Ego and self-serving prejudices shape the life story you share with the world and yourself.
If we assume that your whole life is on the record, how much would what you tell about your life match up with this record?
When creating your life story, you also write your story about who you are and what you do. The stories you create turn into your personality over time. You see the world through the lens you bend to adjust to your ego and reduce the failures and wrong decisions in your life.
Your life story reflects your sense of self and identity. Some experiences you associate with others have a solid foundation, such as factual information about your family and place of birth. Other elements reflect your interpretations of key events, such as your identity or situations about your identity. And these comments affect and differentiate your story over time.
Every time you retell your life story to someone. Every time you tell, you add interesting details to color your story without realizing it.
What do you say when people ask you to talk about yourself? You tell clear facts about where you grew up, when, what school you graduated from, where you live, what job you do. Depending on the situation, you can also transmit other information; what kind of family you grew up in, what affects your main decisions in life. After a while, these cornerstones become clear, automatic, and you tell your story without thinking. While the main theme and frame remain the same, the details of your life story may become different and colored over time.
The details that you deliberately bent and twisted at the beginning turn into deception over time. Now you believe these lies yourself and tell your life differently as if these twists and turns were real.
Self-deception is the process of rejecting or rationalizing the opposition, meaning, or significance of evidence and logical argument. Self-deception is convincing yourself of a truth or a situation that is not there.
The person also tells lies to himself in life, such as believing that his married lover will get divorced in the new year, and a person who studies art history says that he is happy to be a management consultant. Often your motivation is to protect yourself while deceiving yourself, but by doing so you will prevent you from making the necessary changes by taking away awareness. This situation causes great difficulties in bilateral relations.
Self-deception questions one’s nature. In psychoanalytic theory, ego defenses are unconscious processes in which fears and anxieties become pervasive when you think about who you are or who you should be, clashing with who you really are.
I would like to continue with a striking example: Someone unconsciously likes a fellow person, but this is never acceptable on the conscious level. In order to eliminate the anxiety arising from this conflict, the person activates some ego defenses. He denies any interest in his fellow man. She gets along with the opposite sex in a flamboyant way. Or he may express his own liking as if it were the interest of someone around him. In such a case, the person uses the Suppression, Reaction and Reflection Mechanisms.
The Suppression Mechanism can be defined as “supported forgetting”. Active, albeit unconscious, “forgetting” of unacceptable impulses, feelings, ideas, or memories. The Suppression Mechanism is often confused with the Denial Mechanism, where the refusal to accept unacceptable or unmanageable aspects of reality. While the Suppression Mechanism is about mental or internal stimuli, Denial is all about external stimuli. Suppression and Denial Mechanisms often work together. It is difficult to grasp that these two mechanisms are not the same.
The Suppression Mechanism can be confused with Distortion, which is the reshaping of reality to suit one’s inner needs. To give an example, a child who grows up with physical violence by his family does not remember these traumatic events, and the Suppression Mechanism comes into play. Instead, he sees his parent as kind and loving because of the Distortion Mechanism. As this example shows, Distortion not only builds on the Suppression Mechanism, it further strengthens the Suppression Mechanism.
Reaction Formation is the superficial acceptance, often even exaggeration, of diametrically opposed emotions and impulses. Examples of Reaction Formation are when an alcoholic talks about the virtue of not drinking alcohol, or when a student from a wealthy family attends anti-capitalist rallies or even organizes them.
The Projection Mechanism is the attribution of unacceptable feelings and thoughts to others. Like Distortion, Reflection includes the Suppression Mechanism in its first stage. Unacceptable feelings and thoughts are ignored before they are attributed to others. Examples of the Projection Mechanism are that a jealous person believes that everyone is jealous of him, an ambitious person is constantly afraid of being eliminated, and a person who is closely concerned with others suspects that his partner is cheating on him.
Your past experiences, your present, in short, all the stages of your life, from the roots you remember to all the times you have imagined, give you the opportunity to define yourself and develop in accordance with your potential. Internal showdowns will help you better understand who you really are. All these experiences show you your potential, actively researching and discovering who you are.
It is entirely your decision to evolve by integrating in a consistent, authentic and satisfying way with who you are and who you aspire to be.
Do not be afraid to meet yourself. Whoever you are, you are beautiful just the way you are.
Dr.phil. R. Meltem Kavcar Sirmalı
14 November 2022
