Who Are We Behind Our Defenses?

The PoE Concepts: Emotional Resistance

Defenses lock the bad guys out, but at the same time, they lock us in.

Each human being has a certain ability to tolerate specific emotional pains. One has almost no tolerance for fear, but has a good bit of tolerance, relatively speaking, when it comes to anger. Another person may have ‘thin skin’ and finds they are easily shamed or humiliated and a third person has to be good at all times in order to avoid guilt which he or she finds unbearable. Even if you can’t figure the details of your trauma out, you can still benefit a great deal by increasing your ability to tolerate that which you find intolerable. We resist the 9 Basic Emotions - Fear, Anger, Sadness, Disgust, Guilt, and Shame with the 2 primary defense emotions - Fear and Anger.

Resistance is also what we call “Refusal”

This resisting comes in various forms and guises, but in general terms this is what I refer to as REFUSAL. When you deny, in any way, what you’re feeling and sensing, you miss the potential navigation support, the usable orienting information coming from you to you, that your feelings and sensations and thoughts and everything else you have going on about your actual experience represent. Your ability to understand yourself and where you are and where you’re headed are clouded and blurred as a side effect of refusal. If I refuse to accept the reality of trees, I will not do well wandering through a forest. The result is either you’ll be lost and disconnected from your own “map” signals, or you’ll be toxic to yourself, living in a self-destructive, contempt-based relationship with yourself and the world. The resisting that we do gets “done” primarily by way of two of the atomic emotioning elements: fear or anger.  You resist what is happening to you in ‘real time’ with either a fear response or an anger response.  You might recognize this as the “Fight or Flight” response. 

We’re All Runners

We run from feelings, and we run from meanings, and we run from sensations, and we run from potential outcomes, and we run from our past, and we run from ourselves. 

Letting it "all hang out" with yourself, in a space of compassion and benevolent concern means there is no need for “Fight or Flight”

If you stand in front of a mirror and you're not willing to look, you won't see your honest reflection. If you stand in front of a mirror and you really want to see yourself, your vision and your ability to see "you" fully will be limited by every one of your defenses unless you put in some effort. Being "intimate" with you means being with as much truth, as much of your "real" and your "profound" as you can find. Letting it "all hang out" with yourself, in a space of compassion and benevolent concern. The internal "flight" or "fight" you're doing continuously (the act of creating meaning and "defense against" the meaning) can be gently persuaded to get real quiet allowing you to open up to so much more of the rest of you, so no flight or fight is needed.

The Specific Affect Refusal (SAR) Model™

Specific Affect Refusal (SAR) is a model developed by Dr. Lukens to predict the types of behavior that would arise when a person refuses to listen to the signal of any of the 9 basic emotions. This chronic defense turns into behavioral traits. Take Fear of Fear for example. Humans mistakenly end up FEARING FEAR and look hard to avoid ALL our FEAR feeling states. But according to the SAR Model: Fear of Fear is what makes panic attacks arise in human beings…

Refusal Types

  • Behavior: If a person has fear of experiencing fear, they will try to run away from their own fear or things that have the potential to cause them fear which means a panic attack is likely to occur.

  • Behavior: When someone has anger towards fear, they are angry that they feel afraid. They will act vicious and find themselves in situations where they can't afford to get angry (e.g. in front of co-workers). They will subsequently feel depressed because now they feel disempowered.

  • Behavior: This could show up in the ways you escape. Initially, the escape, for instance, alcohol, gives you lifted spirits, but alcohol is a sedative so you drink to feel lifted, but end up feeling sad, so you keep drinking, which makes you sad!

  • Behavior: Anger towards feeling sad might show up, for instance, in relationships. Hot-cold relationships are not at all uncommon for those who experience anger at sadness. If they have a fear of being abandoned they will act out in ways to create chaos in the relationship. In their effort to avoid sadness they get upset and act out and create losses all over the place.

  • Behavior: Fear and Anger of Disgust manifest very similarly. If you're afraid of disgust you're very likely to develop some form of OCD that involves self-purifying and cleansing.

  • Behavior: Fear/anger of disgust manifest very similarly. If you're angry at feeling disgust, you will still adopt the OCD tendencies and purifying and cleanse but you will clean with an edge of anger.

  • Behavior: Fear of guilt motivates a person to try and fix everything. These people have an enormous amount of guilt for doing things that a person without a fear of guilt would’nt feel guilty about.

  • Behavior: When a person is angry about feeling guilty, this devolves into self-punishment. A person will feel the need to lash out because of their anger at guilt. You will see these people beat up on themselves.

  • Behavior: This is the type of person you would call a "Harvey Milktoast" or a person who is overly mild-mannered. This person can't upset anyone ever, they are usually in pain because they feel invisible and like they can’t speak up. They often carry around a sense of the likelihood that someone is going to get angry at them.

  • Behavior: This person is angry you made them angry. "I was having a good @#$ day, and you @#$& pissed me off." A lot of abusive people have anger about being angered. This feels very justifiable to them..."Well you made me angry, and now you’re seeing the results of that!".

  • Behavior: There are two ways this can manifest: Fear of shame potentially happening can manifest as perfectionism, people-pleasing, or avoiding any situations in which the person could be exposed to feeling shame. This person will be very careful about what they agree to socially. And the second, Fear of shame they have already been exposed to experiencing, means they will isolate themselves.

  • Behavior: This person will rarely be able to verbalize the following sentence but they act in accordance, "When feeling angry about feeling shame, rather than allowing myself to feel the shame, I will act contemptuous towards everyone proactively. If someone even innocently catches my eye I may react with, "what the @#$& are you looking at!!" The anger refusal of shame manifests itself in acting out with anger. These people tend to be constantly patting themselves on the back and have a chip on their shoulder.