What are some ego defenses?
- Grandiosity
- Negative Merging
- Schizoid Defense
- Defensive Suspiciousness
This is not your ordinary Freudian list of ego defenses. Freud’s list of ego defenses looks something like this:
- Denial, Repression, and Suppression
- Displacement and Sublimation
- Projection and Intellectualization
- Rationalization
- Regression
- Reaction Formation
The difference in these two lists of ego defenses is that one concerns itself with the ego’s defense against anxiety seeking equilibrium for an ego sense of self, while the other list is more oriented around the ego defending itself from the intrusion of Being.
Rare is the teacher that can take a student beyond the anxiety and terror of ego dissolution and into the emptiness that offers the opportunity for one’s true nature to arise.
Just this past week, while attending some advanced training on narcissism, I got wondering about pain (emotional and psychological). Why do we avoid it? Exactly what is psychological and emotional pain?
It’s said that all emotional and psychological pain is caused by separation from Being.
It all boils down to – Who are you taking yourself to be?
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A gardener once asked a deeply buried soul, “what do you want?”
“I want to know what I am. I’ve always been confused about that.” She was innocent to the layers of dirt, leaves, debris that defended her place in the garden. It all seemed a necessary part of her existence. The gardener cared, winds blew, storms, mighty storms rained and snowed, the sun shone, more seasons came and went. Just when she concluded, I’ll never know what I am. She was awakened one night to the intimately impersonal point of her existence. She was free to be a daffodil, a tulip, driftwood or rock. She was free to be anything but mostly she was just free to be.