Behaviors

This emotional reactivity is both incredibly painful and completely reactive – because we can’t control others, and others dictate our wellbeing. We feel no agency, no control over ourselves. We’re in survival mode – instinctively reacting to each moment as it arises - like an animal under attack in fight or flight mode. 

This can lead us to behave in ways that are self damaging and self defeating.

In survival mode – under extreme, constant threat – our capacity to think is undercut. Thinking is slow, under attack we need instinctive action. Individuals in survival mode may engage in impulsive and risky behaviors – like gambling, reckless driving, unsafe sex, spending sprees, binge eating, self harm or drug abuse - anything to manage the stress (or emptiness/boredom) of the moment. They may also sabotage success by suddenly quitting a good job or ending a positive relationship – associating positive feelings of idealization with the impending crash, and opting to cut to the chase. 

These instinctive, pain relieving actions help us escape the intolerable emotional pain we experience moment to moment. Like sticking our arms out when we feel like we’re falling – we may break an arm that way, but our bodies don’t care – it’s just instinct to break the fall. But these actions do nothing to change the overarching pattern causing the pain in the first place, and take us out of the frying pan into the fire. 

This impulsivity can become a vicious cycle: we start with a lack of agency – a sense that we can’t meet our own needs. We then depend on others to meet our needs. When they don’t, we are under stress and react instinctively, further reinforcing our pattern of doing without thinking and further diminishing our sense of agency - i.e. control over our actions in the world. 

We also engage in behaviors that make us feel worse about ourselves – amassing more and more evidence for why we can’t trust ourselves, why we must depend on others. This continues to add more pressure to our relationships, making our sensitivity and reactivity to our status with others even more intense. 

As this cycle continues our identity becomes smaller and more diffuse – this repeated failure makes us lose confidence in our ability to meet our own needs. Our ideal-self remains high, while our assessment of our current self, our identity, drops lower and lower. Over time, our capacity to set any goals, or imagine any path from where we are today to our ideal-self becomes intractable. We give up on self-actualization.