Building, Maintaining and Defending the Self
One way that we establish solid ground for ourselves is to build a sense of who we are as a person, from the messages we received as children (from family, friends, school, culture) as well as what we experience as our natural abilities and limitations. Then, we put a lot of unconscious effort into maintaining that image of ourselves. When you look closely, most of our thoughts and words are devoted to that end – building, maintaining and defending our sense of self, sometimes in very subtle ways.
Even if the picture we have built is mixed or negative, it still gives us something solid to hang onto as a reference point that is comfortable and familiar, so we resist seeing anything contrary to it.
A couple of examples from friends really stick in my mind:
>>>I was trying to convince one friend that, contrary to his self-image, he was quite interesting, not boring; frustrated, I pressed him: “Why do you hang on to that idea about yourself?!” He said, in a moment of clarity, “If I wasn’t boring, I wouldn’t know who I was.” As we talked, it was clear and even explicit, that he felt was better to feel inadequate than to feel the groundlessness of not knowing who he was at all.
>>>Another friend has a difficult family and life history, but also has had good fortune on most fronts in the past few years. Nonetheless, he continues to rake up his past history and dwell on that, in his mind and in his conversations. In some deep discussions we had, he realized that over time he developed the belief that being more ‘screwed up’ than other people is what made him special and lovable, and got him lots of attention – and if he was normal, how would he get what he needs? And he would be run-of-the-mill, ordinary, not ‘special’.
We all have our ways of trying to be special, or trying to be invisible, or even both, depending on how our sense of self has developed.
