In the process of incessant collision of human will and desire with the resistance of reality, huge volumes of negative experiences are generated in us. Continuous friction against reality, which never satisfies our appetites, its blows and shocks wear out the psyche of the individual faster and more inexorably than it happens to his body. While the latter, at the very least, knows how to maintain its own integrity, guided by a detailed set of genetic instructions, the field of consciousness is experimental for nature and is not regulated by equally reliable algorithms. In other words, it is largely left at the mercy of "human freedom" - to hide behind the hem of Mother Nature and expect that she will sew and repair everything, as it happens with a cut finger, will not work here. We have to do it ourselves. That,how each of us learns to react to negative experiences is therefore a determining factor in the formation of personality and the structure of all life, happiness and human productivity.
Ignorance about the principles of work of his inner world and unwillingness to endure the stress associated with the constructive assimilation of negative realities, force a person to resort to three regressive strategies. Seduced by their easy accessibility and frugality in terms of the effort expended, he is unable to recognize their destructive nature and himself condemns himself to serving a duty in one of the circles of mental hell, depending on the neglect of the situation.
To understand why there are three of these strategies and what are their internal dynamics, it is necessary to understand the fundamental structure of the psyche, which generates all negative experience with the exception of physical stress and pain. It can be called an existential gap, which is understood as the distance constructed by the imagination between "I have" and "I want" - a fundamental, irreducible and self-sustaining contradiction at the very center of the human personality. Whenever we satisfy our need and at least slightly bring its lower limit to the upper one, the motivational centers of the brain pamper us with pleasant experiences. On the contrary, the lack of satisfaction of the need or the prospect of it, failures and disappointments that increase this gap, provoke a backhand.
crowding out
Since any negative experience is a stretching of an existential gap, the first trick in neutralizing it is an attempt to pretend that nothing happened and thereby return everything to its place. In other words, the painful experience, instead of being mastered and overcome, is subjected to violent repression. Undigested, it settles as a weight in the subfield of the unconscious, from where the ominous knocking of demons born from small pricks of reality, and demons generated by traumatic experiences are then heard. Multiplying there over the years, not disturbed by anyone and left to themselves, they destroy our inner world. If their strength becomes large enough, and the damage inflicted is critical, they break through, which makes a person a patient of a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst. These are the kind of peoplefrom Freud to the present day, constitute their professional interest, these disciplines themselves in their modern form were born in the process of understanding the phenomenon of repression.
Turning away from the painful aspects of reality, refusing to creatively perceive and neutralize them, a person settles into himself guests who deform his psyche and, ultimately, is punished for his own cowardice. If life is merciful to us, then repression can be an effective means of getting rid of moderate and therefore relatively harmless painful experiences. They manage to keep them in the subfield of the unconscious and not pay attention to the muffled tapping from there from time to time. But even in this case, if, with the assistance of fortune, repression manages to provide us with fragile harmony, it remains a regressive strategy, for a person does not know how to reveal the positive potential of negative experience - to see in it an invaluable lesson and stimulus for growth, moreover, the very condition of moving forward …Its development is constrained and delayed, judgment and creative powers are suppressed. In order to give freedom to the highest possibilities of his I, such an individual must descend the stairs into the darkness and meet face to face everything from which he had previously looked away.
Forgery
Promotional video:
The second way to reduce the severity of painful experience is to reduce the existential gap by lowering the upper limit through the substitution of our original goals and at the same time devaluing, subjectively lowering the significance of failures in their implementation. Not realizing the need, the individual, with a clever movement, replaces it with something else, assuring himself that, in essence, he did not need it, and devalues what has happened, thereby reducing the scale of the loss suffered. The traumatic content of negative experience is smoothed out due to the fact that a person takes the side of his own failure - unable to achieve what he wants and not coping with his failures, he pretends to want what has been achieved. This ailment that struck a person can be called Stockholm Syndrome,because as a result of it, people become voluntary hostages of forces alien and hostile to them, a way of life, work, people, customs. As soon as this operation becomes a habit, we observe a gradual collapse of our standards - retreating step by step, we are increasingly moving away from our inner truth, we renounce real ideals, values and desires.
Compensation through aggressive self-assertion
Thus, in the course of repression, we deny the expansion of the existential gap, while forgery allows us to reverse it by lowering the upper bar. The only thing that remains now in our arsenal is the approach of the lower border to the upper one. This can be done in two ways. On the one hand, a constructive way of carrying out this action opens up before a person through creative overcoming of the resistance to reality and his own elevation. On the other hand, in order to be higher, it is not necessary to climb up yourself - you can lower and lower the world around us. It is here, in this initial intuition, that the laconic formula of a well-known phenomenon is hidden, which has many names and guises from everyday rudeness to all-consuming anger. Trampled by life, disappointed and failing after failurea person, like a straw, grabs at the opportunity to restore his tormented self-esteem and wash away the bitterness of defeat that has settled on his tongue through humiliation and aggressive use of force. The use of force, including the force to offend verbally, fills with the feeling of its presence, serves, for psychological reasons, as proof of its presence and thereby acts as an illusory antidote to the constant humiliation experienced by the individual.
Rudeness, anger, aggression by their nature are a regressive reaction to the painful experiences experienced by an individual, their desperate compensation and an attempt to prove their worth. Therefore, it is possible to measure with mathematical precision the depth of a person's hatred of himself, of his insecurity and humiliation to the extent that he aggressively asserts himself at the expense of the world around him. The larger the latter, the more significant the former. The history of the Persian king Xerxes vividly illustrates the savagery of people in revenge of reality for the defeats inflicted on them. According to ancient tradition, Xerxes once, during a military campaign against Greece, conducted a crossing over the Hellespont, when the weather suddenly changed and a storm that fell swept away the bridges that had been built, sinking many Persian soldiers. The enraged lord decided to punish the rebellious element and ordered the executioners who were with the army to whip the sea with whips and flails.
The common man, however, does not realize that he is in a much more ridiculous position than Xerxes, because believing that he is scourging the world around him, he is in fact whipping himself with bitterness. The one who gives vent to anger, to use the allegory from the famous Buddhist parable, is like one who picks up a burning coal in order to throw it at another. The emotions involved in aggressive self-assertion, although directed outward, are internal processes. Their bearer experiences their inherent destructiveness in their entirety, poisoning their own sense of life, hindering happiness, dulling judgment and reducing productivity. At the same time, as it has been confirmed in hundreds of studies over the past decades, they cause enormous damage to the physical health of the human body,potentially provoking dysfunction of all its systems and accelerating the aging and neurodegeneration processes due to the chronically increased level of stress hormones, primarily cortisol.
Ecology of the soul
The modern Western world is preoccupied with environmental issues, and it would be foolish to deny that the environment is in critical condition, and therefore these problems are important and urgent. At the same time, it is necessary to remember that the word "ecology", derived from the ancient Greek οἶκος (dwelling), means "the science of home" and presupposes the ability to protect it. The main home of people, however, is not at all the nature that contains us, but our own consciousness, in caring for the purity and health of which we have not yet taken even the first steps. The soul of today's man is a truly post-apocalyptic landscape - covered with clouds and puffs of toxic fumes, dotted with craters and ruts, traumatized and clogged much more than the atmosphere and water bodies of our planet.
In order for crops to grow on this soil, you need to learn how to control your consciousness and, first of all, neutralize and use negative experiences. The constructive response to it is twofold. First of all, it is rooted in the liberation from desires, distance from them, due to which the existential gap is reduced. We move its upper border down, however, unlike the substitution operation discussed above, this action does not entail abandoning our true goals, it only moderates the greed with which we pursue them.
Second, we learn to uncover the positive content of negative experiences, recognizing them as an integral and necessary part of the game that stimulates further growth. Instead of supplanting it or compensating for it through aggressive self-assertion, we must learn it with interest and learn the lesson it carries. Half in jest, half seriously, we can say that even when we have to martyrically drag our cross up the mountain, it's good to remember that this is a good fitness exercise and a whole school of character building. Recognizing the positive potential of the negative again brings down the upper bar of the existential gap, not only freeing up creative opportunities, but also making an invaluable contribution to our well-being.
We can agree with Christ that the Kingdom of God is within us - everything we know about a person speaks in favor of this statement. To this, however, it is necessary to make a much less comforting addition: inside of us are also all nine circles of hell, on which most of humanity is slowly roasting, and not after death, but right now. Both of these dimensions do not come sometime in the future, and even more so after the end of life. The clergy do not distribute tickets there, and they cannot be bought with "good" or "evil" deeds, although the preference of one or the other is of great importance for the spiritual ecology. First of all, these are certain modes of work of consciousness, and in order to open the doors to one of them or change the place of your own registration, you need to understand how it works and act on the basis of this knowledge.
© Oleg Tsendrovsky
