Recap: Stress

➡️ We meet our needs either through ourselves or through others

➡️ When we don’t feel we can trust others, all the pressure falls on us to meet our own needs

• This, alone, makes our wellbeing more volatile, since one person is less likely to be able to meet their needs all the time than a group

➡️ When, as children, we develop a pervasive lack of trust in others to meet our needs, our brains protect us through a process called splitting

• In splitting, our identity is merged with our ideal selves; helping to diminish anxiety around meeting our needs

• Others are simultaneously devalued to support our idealized sense of self

➡️ Splitting prevents accurate self-reflection. Finding fault in ourselves is intolerable because we must be the best to survive

• Our expectations of ourselves are too high – leading us to feel too good about ourselves 

• This creates many opportunities for reality to make us feel bad about ourselves when we encounter evidence that – like everyone else – we’re not able to meet our needs all the time

• Because we only can rely on ourselves, the stakes for meeting our needs are high, leading to peaks and crashes in our self-esteem

➡️ When we do find fault in ourselves, the split can reverse – and we go from feeling like the best to the worst

• In this state, our expectations of ourselves are now too low – leading us to feel like we can’t do anything for ourselves and are totally at the whim of others 

• It can be intolerable to find anything good in ourselves, because that would indicate we could be more or better

• This makes it hard to motivate any action or self actualization at all

These peaks and crashes are incredibly painful in and of themselves – many of the behaviors that are the primary reason people seek mental health treatment can be seen as: 

• Reactions to these crashes: shame, depression, dissociation, suicidality 

• Methods to reduce the pain of these crashes: substance use, impulsive behaviors

• Ways to regain control and stay at the peak for longer: anxiety, rage, overcontrolled behaviors, flirtation and seduction, delusions

The problem is that these behaviors don’t actually fix the problem: our sense of self is unstable because it’s untethered from reality. Further, these behaviors often serve to double down on our too-high expectations of ourselves, creating even greater opportunities for future crashes, and trapping us in an ever more exaggerated vicious cycle.

Or, through our behaviors we finally create sufficient evidence that we aren’t good enough to meet our needs, and can find ourselves giving up entirely.