
To begin with, newborns have no way of coping with even the most basic challenges of being alive; They are not able to eat, talk, move independently, or even make sense of the signals their eyes, ears, nose, mouth and other body parts send to their brain. They must therefore rely on a parent to cope for them, to make sense of life on their behalf, to digest it and filter it, in order that they might be able to at least take some small parts of it in.
When you were in the womb, your mother breathed the air, ate the food, expelled waste and moved about in the world, filtering what she took in and providing sustenance to you via the umbilical, whilst human-shielding you from the outside world. Once you left the womb, much of this parental 'filtering' continued; your mother continued to provide food for you; changed full nappies for clean ones, and so on.
As well as managing bodily functions, the mother also manages sensations for the baby. If the baby is hungry, or tired, or cold, or something else, she will simply cry out; The mother must make sense of this discomfort and attend to the baby's emotional need. If there is no mother, for any reason, even for a brief period, then the baby is left exposed to the reality of life, 'unfiltered'. If the baby is confused, there is no-one to make sense of things for it. If the baby is hungry, no-one to feed it. If the baby is tired, she must somehow find sleep herself.
Of course, the parent cannot be there all the time. There will inevitably be at least a brief period in which the baby must experience life 'unfiltered'. What, then, does an infant do at these times? The answer is that they erect some sort of shield, or 'defence' to the onslaught of reality. The simplest form of defence might be to simply deny what their senses are telling them. The hunger pain they feel is ignored, and thereby, no longer painful. This works for a while, but cannot work forever. Some defences are more helpful than others. As the child grows, new, more complex forms of defence become possible.
As childhood progresses, children are forced to cope with more and more of life's painful realities; they must manage their own bowel movements, for example. As the tasks of living life become more complex, so too do the defences to life that must sometimes be erected in order to manage the pain of it. A pre-schooler, faced with a room full of unfamiliar faces, may retreat into the comfort of his own intellect, looking away from the curious eyes, downward instead in intense concentration on a lego tower. A toddler, struggling to manage overwhelming and confusing feelings triggered by an absent mother, may become frantically busy, rushing from one activity to another, never allowing the external world to settle, keeping her attention ever-moving, and thereby forever postponing the moment when those dreadful internal feelings must be somehow felt.
When an adult is presented with an experience that is overwhelming, they may be 'traumatised' by it. It is reasonable to consider that trauma can in fact occur at any age, and in fact someone like an infant, with so few defences of their own, might actually be even more suceptible to trauma than an adult. This is indeed the case, although infants and children, with their remarkable capacity to learn and adapt to new situations, seem to recover better from traumas than older adults do.
What, then, is mental illness?
Mental illness, in all its forms, might occur when one or more of an individual's defences is malfunctioning in some way. It may be that the efforts a person is going to, to cope with the pain of reality, are themselves causing needless pain. For example, a person who repeatedly checks and re-checks all the power switches in his house, is doing this to manage a deeper sense of dread, or some otherwise overwhelming notion about himself, or the world. He is arguably suffering more than necessary from the effort of maintaining this defence - more than he would suffer if he had to confront the deeper dread he is afraid to feel.
Or consider a person who manages the pain of loneliness by overeating; he may only be substituting one pain for another delayed-onset form of suffering. Or a person who finds herself simply overcome with sadness; she may have reached a point where some of her defences have ceased to protect her adequately from one or more of the painful truths of life. A man full of barely-contained rage may become violent when he encounters a situation with which he cannot cope. One way or another, the problem relates to reality, and the way in which the person copes with it.
So the next time you are accused of being 'defensive', take it as a compliment. Imagine where you would be without your defences?
This would be apparent to anyone who witnessed your emergence into the world. Healthy newborns clench their fists, curl their toes, and scream in shock and agony. Life is a gift, the receipt of which none of us is consulted about in advance.
We each find our own individual ways of managing the pain of being alive. As we grow, and the circumstances of our life change, our methods of coping are continually challenged. Sometimes, we encounter a situation for which we have no established coping strategy. This may happen within minutes of being born, or not until much, much later.
To begin with, newborns have no way of coping with even the most basic challenges of being alive; They are not able to eat, talk, move independently, or even make sense of the signals their eyes, ears, nose, mouth and other body parts send to their brain. They must therefore rely on a parent to cope for them, to make sense of life on their behalf, to digest it and filter it, in order that they might be able to at least take some small parts of it in.
When you were in the womb, your mother breathed the air, ate the food, expelled waste and moved about in the world, filtering what she took in and providing sustenance to you via the umbilical, whilst human-shielding you from the outside world. Once you left the womb, much of this parental 'filtering' continued; your mother continued to provide food for you; changed full nappies for clean ones, and so on.
As well as managing bodily functions, the mother also manages sensations for the baby. If the baby is hungry, or tired, or cold, or something else, she will simply cry out; The mother must make sense of this discomfort and attend to the baby's emotional need. If there is no mother, for any reason, even for a brief period, then the baby is left exposed to the reality of life, 'unfiltered'. If the baby is confused, there is no-one to make sense of things for it. If the baby is hungry, no-one to feed it. If the baby is tired, she must somehow find sleep herself.
Of course, the parent cannot be there all the time. There will inevitably be at least a brief period in which the baby must experience life 'unfiltered'. What, then, does an infant do at these times? The answer is that they erect some sort of shield, or 'defence' to the onslaught of reality. The simplest form of defence might be to simply deny what their senses are telling them. The hunger pain they feel is ignored, and thereby, no longer painful. This works for a while, but cannot work forever. Some defences are more helpful than others. As the child grows, new, more complex forms of defence become possible.
As childhood progresses, children are forced to cope with more and more of life's painful realities; they must manage their own bowel movements, for example. As the tasks of living life become more complex, so too do the defences to life that must sometimes be erected in order to manage the pain of it. A pre-schooler, faced with a room full of unfamiliar faces, may retreat into the comfort of his own intellect, looking away from the curious eyes, downward instead in intense concentration on a lego tower. A toddler, struggling to manage overwhelming and confusing feelings triggered by an absent mother, may become frantically busy, rushing from one activity to another, never allowing the external world to settle, keeping her attention ever-moving, and thereby forever postponing the moment when those dreadful internal feelings must be somehow felt.
When an adult is presented with an experience that is overwhelming, they may be 'traumatised' by it. It is reasonable to consider that trauma can in fact occur at any age, and in fact someone like an infant, with so few defences of their own, might actually be even more suceptible to trauma than an adult. This is indeed the case, although infants and children, with their remarkable capacity to learn and adapt to new situations, seem to recover better from traumas than older adults do.
What, then, is mental illness?
Mental illness, in all its forms, might occur when one or more of an individual's defences is malfunctioning in some way. It may be that the efforts a person is going to, to cope with the pain of reality, are themselves causing needless pain. For example, a person who repeatedly checks and re-checks all the power switches in his house, is doing this to manage a deeper sense of dread, or some otherwise overwhelming notion about himself, or the world. He is arguably suffering more than necessary from the effort of maintaining this defence - more than he would suffer if he had to confront the deeper dread he is afraid to feel.
Or consider a person who manages the pain of loneliness by overeating; he may only be substituting one pain for another delayed-onset form of suffering. Or a person who finds herself simply overcome with sadness; she may have reached a point where some of her defences have ceased to protect her adequately from one or more of the painful truths of life. A man full of barely-contained rage may become violent when he encounters a situation with which he cannot cope. One way or another, the problem relates to reality, and the way in which the person copes with it.
So the next time you are accused of being 'defensive', take it as a compliment. Imagine where you would be without your defences?
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