Nice article.
Coming into balance
I recently broke my foot, a fracture that occurred as I missed a step on my front porch. The break occurred on the outside part of my foot- the fifth metatarsal. My doctor provided some good news in that I wouldn’t need a cast and I proceeded to adjust to my broken foot. Or so I thought. In deference to the pain on the outer perimeter of my foot I shifted my weight toward my other side, compensating for the damage.
By the following week later I had developed a new and more painful problem. I stressed the unbroken part of my foot by placing an inordinate amount of pressure on it. I actually experienced more acute pain in that area than in the break itself. A month later the broken bone had essentially healed--but the damage I caused to the inner part of my foot still lingers. This is an issue of compensation. And nowhere does this tendency provoke more havoc than in our emotional and psychological states.
At different times in life—and most particularly in childhood—we develop coping mechanisms to adjust to the challenges and travails that we encounter. Coping mechanisms are the adjustments that we make to our personalities, typically in our childhood. We’re not usually aware that we’re developing them as they assimilate into our being in very subtle ways. We craft them so that we might deal with the challenges, wounds, rejections or other stressors that life brings us. Coping mechanisms are our way of defending against challenges. Ordinarily, these alterations to our natural state of being are adaptations to the assaults to our emotional and psychological being.
An abusive or unloving parent may cause us to become indifferent to the hurt so that we can survive the pain. So we fashion a personality to protect us from being vulnerable. And in so doing we preclude having more open and intimate relationships. A chaotic or turbulent home environment may induce us to fashion the mask of being a people pleaser, as we try to placate everyone so that peace may reign. We might also seek the security of predictability to compensate for the uncertainty of childhood. Over time, becoming rooted to the need for that predictability, we dull the growth and creativity that only comes from embracing uncertainty.
We might be simply compensating for not feeling good enough, popular enough or loved enough. In most cases the temporary defensive formation can be a helpful mechanism. It assists us in getting through a difficult transition. Over time, however, the coping mechanism becomes a fixed and habitual feature of our persona, which limits our growth.
These adaptive techniques are reasonably purposeful when we first adorn them. The problem is that most of us struggle to shed these previously adaptive parts of our personality and over time they become hardened. In other words, they burden us and they block our greater emergence. What was once a coping mechanism becomes a suit of armor—and we clank through life wearing it.
Read
the rest of the article to see what Schwartz is really talking about here.
