Last week, we studied about personality in my classes and my students got very fascinated by Freud’s Defense Mechanism. I asked them to try to analyze their own personality with one of the Personality Theory as our weekly assignment and most of them analyzed their kind of defense mechanism.
There are many forms of defense mechanism, they are: denial (the refusal to face the threat); Repression (suppress the anxiety away from awareness); regression (return to a form of an earlier stage of development behaviors); Displacement (transfer impulses from unsuitable objects to socially acceptable objects); Sublimation (channeling impulses into more positive efforts); Reaction formation (expresses impulses in a 180 degrees different kind of attitudes); Projection (assuming other person is facing our own unacceptable impulses); Rationalization (self-deceiving justifications for unacceptable behaviors).
Many of my students confessed in their assignment that they commonly use rationalization to make peace with their unacceptable behaviors and I found that understandable because they are in a transition from teenagers to adults, you need many excuses to cope in this transitions.
The thing is, I also experience something that made me analyze my own defense mechanism. I really lost in grief these past days. I kinda thought that some people really hate me after all the things I’ve done for them. I felt like I’m crushed. I love them for real and I didn’t feel like my feeling is reciprocal. The unloved feeling has keep me from tight sleep and started to influence my health negatively. I feel that they avoiding me, they did something wrong to me but they act like I am the one to be blamed. I hate to be in this kind of situation where you know that this was not a healthy relationship but you can’t just quit because you really care about the person and after all the sacrifices, turned out that you meant nothing for them.
Sucked, no?
What make it more sucked is that those people act like everything is fine between us and their casual attitudes shock me. Am I looking into these whole things from a wrong view? That is the moment when I finally understand the situation. I suddenly feel like I am the most stupid person to over reacting in this situation. I figure out that this conflict only happen in my mind. I was fighting with my own perspective. I am projecting my disappointments to other people. I was disappointed at how they treated me like I was not their friends but I projected it as they disappointed at me and didn’t want me at their life anymore.
Yes. This whole time. I finally understand that I keep projecting my own feeling towards others.
I still have a feeling that all of my thoughts about this unhealthy relationships are true but right now I just want to think it as my own fear that has been projected. I prefer to think it this way because I am so used to find my own happiness, I don’t want to depend my feeling to others. If I thought this is only me, projecting my fear onto others, then it will be easier to fix these inner conflicts and keep it in me.
See guys? We’ve learn something together. I am just a knowledge tool that shares a book’s texts to you but all of you share a bit of your soul to me that really helps me to find my own self. I cannot thank you all enough for this life lessons.
The DarkJasmine 