Our mind's defense Walls, abusers effect on them, creativity blocks
Defence mechanisms and inner blocks:
Our mind is like a huge field of grass, separated and divided into small pastures by barbed wire and posts, some are loose so they can be easily crossed, and some are wired in multiple layers of wire, some even have stone walls around them. The wire and walls are where our defence mechanisms are active.
They can be inner blocks of beliefs that others have convinced us to adopt.
When in a relationship with an abuser we see these wires all over, saying “You can’t go there, can’t look there, can’t think of this, and can’t feel like that”.
So we are restrained to one small pasture where it’s relatively safe to exist.
That is why free journaling comes in handy, as it is a cross-border association-based activity.
I’ll explain:
Free journaling, means you write whatever comes to your mind at the moment it hits your thought, even if it means stopping in mid-sentence and following the immediate thought, even if it is nonsense or repeating words, or just gibberish.
The idea is to let your mind wind out its storage.
The first several pages would be a spilt-out garbage that was floating in your mind, but then something very interesting happens:
When your mind has winded out all the garbage it had on its “safe pasture” it moves on by the association thread. The association thread is not restricted or organized in any way that resembles the divided pastures. It is more like a wide system of roots of a big tree that are connected to all of the fields of mind.
When free journaling, the mind follows the association thread and touches on a variety of fields. In this exercise, the goal is not to stop it, but to let it flow, and write whether it comes to mind.
In other words, no matter how hard you have guarded those forbidden fields, free journaling will access its contents as it is not a logic-based practice.
An abuser will make you believe that even your deepest thoughts like your free-journaling should be shared with him. He can make you believe that if you thought anything and didn’t share it, it equals lying.
When you share it with him, he will find one or more things that he would get really upset about and will keep it for later arguments to use against you and make you feel guilty of thinking that way, which will make you feel ashamed of your own thoughts.
Because you are an authentic person and believe in truth and avoid lying, you know that if you know something you will tell him, or he will convince you to tell him.
So the better strategy is just not knowing what you should not say.
You hide these things from yourself because you know you can’t hide them from others, as your mind is not your private space.
Eventually, to avoid going to the forbidden fields you avoid writing or doing any other activity that is association-based, which equals all creativity.
I loved sharing my deepest thoughts, it felt real and connecting, until the moment he used it against me, to crush another layer of my personality.
It’s such a relief and luck that we are like onions, we have layers and we can’t be smashed like a cake in one blow.
That is what endurance means to me. That no matter how many layers one will try to scrape from me, I will still have my core that is invincible (unlike an onion).
You can track your defense mechanisms like this:
Wherever there’s a barrier you cannot cross, try to look behind it, what’s in that pasture that it stops you from stepping into.
What is nice about it, is that the wires don’t block the view, only the ability to step and scoss, so you can freely look into that field if you want.
What is the thing or thought or memory it is preventing you from encountering?
There may be things that make you feel in a certain way while your conscious self is certain you should not feel like that. This dissonance is one of the most energy-consuming states you can be in when your energy contradicts itself.
If I have lots of these barriers, why would I want to change this?
High energy consumption:
If you are a creative person, these would block your creativity. Because we create in an association-based way, in other words, from our whole self, and not only from one part of us. If we restrain our creativity the result would be partial, flat, blunt, shallow, you name it. Certainly not as authentic and alive as we would want our creation to be.
Flow.
Defence mechanisms are like block walls on our way, when we go about our lives we stumble upon them in our mind and they go “Hey! Stop! You can’t go there. You are not allowed”. So you stubble in mid-sentence or in front of a certain situation while your mind tries to recalculate a new path to avoid the forbidden field.
If you find yourself stumbling into these invisible walls during your life and conversations, you might want to take a deeper look at what those walls are trying to protect.
The content of the forbidden field is present in your life, behaviour, and mind, no matter how sealed it may be.
If you notice in yourself unwanted, unconscious behaviour that looks odd to you, it probably originates in one or more of these fields your mind is protecting you from.
Yes, defense mechanisms are there to protect us, but they are not there to stay forever. They are there to help us cross the border of a difficult situation, to survive difficult things that we experience in life so we won’t be overwhelmed.
But, they guard these blocks of information for us to digest later, exactly like the body stores fat to later use when we need it.
We were never meant to store all this undigested information and emotion for most of our lives.
The problem is that we never stop to actually pay attention to our storage contents.
We always run forward, always late, always in a rush.
“The amount of SPACE you open will determine the amount of TENSION you have”
In other words, according to the space given the tension drops down.
Like a balloon.
When you give your mind space to breathe out all that is stored in it, your levels of tension will significantly drop.
On the other hand, if your mind keeps building up more and more defense walls without airing out others, you will start showing psychological health issues and might even end up going insane.
Our dreams are a kind of tension reliever, a valve that is opened when our mind is relaxed.
Our dreams are digestible content that helps us wind out some of our defense walls.
Some people build those walls and live as if they are the rules of their existence. These walls are your own rules you created to keep yourself in a comfort zone - which by the way is never as comfortable as being free of them, I must say.
But people are still building those walls and punishing themselves if they even think of going beyond them.
See, it is another defense that was probably created after a very hurtful experience in our lives, and they are only there to protect us from being hurt again. Resolving wall defenses like this is to teach yourself how to react to this kind of hurtful situation in a healthy way.
On each wall a story is engraved, that painful event, thought, or action that stands there as a justification for the wall’s existence.
In abusive relationships we see the face of the abuser also engraved on the walls, justifying their existence.
Structure:
Walls never stand alone, they have their justifying story and they have their forbidden field that they protect.
Each wall has its manifestation in your reality like a small thread you can tug on that would lead you to its location.
Most of the time your conscious self is more afraid of the contents of its mind than the mind itself. When letting go of the controlled thinking and letting the mind solve its own problems it will do a better job than you in this.
I believe in the magical combination of free journaling, psychotherapy, setting goals, and educating yourself on how your mind works so you can help it work better and live a better life.
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