Defense Mode Quotes

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.

The abuser’s mood changes are especially perplexing. He can be a different person from day to day, or even from hour to hour. At times he is aggressive and intimidating, his tone harsh, insults spewing from his mouth, ridicule dripping from him like oil from a drum. When he’s in this mode, nothing she says seems to have any impact on him, except to make him even angrier. Her side of the argument counts for nothing in his eyes, and everything is her fault. He twists her words around so that she always ends up on the defensive. As so many partners of my clients have said to me, “I just can’t seem to do anything right.” At other moments, he sounds wounded and lost, hungering for love and for someone to take care of him. When this side of him emerges, he appears open and ready to heal. He seems to let down his guard, his hard exterior softens, and he may take on the quality of a hurt child, difficult and frustrating but lovable. Looking at him in this deflated state, his partner has trouble imagining that the abuser inside of him will ever be back. The beast that takes him over at other times looks completely unrelated to the tender person she now sees. Sooner or later, though, the shadow comes back over him, as if it had a life of its own. Weeks of peace may go by, but eventually she finds herself under assault once again. Then her head spins with the arduous effort of untangling the many threads of his character, until she begins to wonder whether she is the one whose head isn’t quite right.

If you smother him, he’ll go into defense mode and look for an escape route to protect his freedom.

Silence has always been my default mode—my best defense against the rest of the world.

Being in a state of denial is a universally human response to situations which threaten to overwhelm. People who were abused as children sometimes carry their denial like precious cargo without a port of destination. It enabled us to survive our childhood experiences, and often we still live in survival mode decades beyond the actual abuse. We protect ourselves to excess because we learned abruptly and painfully that no one else would.

most people spend most of their time on defense, in reactive mode, in playing with the cards they got instead of moving to a different table with different cards. Instead

To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defense, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego. Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions. It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying. A change of mind about the mode of thinking and being.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use---silence, exile and cunning.

If you smother him, he’ll go into defense mode and

When we feel isolated, disconnected, and lonely, we try to protect ourselves. In that mode, we want to connect, but our brain is attempting to override connection with self-protection. That means less empathy, more defensiveness, more numbing, and less sleeping.

As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld. The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience. The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches. Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.” The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.

... If instead of colonies you send troops, the cost is vastly greater, and the whole revenues of the country are spent in guarding it so that the gain becomes a loss, and much deeper offense is given since in shifting the quarters of your soldiers from place to place the whole country suffers hardship, which as all feel, all are made enemies and enemies who remaining, although vanquished, in their own homes, have power to hurt. In every way, therefore, this mode of defense is as disadvantageous as that by colonizing is useful.

Many freeze types unconsciously believe that people and danger are synonymous, and that safety lies in solitude. Outside of fantasy, many give up entirely on the possibility of love. The freeze response, also known as the camouflage response, often triggers the individual into hiding, isolating and eschewing human contact as much as possible. This type can be so frozen in retreat mode that it seems as if their starter button is stuck in the ‘off’ position. It is usually the most profoundly abandoned child - ‘the lost child’ - who is forced to ‘choose’ and habituate to the freeze response… Unable to successfully employ fight, flight or fawn responses, the freeze type’s defenses develop around classical dissociation.

La-Z-Boy type thing covered with bronze and silver gears. Kronos slashed, and I managed to jump straight up onto the seat. The throne whirred and hummed with secret mechanisms. Defense mode, it warned. Defense mode.

Soon he essentially stopped talking. "I am retreating into silence as a defensive mode," he mentioned. Eventually, he was down to uttering just five words, and only to guards: yes; no; please; thank you. "I am surprised," he wrote, "by the amount of respect this garners me. That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable." Later he added, "I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can't keep quiet.

One of the hallmarks of anxiety is rapid thinking. Because you are focusing on some issue so deeply and for so much time, you assume that you are also thinking through the issue thoroughly and arriving at the most likely conclusion. However, the opposite is happening. You’re experiencing a logical lapse. You’re jumping to the worst-case scenario because you aren’t thinking clearly, and then you are engaging your fight-or-flight response because the worst-case scenario makes you feel threatened. This is why you obsess about that one, terrifying idea. Your body is responding as though it’s an immediate threat, and until you “defeat” or overcome it, your body will do its job, which is to keep you in defense mode, which is really a heightened state of awareness to the “enemy.

That’s the thing about high standards: they don’t have to come with insecurity. Only perfectionism grafts the two together. As Paul understands it, perfectionism isn’t about perfecting things or tasks, nor is it about striving for especially high standards in, say, your assignments, appearances, parenting, or relationships. It’s far, far deeper than that. It’s about perfecting ourselves, or to be more exact, perfecting our imperfect selves; going through life in defensive mode, concealing every last blemish, flaw, and shortcoming from those around us.

Fine. It’s your life, but—” “But you’re still going to tell me what to do?” he asked, a small smile on his lips. She went into defense mode at his amused tone. “Well, I’m sure as hell not going to be quiet about it.” “Duly noted,” he said dryly. “And for the record? I never want you to be quiet, Elle.

I am retreating into silence as a defensive mode,

We tend to thrive when we see opportunities for growth, not when we are in defensive mode.

A wise person remains centered enough to let go every time the energy shifts into a defensive mode.

To be at your most resourceful in handling workplace challenges, it helps to become adept at recognizing when you’re sliding into defensive mode. Refocusing attention on potential rewards in the situation at hand can also help to reengage your deliberate system and shift you back into discovery mode.

Traumatized children often over-gravitate to one of these response patterns to survive, and as time passes these four modes become elaborated into entrenched defensive structures that are similar to narcissistic [fight], obsessive/compulsive [flight], dissociative [freeze] or codependent [fawn] defenses.

Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and liberty—or a wariness of change, a belief in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue. These may be the byproducts of conservatism, one or more of its historically specific and ever-changing modes of expression. But they are not its animating purpose. Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians, and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force—the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere. Such a view might seem miles away from the libertarian defense of the free market, with its celebration of the atomistic and autonomous individual. But it is not. When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees. 40

And, under and above it all, there was the fear of death before which he was naked and without defense; he had to go forward and meet his end like any other living thing upon the earth. And regulating his attitude toward death was the fact that he was black, unequal, and despised. Passively, he hungered for another orbit between two poles that would let him live again; for a new mode of life that would catch him up with the tension of hate and love. There would have to hover above him, like the stars in a full sky, a vast configuration of images and symbols whose magic and power could lift him up and make him live so intensely that the dread of being black and unequal would be forgotten; that even death would not matter, that it would be a victory. This would have to happen before he could look them in the face again: a new pride and a new humility would have to be born in him, a humility springing from a new identification with some part of the world in which he lived, and this identification forming the basis for a new hope that would function in him as pride and dignity.

A wise person remains centered enough to let go every time the energy shifts into a defensive mode. The moment the energy moves and you feel your consciousness start to get drawn into it, you relax and release. Letting go means falling behind the energy instead of going into it. It just takes a moment of conscious effort to decide that you’re not going there. You just let go.

Although Galileo was a devout Catholic, it was his conflict with the Vatican, sadly mismanaged on both sides, that lay at the basis of the running battle between science and religion, a tragic and confusing schism which persists unresolved. More than ever today, religion finds its revelatory truths threatened by scientific theory, and retreats into a defensive corner, while scientists go into the attack insisting that rational argument is the only valid criterion for an understanding of the workings of the universe. Maybe both sides have misunderstood the nature of their respective roles. Scientists are equipped to answer the mechanical question of how the universe and everything in it, including life, came about. But since their modes of thought are dictated by purely rational, materialistic criteria, physicists cannot claim to answer the questions of why the universe exists, and why we human beings are here to observe it, any more than molecular biologists can satisfactorily explain why – if our actions are determined by the workings of a selfish genetic coding – we occasionally listen to the voice of conscience and behave with altruism, compassion and generosity. Even these human qualities have come under attack from evolutionary psychologists who have ascribed altruism to a crude genetic theory by which familial cooperation is said to favour the survival of the species. Likewise the spiritual sophistication of musical, artistic and poetic activity is regarded as just a highly advanced function of primitive origins.

Left and right in this sense are almost like spirits that flit from host to host, occupying the minds of millions of people at the same time, coordinating groups against each other. And as you start looking at the history of religions or political movements, you can start to see that each has a “left mode” for revolutionary offense and a “right mode” for ruling class defense. Why then do people often discuss left and right as if they were permanent classes rather than temporary tactics?

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.

You’ll recall from our trip to the Serengeti that a fight-or-flight stress response starts when you recognize an external threat. Your brain and body then go into the self-defense mode of attack or escape. The pause-and-plan response differs in one very crucial way: It starts with the perception of an internal conflict, not an external threat. You want to do one thing (smoke a cigarette, supersize your lunch, visit inappropriate websites at work), but know you shouldn’t. Or you know you should do something (file your taxes, finish a project, go to the gym), but you’d rather do nothing. This internal conflict is its own kind of threat: Your instincts are pushing you toward a potentially bad decision. What’s needed, therefore, is protection of yourself by yourself. This is what self-control is all about. The most helpful response will be to slow you down, not speed you up (as a fight-or-flight response does). And this is precisely what the pause-and-plan response does. The perception of an internal conflict triggers changes in the brain and body that help you slow down and control your impulses. THIS

Certain opponents of Marxism dismiss it as an outworn economic dogma based upon 19th century prejudices. Marxism never was a dogma. There is no reason why its formulation in the 19th century should make it obsolete and wrong, any more than the discoveries of Gauss, Faraday and Darwin, which have passed into the body of science... The defense generally given is that the Gita and the Upanishads are Indian; that foreign ideas like Marxism are objectionable. This is generally argued in English the foreign language common to educated Indians; and by persons who live under a mode of production (the bourgeois system forcibly introduced by the foreigner into India.) The objection, therefore seems less to the foreign origin than to the ideas themselves which might endanger class privilege. Marxism is said to be based upon violence, upon the class-war in which the very best people do not believe nowadays. They might as well proclaim that meteorology encourages storms by predicting them. No Marxist work contains incitement to war and specious arguments for senseless killing remotely comparable to those in the divine Gita.

Article VIII All charges of war, and all other expenses that shall be incurred for the common defense or general welfare, and allowed by the United States in Congress assembled, shall be defrayed out of a common treasury, which shall be supplied by the several States in proportion to the value of all land within each State, granted or surveyed for any person, as such land and the buildings and improvements thereon shall be estimated according to such mode as the United States in Congress assembled, shall from time to time direct and appoint. The taxes for paying that proportion shall be laid and levied by the authority and direction of the legislatures of the several States within the time agreed upon by the United States in Congress assembled.

In humans (and other highly sociable mammals, such as dogs), the default setting is a major contributor to their individual personality. People (and dogs) who go through life in discover mode (except when directly threatened) are happier, more sociable, and more eager for new experiences. Conversely, people (and dogs) who are chronically in defend mode are more defensive and anxious, and they have only rare moments of perceived safety. They tend to see new situations, people, and ideas as potential threats, rather than as opportunities. Such chronic wariness was adaptive in some ancient environments, and may still be today for children raised in unstable and violent settings. But being stuck in defend mode is an obstacle to learning and growth in the physically safe environments that surround most children in developed nations

We can no longer speak Evil. All we can do is discourse on the rights of man - a discourse which is pious, weak, useless and hypocritical, its supposed value deriving from the Enlightenment belief in a natural attraction of the Good, from an idealized view of human relationships (whereas Evil can manifestly be dealt with only by means of Evil). What is more, even this Good qua ideal value is invariably deployed in a self-defensive, austerity-loving, negative and reactive mode. All the talk is of the minimizing of Evil, the prevention of violence: nothing but security. This is the condescending and depressive power of good intentions, a power that can dream of nothing except rectitude in the world, that refuses even to consider a bending of Evil, or an intelligence of Evil. There can be a 'right' to speech only if speech is defined as the 'free' expression of an individual. Where speech is conceived of as a form implying reciprocity, collusion, antagonism or seduction, the notion of right can have no possible meaning.

In the poem, Inanna, unveiled, sees her own mysterious depth, Ereshkigal, who glares back at her. She has an immediate, full experience of her underworld self. That naked moment is like the fifth scene in the Villa of Mysteries where the faun, looking into a mirror bowl, sees reflected back a mask of terrible Dionysus as lord of the underworld. It is the moment of self-confrontation for the goddess of active life and love. Archetypally, these eyes of death are implacable and profound, seeing an immediateness that finds pretense, ideals, even individuality and relatedness, irrelevant. They also hold and enable the mystery of a radically different, precultural mode of perception. Like the eyes in the skulls around the house of the Russian nature goddess and witch, Baba-Yaga, they perceive with an objectivity like that of nature itself and our dreams, boring into the soul to find the naked truth, to see reality beneath all its myriad forms and the illusions and defenses it displays. Western science once aspired to such vision. But we humans do not have such objective eyes. We can see only limited and relative, indeterminate truths. We and our subjectivity are part of the reality we seek to see. Before the vision of Ereshkigal, however, objective reality is unmasked. It is nothing"Neti,neti," as the Sanskrit says and yet everything, the place of paradox behind the veil of the Great Goddess and the temple of wisdom. These eyes see from and embody the starkness of the abyss that takes all back, reduces the dancing, playing maya of the goddess to inert matter and stops life on earth.

One mode of anti-frontier and anti-self-reliance propaganda is contemporary hysteria about gun control – a part of the materialistic determinism of the hour. To the superficial minds of “Liberals,” collectivists, Marxians, et al., instruments are supposed to act upon man, and men (no longer self-reliant) merely to be acted upon: to them, murder lies in the gun and not in the soul of man. So they think that to deprive men of guns would prevent man from murder! “What the Power Boys – the insiders – behind the gun controls really want, of course, is not to control guns but to control us. They want registration so that they can confiscate; they want to confiscate so that they will have power and we shall be powerless – even as we live today upon a wild frontier demanding ever more self-reliance. “On the old frontier, men had to rely upon themselves and had to be armed until there were sound laws and until law-enforcement officers could enforce the laws. Today laws against thieves, muggers, thugs, rapist, arsonists, looters, murderers (thanks largely to the “Liberal” majority on the Supreme Court) are diluted almost to the point of abolition; the Marshal Dillons of the world, thanks to the same Court, are disarmed or emasculated, they are told to respect the “rights” of thieves, muggers, thugs, rapists, arsonists, looters, muggers, above the right of good citizens to be secure from such felons. “Good citizens, deprived of the processes of the law or the protection of the police, are supposed to accept their lot as the passive happy victims of “the unfortunate,” sheep to be sheared of feed to the wolves bleating about the loveliness of it all. It is “violence” if good citizens defend themselves; it is not “violent” but “protest” if they or their property are assaulted. So gun controls are the order of the day – gun controls that will disarm me of good will, but will not disarm the Mafia, the mobs out on a spree, the wolves on the prowl, the men of ill will. “This is a part of the “Liberal” sentimentality that does not see sin, evil, violence, as realities in the soul of man. To the “Liberal,” all we need is dialogue, discussion, compromise, co-existence, understanding – always in favor of the vicious and never in defense of the victim. The sentimental “Liberal,” fearful of self-reliant man, believes this to be a good thing; the cynical Power Boys pretend to believe it, and use it for their own ends. “Gun control is the new Prohibition. It will not work, as Prohibition did not work. But meanwhile, it will be tried, as a sentimental cure-all, a new usurpation of the rights of a once thoroughly self-reliant people, another step on the march to 1984. It is only a symptom of our modern disease, but it is well worth examining at a little more length. And, as I recently made a trip to the land of Sentimentalia, and brought back a published account of gun control there, I hope you will permit me to offer it as evidence speaking to our condition: “A few hundred of the several hundred million citizens of Sentimentalia have in recent years been shot by criminals. The Congress of that land, led by Senators Tom Prodd and Jokey Hidings, and egged on by the President, responded with a law to first register, and eventually confiscate, all the wicked instruments known as ‘guns.’ The law was passed amid tears of joy. “But, alas, when guns continued to be used by the happy thugs thus freed from the fear of being shot by self-reliant citizens, the Prohibitionists claimed that this meant that knives need to be forbidden… and then violence and murders would end.

Intuitively we all know that it is better to feel than to not feel. Our emotions are not a luxury but an essential aspect of our makeup. We have them not just for the pleasure of feeling but because they have crucial survival value. They orient us, interpret the world for us, give us vital information without which we cannot thrive. They tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth. Imagine how disabled we would be if we could not see or hear or taste or sense heat or cold or physical pain. To shut down emotions is to lose an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and, beyond that, an indispensable part of who we are. Emotions are what make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, and meaningful. They drive our explorations of the world, motivate our discoveries, and fuel our growth. Down to the very cellular level, human beings are either in defensive mode or in growth mode, but they cannot be in both at the same time. When children become invulnerable, they cease to relate to life as infinite possibility, to themselves as boundless potential, and to the world as a welcoming and nurturing arena for their self-expression. The invulnerability imposed by peer orientation imprisons children in their limitations and fears. No wonder so many of them these days are being treated for depression, anxiety, and other disorders. The love, attention, and security only adults can offer liberates children from the need to make themselves invulnerable and restores to them that potential for life and adventure that can never come from risky activities, extreme sports, or drugs. Without that safety our children are forced to sacrifice their capacity to grow and mature psychologically, to enter into meaningful relationships, and to pursue their deepest and most powerful urges for self-expression. In the final analysis, the flight from vulnerability is a flight from the self. If we do not hold our children close to us, the ultimate cost is the loss of their ability to hold on to their own truest selves.

when people’s brains are in defensive mode, it becomes harder to see common sense. Small disagreements can end up holding back progress beyond reason.

To defend against intrusions into this inner fantasy, the person utilizes three major modes of defense: (1) selection; (2) distortion; and (3) provocation. These defenses are behavioral operations that serve to protect the fantasy bond.

And you say you want a new job, but something keeps you holding on to the old one, justifying why he’ll get better this year,” Mina added, holding her iced almond-milk latte in one hand as she swiped through a dating app with the other. “And he’s so clingy and expects you to be there for him twenty-four seven,” Ellen added. “And when you do finally get another offer, you get cold feet because you can’t even remember who you were without Mr. Wall Street in your life.” “You’ve got to get out,” Mina said, tilting her head to evaluate a digital suitor on her phone. “It’s time,” Ellen agreed. “Sarah agrees with us.” Rae felt the panicked sensation of a door that had closed before she’d managed to reach it, but she avoided interpreting their words as truth. She just went into defensive mode, disliking how the rest of the Scramblettes had apparently started a separate group chat to stage an intervention. “Things have been getting better,” Rae said. “I think I’ll be able to present my market size analysis to a client at a pitch meeting next week.” “You’re doing that thing,” Ellen said, “where the shitty boyfriend does one mediocre thing, but relative to everything else he’s done it’s amazing, and so you think this means he’s really changed.” The glare from Ellen’s engagement ring felt very bright, and Rae didn’t like the sight of it.

When our ancestors were separated from the safety of the group, they needed to react defensively even to marginal threats, since they might well turn out to be lethal. But in modern life that same hypervigilance causes us to misread harmless or even welcoming people and situations as threats. Fleeing into self-preservation mode, we’ll avoid people and distrust even those

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With all that taken care of, she was officially off duty for the day. And out of excuses to not call her mother back. Was she being a healthy adult by avoiding unnecessary stress? Or was this an immature defense mechanism left over from a tumultuous childhood? She picked up the phone and scrolled to her mother’s contact. Andrea. Not Mom. Andrea hadn’t earned the title. “Mackenzie!” her mother trilled when she answered, and Mack automatically shifted into carefully listening mode for any signs of alcohol, her mother’s favorite hobby. “Hi, Mom.

When you’re in “one thing is true” mode, you’re judgmental of and reactive to someone else’s experience, because it feels like an assault on your own truth. As a result, you will seek to prove your own point of view, which in turn makes the other person defensive, because they need to uphold the realness of their experience. In “one thing is true” mode, exchanges escalate quickly—each person thinks they’re arguing about the content of the conversation, when in fact they’re trying to defend that they are a real, worthy person with a real, truthful experience.

To truly be prepared for violence, it helps to study how it works. We need to understand how it happens and what factors can improve our ability to prepare for, pre-empt, detect, defuse, minimize, contain, resolve, and deal with the aftermath of it long before we face it. If we do have to defend ourselves physically, we don’t have to go all out in seek and destroy mode like I did in third grade. We can learn to do just what is needed to evade and escape or develop the ability to contain and control violence so it doesn’t boil over. At our best, we develop ourselves into the kind of person who is unlikely to attract altercations.

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you get such an indication from Jan that she’s going to try to derail you with a denial, or if she beats you to the punch and is able to voice the denial, there are several immediate actions you can take to quash her effort. First, if you want to get a person to stop talking, a very effective way to accomplish that is with one word: the person’s name. A fascinating nuance of human communication is that when we hear our name, we have a natural inclination to switch from speaking mode to listening mode, because it’s the way people typically get our attention to tell us something—we hear our name, and our ears perk up. The next step is to use a control phrase, like, “Jan, hold on a second,” or “Jan, give me a chance to make this clear.” That enables you to gain control of the exchange, and to ease back into your monologue. As always, it needs to be conveyed calmly, and without raising your voice—trying to control the situation by turning up your volume will create a confrontational atmosphere that will only make your job more difficult. Third, a remarkably effective mechanism to get someone to stop talking is the universal stop sign: You hold up your hand. You do it almost as a gesture of self-defense—you’re not extending it out aggressively and shoving it into the person’s face, or doing it with attitude. It’s a visual amplification of your control phrase, and it’s more powerful than you might imagine. The reason is that this is a verbal battle, and when you get the person to stop talking, you’ve taken away his weapon. In medieval times, it was a clash of swords;

Cartridgeration has its consequences. Prolonged exposure to this fragmentary method of relating to the world inculcates in the gamer the belief that he can have it all, serially, within a very short time span, regardless of whether any two pieces of It are mutually exclusionary. He can be chasing em down… and on the run. Safe… and under fire. Cute and harmless… and imposing and dangerous. As he toggles from cartridge to cartridge, game to game, goal to goal, identity to identity, his mother’s long-standing promise that he can “be whatever he wants to be in this world” seems fulfilled, given a broad enough interpretation of “in this world.” This is not entirely a bad thing. The ability to simultaneously entertain contradictories can be useful… but it comes at a price. The Cartridgeration process leads one to a mode of thinking that stresses the inadvisability of choices. Any definite choice and subsequent course of action puts the gamer on one path at a tremendous possibility cost to all conceivable others. Through definitive actions, he pares the ür-configuration containing all his possible worlds to a stunted fraction of its former self. How many brilliant futures are ruled out with each step, with each decisive word? Billions, in a very real sense. The further he gets himself into any situation, the more severe the pruning of his possibility tree. Thus his inability to focus on any enthusiasm for too long, a metaphysical fickleness that functions as a defense mechanism against the death of possibility.

If you’re like most people, a string of nerve-racking incidents keeps you in fight-or-flight response—and out of homeostasis—a large part of the time. Maybe the car cutting you off is the only actual life-threatening situation you encounter all day, but the traffic on the way to work, the pressure of preparing for a big presentation, the argument you had with your spouse, the credit-card bill that came in the mail, the crashing of your computer hard drive, and the new gray hair you noticed in the mirror keep the stress hormones circulating in your body on a near-constant basis. Between remembering stressful experiences from the past and anticipating stressful situations coming up in your future, all these repetitive short-term stresses blur together into long-term stress. Welcome to the 21st-century version of living in survival mode. In fight-or-flight mode, life-sustaining energy is mobilized so that the body can either run or fight. But when there isn’t a return to homeostasis (because you keep perceiving a threat), vital energy is lost in the system. You have less energy in your internal environment for cell growth and repair, long-term building projects on a cellular level, and healing when that energy is being channeled elsewhere. The cells shut down, they no longer communicate with one another, and they become “selfish.” It’s not time for routine maintenance (let alone for making improvements); it’s time for defense. It’s every cell for itself, so the collective community of cells working together becomes fractured. The immune and endocrine systems (among others) become weakened as genes in those related cells are compromised when informational signals from outside the cells are turned off. It’s like living in a country where 98 percent of the resources go toward defense, and nothing is left for schools, libraries, road building and repair, communication systems, growing of food, and so on. Roads develop potholes that aren’t fixed. Schools suffer budget cuts, so students wind up learning less. Social welfare programs that took care of the poor and the elderly have to close down. And there’s not enough food to feed the masses. Not surprisingly, then, long-term stress has been linked to anxiety, depression, digestive problems, memory loss, insomnia, hypertension, heart disease, strokes, cancer, ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, colds, flu, aging acceleration, allergies, body pain, chronic fatigue, infertility, impotence, asthma, hormonal issues, skin rashes, hair loss, muscle spasms, and diabetes, to name just a few conditions (all of which, by the way, are the result of epigenetic changes). No organism in nature is designed to withstand the effects of long-term stress.

modes of defenses change depending on whether you are familiar or unfamiliar with the enemy

When our behavior threatens our self-concept, our ego automatically goes into hyper-defense mode, circles the wagons, and begins issuing self-justifications designed to protect itself.

Genesis 11:4 for Zane:   “And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”   “Doesn’t that sound just a little familiar?” He sat back and went into full quoting mode again:   “We the people (‘go to, let us’) of the United States (‘make us a name’), in Order to form a more perfect Union, (‘lest we be scattered abroad’), establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

We need to analyze and contemplate the experience of modernity in the Arab and Muslim world, in order to grasp what is happening. Some of us, for example, reject modernity, and yet it’s obvious that these same people are using the products of modernity, even to the extent that when proselytizing their interpretation of Islam, which conflicts with modernity, they’re employing the tools of modernity to do so. This strange phenomenon can best be understood by contemplating our basic attitude towards modernity, stemming from two centuries ago. If we analyze books written by various Muslim thinkers at the time, concerning modernity and the importance of modernizing our societies, and so forth, we can see that they distinguished between certain aspects of modernity that should be rejected, and others that may be accepted. You can find this distinction in the very earliest books that Muslim intellectuals wrote on the topic of modernity. To provide a specific example, I’ll cite an important book that is widely regarded as having been the first ever written about modern thought in the Muslim world, namely, a book by the famous Egyptian intellectual, Rifa’ Rafi’ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), Takhlish al-Ibriz fi Talkhish Baris, whose title may be translated as Mining Gold from Its Surrounding Dross. As you can immediately grasp from its title, the book distinguishes between the “gold” contained within modernity—gold being a highly prized, expensive and rare product of mining—and its so-called “worthless” elements, which Muslims are forbidden to embrace. Now if we ask ourselves, “What elements of modernity did these early thinkers consider acceptable, and what did they demand that we reject?,” we discover that technology is the “acceptable” element of modernity. We are told that we may adopt as much technology as we want, and exploit these products of modernity to our heart’s content. But what about the modes of thought that give rise to these products, and underlie the very phenomenon of modernity itself? That is, the free exercise of reason, and critical thought? These two principles are rejected and proscribed for Muslims, who may adopt the products of modernity, while its substance, values and foundations, including its philosophical modes of thought, are declared forbidden. Shaykh Rifa’ Rafi’ al-Tahtawi explained that we may exploit knowledge that is useful for defense, warfare, irrigation, farming, etc., and yet he simultaneously forbade us to study, or utilize, the philosophical sciences that gave rise to modern thought, and the love for scientific methodologies that enlivens the spirit of modern knowledge, because he believed that they harbored religious deviance and infidelity (to God).

...have you ever seen a mother robin in her territorial mode? I watched one brutalize another female robin, then a minute later strike a hard blow to the back of a considerably larger Steller's Jay...Generally speaking, and again from my observations, most males of most species are actually fairly low-key and oriented toward to the idea of defense through song and display and, if necessary, scuffling. Progecting chicks in the nest, a female will be quick to drive away anyone deemed an intruder, and without much fanfare They're more direct and seem tougher to me. They go for the jugular, almost literally. As another bird, I'd much rather deal with a male.

Our foreign policy has become an aggressive assertion of military superiority in a defensive and reactive mode, seeking to protect us against growing and invisible threats instead of addressing the root causes of those threats.

Thus the continuation of the master tutor and willing servant students, the privileging of the visual, the inculcation of absurd modes of behaviour (sleep deprivation, aggressive defensiveness, internal competition), the raising of individuals on to pedestals, all these and more self-perpetuate in schools of architecture around the world, a strange form of interbreeding with tutors passing the architectural gene to students who in turn become tutors who perform the same rituals.

At times he is aggressive and intimidating, his tone harsh, insults spewing from his mouth, ridicule dripping from him like oil from a drum. When he's in this mode, nothing she says seems to have any impact on him, except to make him even more angrier. Her side of the argument counts for nothing in his eyes, and everything is her fault. He twists her words around so that she always ends up on the defensive.

At times he is aggressive and intimidating, his tone harsh, insults spewing from his mouth, ridicule dripping from him like oil from a drum. When he's in this mode, nothing she says seems to have any impact on him, except to make him even more angrier. Her side of the argument counts for nothing in his eyes, and everything is her fault. He twists her words around so that she always ends up on the defensive. At other moments, he sounds wounded and lost, hungering for love and for someone to take care of him. When this side of him emerges. He appears open and ready to heal

Hanlon’s Razor, when practiced diligently as a counter to confirmation bias, empowers us, and gives us far more realistic and effective options for remedying bad situations. When we assume someone is out to get us, our very natural instinct is to take actions to defend ourselves. It’s harder to take advantage of, or even see, opportunities while in this defensive mode because our priority is saving ourselves—which tends to reduce our vision to dealing with the perceived threat instead of examining the bigger picture.

Down to the very cellular level, human beings are either in defensive mode or in growth mode, but they cannot be in both at the same time.

Satan knows the danger of pride. So a lot of the thoughts that he tries to put in our head are pride-based thoughts. When a person thinks they know everything, you can’t teach them anything. We have to be very careful that we do not always think in every situation that we are right and we won’t listen to anyone else. I can find no place in the Bible where Jesus ever tried to prove that he was right about anything. He was accused of stuff all the time. And he just basically said: Well whatever you think. Whatever you think. And you know why? Because he knew who he was. If we know who we are, and we know who we belong to, we don’t have to try to prove to other people that we are right about stuff. If we have no humility, and somebody accuses us of something, then right away we go in a defense mode because we don’t want them to think badly of us. Can I tell you something? Being right is highly overrated. It really doesn’t do all that much for you in the long run. And I know one thing, I spent a lot of years of my life not knowing that, because I sure started arguments trying to prove that I am right, and I am telling you all that it is, is the fruit of pride.

Della, on the other hand, looked like she’d gone into full mama-bear mode and was imagining the many ways she could use her fancy defense training to drop-kick Stina across the room and then step on her with the spikes of her heels.

While across patriarchies a common response is to view women as dangerous antagonists to be subdued, [Sudhir] Kakar says the 'defensive mode' of Indian male fantasy takes a specific form - that of 'desexualization, either of the self or of the woman', the former through celibacy and ascetic longings, and the latter through transforming the woman into either a maternal automation or an 'androgynous virgin

The truth is that intimacy with our partner rises or falls in direct proportion to our capacity to listen well. Listening with an open heart is the ultimate spiritual act. It is the greatest gifts we can give to our partner, and ultimately to ourselves. The problem is that we're all defensive a fair amount of the time, although we may be better able to observe defensiveness in other people. Once we’re in defensive or reactive mode we can’t take in new information or see two sides of an issue—or, better yet, seven or eight sides. Defensiveness is normal and universal. It is also the archenemy of listening. Defensiveness makes it impossible to truly know our partner or be known.

If these analysts are right, then the way people actually function is at odds with the myth of the "good citizen." People are motivated essentially by the attempt to "maximize their outcomes." In social situations involving the fate of other people, this involves the reduction of "social and self distress" at minimum cost to other desired resources (Walster et al., 1976). When the costs are high, the "Rational Man" myth is threatened by the person's use of the "justification" mode of restoring "psychological equity" (Walster & Piliavin, 1972); or, as Schwartz (1975) describes, the "reassessment and redefinition of the situation." These reactions are essentially the irrational defenses based upon "denial of the victim's state of need," "denial of the suitability of norms" which define the victim as someone truly innocent and in a state of "genuine need." *Readers may be more familiar with comparable versions of this material that appeared in Walster, Berscheid and Walster, 1976. 30 CHAPTER 1 What some of our best known theorists have described is that we do not act as "good citizens." On the contrary, we are always trying to make the best deal for ourselves. And when it is the most profitable way to respond, we are not very "rational" in the way we justify our self-interested acts. If they are correct, then it is quite obvious that we must go to great lengths to maintain the belief that we live in a just world. But do we?

The allostatic model of stress suggests that stress-induced illness isn’t a result of depleting or exhausting any particular glands or hormones or what have you, but rather the unintended consequence of an overactive coping strategy. Stress-mode is not a healthy place to be, thanks to all the physiological changes it involves, and spending too much time there accumulates wear and tear across your entire body, which we measure as allostatic load. Paraphrasing researcher Robert Sapolsky, your body’s army doesn’t run out of bullets; it spends so much on the defense budget that it doesn’t have any cash left over for the more essential life processes.21 If the brief dip into stress-mode is adaptive ― that is, if it solves the problem ― then you’re fine. You’ll adjust and everything settles back to normal. It’s when you stay in stress-mode all day every day, for weeks and months, that you develop real health issues.

The Instagram versus Hipstamatic story is perhaps the canonical example of a strategy made famous by Chris Dixon’s 2015 essay “Come for the tool, stay for the network.” Chris writes: A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is what I like to call “come for the tool, stay for the network.” The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company.40 There are many other examples across many sectors beyond photo apps: The Google Suite provides stand-alone tools for people to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, but also network features around collaborative editing, and comments. Games like Minecraft or even classics like Street Fighter can be played in single-player mode where you play against the computer, or multiplayer mode where you play with friends. Yelp started out effectively as a directory tool for people to look up local businesses, showing addresses and phone numbers, but the network eventually built out the database of photos and reviews. LinkedIn started as a tool to put your resume online, but encouraged you to build up your professional network over time. “Come for the tool, stay for the network” circumvents the Cold Start Problem and makes it easier to launch into an entire network—with PR, paid marketing, influencers, sales, or any number of tried-and-true channels. It minimizes the size requirement of an atomic network and in turn makes it easy to take on an entire network. Whether it’s photo-sharing apps or restaurant directories, in the framework of the Cold Start Theory, this strategy can be visualized. In effect, a tool can be used to “prop up” the value of the network effects curve when the network is small.

Because she had not only observed him up close at trial on a daily basis but interviewed him twice providing great insight into Oswald’s killer. In addition, Kilgallen could check not only his background but investigate discrepancies in statements he made to the Warren Commission since she was the first reporter to read them, and since Ruby was still alive, the potential existed to interview him again. This strategy was unique, far afield from that conducted by any reporter or investigative body consumed with targeting Oswald as the key to unlocking the mysteries of the JFK assassination when Kilgallen believed he was not. In addition, after interviewing Ruby twice, Kilgallen had gained a soft spot for his plight, some sympathy for the man who shot Oswald. Whatever she heard during the twin interviews caused her to wonder if Ruby was a patsy, used and then discarded. Recall what she wrote after the second interview: “I went out into the almost empty lunchroom corridor wondering what I really believed about this man.” Kilgallen’s actions while pursuing the investigation indicated she had taken on the task of defending Ruby herself. She was standing up for him, demanding justice, becoming his paladin. She wondered if he had fair treatment, if his constitutional rights to a fair trial were honored. Armed with this mindset, Kilgallen was in fighting mode determined to leave no avenue of interest unturned. Kilgallen’s siding with Ruby’s defense team at his trial evidenced proof of Kilgallen’s focus on Ruby. She also attempted to aid the defense by securing more information from the FBI about Oswald. Then Kilgallen exposed only Ruby’s testimony at the Warren Commission before its intended release instead of the thousands of pages of pertinent information about others associated with the assassinations. It also appears likely she flew to New Orleans based

Because I was always in survival mode or on defense, I didn’t have the privilege of softness or vulnerability.

In the field of biology, “superbugs” evolve when a bacterium, fungus, or virus is put in a low-stakes setting where it can both thrive and test itself against a panoply of our best defenses (like antibiotics). Hospitals present one such setting in that they serve as gathering points for already-infected individuals (many of whom are immunocompromised, making them “easy mode” for viruses, fungi, and bacteria) and are packed with antivirals, antifungal, and antibiotic medications. . . . Our modern social landscape has created a similar environment, enabling cultural viruses to evolve. These viruses cannot survive and reproduce independently and must parasitize healthy cultural ecosystems, rewriting healthy cultures' internal machinery to carry out their life cycles.

A key point in Dr. Lipton’s astute explanation of biological activity is that at any one time, cells—like the entire human organism—can be either in defensive mode or growth mode but not both. Our perceptions of the environment are stored in cellular memory. When early environmental influences are chronically stressful, the developing nervous system and the other organs of the PNI super-system repeatedly receive the electric, hormonal and chemical message that the world is unsafe or even hostile. Those perceptions are programmed in our cells on the molecular level. Early experiences condition the body’s stance toward the world and determine the person’s unconscious beliefs about herself in relationship to the world. Dr. Lipton calls that process the biology of belief. Fortunately, human experience and the ever-unfolding potential of human beings ensure that the biology of belief, though deeply physiologically ingrained, is not irreversible.

We have seen that stress is the result of an interaction between a stressor and a processing system. That processing apparatus is the human nervous system, operating under the influence of the brain’s emotional centres. The biology of belief inculcated in that processing apparatus early in life crucially influences our stress responses throughout our lives. Do we recognize stressors? Do we magnify or minimize potential threats to our well-being? Do we perceive ourselves as alone? As helpless? As never needing help? As never deserving help? As being loved? As having to work to deserve love? As hopelessly unlovable? These are unconscious beliefs, embedded at the cellular level. They “control” our behaviours no matter what we may think on the conscious level. They keep us in shut-down defensive modes or allow us to open to growth and to health. We look now at some of these viscerally held perceptions more closely.

It would not seem necessary to conduct any detailed dissection of Lewis's theology, for the job has already been done by John Beversluis, who in C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (1985) has keenly, pungently, but entirely without malice and rancor knocked down every pillar of Lewis's defenses of God, Jesus, and Christianity. (Richard H. Purtill's sorry attempt at rebutting Beversluis only proves that Lewis's advocates are, on the whole, even less worthy of consideration than he was himself.) Beversluis exposes the manifold fallacies of Lewis's mode of argumentation: question-begging, false dichotomies, sheer ignorance of philosophical complexities, rhetorical sleight of hand, and much more. Perhaps his most frequent error is the enunciation of his opponents' views in a highly superficial and even misleading manner, to the point that they become caricatures of the positions he is attempting to refute. As Beversluis notes: "His tendency is to rush into battle, misrepresent the opposition, and then demolish it. The demolition is often swift and the victory decisive, but the view refuted is seldom a position anyone actually holds." One gains the strong impression that Lewis was simply unwilling, or perhaps even afraid, to deal forthrightly with views he disagreed with. It would be surprising to find someone of his general (but not philosophical) intelligence making such crude and grotesque errors in reasoning, were it not that he manifestly considered his opponents not merely factually wrong but morally repugnant and even dangerous, so that he set about attacking them with every weapon available, legitimate or otherwise.

When conversations of racism arise, you jump into defense mode, making you unable to really hear and understand the pain and challenges of BIPOC. The focus becomes to defend the self (and really, one’s white privilege and white supremacy as a whole) rather than opening yourself up to an experience of becoming consciously aware of what your privilege has protected you from.

Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.

Art's relation to form, to the image, to the monistic fantasy that provoked its defense of its own dividedness is today, as Klein predicted, intermittent and embarrassed. There are modes of art now that resemble activism or protest, pure and simple; modes of art characterized by a refusal to structure themselves around subject-object relations. The visual itself, the image, is questioned as the normative framework of art. Art is often not a product, not a precious trace, not a singularity, but rahter a dynamic, multipular interaction that creates temporary publics who are public to one another. Art does not have to add anything to the world. for technology and entrepreneurship already do that. Art is an irreality opened up inside the world. Art is the refusal of complicity in any form of domination. You are not trapped by the collectivity, but you are not entirely free either, for freedom, even the anarchic mode of the artwork, is suspected to be a mode of evasion of responsibility. Art is a quasi-event: it is not there all the time (like a book), but it is also not there only at an assigned time (like a theatrical play). This has become a comparative advantage of art over the other arts, which have more trouble intervening in reality. Much art today is coordinated with long-term eschatological or emancipatory projects, with projects as such. Art aims at such positive goals as synchrony, participation, inclusion, and sympathy, concepts hard to reconcile with the once-prized, exclusive qualities of art.

The bizarre schizoid style of the Trump administration becomes intelligible as an attempt to escape this dilemma. Elected as an agent of negation, President Trump must now promote positive policies and programs. Any direction he takes will alienate some of his supporters, who are bound together largely on the strength of their repudiations. A predilection for the mainstream will alienate most of them. Against this background, the loud and vulgar sound of the president’s voice becomes the signal for a mustering of the political war-bands. The subject at issue is often elite behavior unrelated to policy: “fake news” in the media, for example, or an NFL star kneeling during the National Anthem. Those who oppose Trump can’t resist the lure of outrage. Their responses tend to be no less loud or vulgar, and are sometimes more violent, than the offending message.80 Groups on the other side of the spectrum, now stoked to full-throated rant mode, rally reflexively to the president’s defense. I have described this process elsewhere.81 It’s a zero-sum struggle for attention that rewards the most immoderate voices—and, without question, Donald Trump is a master of the game. His unbridled language mobilizes his anti-elite followers, even as his policies appeal to more “conventional” Republicans and conservatives. Politically, it’s a high-wire act without a net. Trump was never a popular candidate. He’s not a popular president. To retain his base, he must provoke his opposition into a frenzy of loathing. Ordinary Americans, inevitably, have come to regard the president as the sum of all his rants. For our confused and demoralized elites, who have no clue about the game being played, Donald Trump looks something like the Beast of the Apocalypse, a sign of chaotic end-times. Writes the normally reflective Ian Buruma: “the act of undermining democratic institutions by abusing them in front of braying mobs is not modern at all. It is what aspiring dictators have always done.

Why should you do this, when it’s the last thing you want to do? Because it works when other approaches don’t. Ignore a slacker, and the problem will continue and probably escalate. Confront the person, expecting to receive an apology and a promise to reform, and you’re likely to create an enemy who’ll look for every opportunity to covertly work against you. But do the unexpected by apologizing yourself, and something very different occurs: You shift a person instantly out of defensive mode and cause the individual to mirror your humility and concern. Taking responsibility for your actions and committing to correct your faults in the future also demonstrates tremendous graciousness, generosity, and poise, and turns you into a person worthy of respect.

They may alternate between an extremely dependent posture on one hand, and an authoritarian stance when they are in the parental mode.

Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air and saying, ‘Enough!’ I immediately feel my brain seizing up when I do that. Then, instead of being smart in handling the workload, it’s easy to make bad decisions,” he says. “You can end up catastrophizing, worrying about worst-case scenarios like missing deadlines and even losing your job. None of which helps you think any more clearly.” It’s a good description of how stressful it feels when our brain’s deliberate system gets swamped with demands, and how the resulting tumble into defensive mode makes it hard to be our most sensible selves.

In The Archangel Raphael Leaving Tobias' Family, Rembrandt leaves dirt on the shadowed soles of Raphael's feet as he flies off, illuminated in glory. Passing by the painting, one sees the dramatic action, the melodramatic emotions, and the re-created narrative events of the Bible. Slowed down a bit, the viewer sees light across a large muscular calf, a strong and sharply shaped ankle, and then dirty feet. The angel who tells us he only pretended to eat - this to explain away all traces of his apparent earthliness as a fallen creaturely being - is here on the canvas with dirty feet, carrying soil, the created, to the creator. Van Gogh had rightly said there are mysteries in these paintings. They are mysteries of device and design, not of messianic significance. They require a docent and not a priest, a creative critic to guide the view of specific images, not a guardian of mysteries and master of their enigmatic authority. Dirty feet on the soles of an archangel famous for his annunciations give the viewer a point of view on the inescapably human nature of the narrated God. Raphael may no eat. He may believe he creates an illusion to satisfy the religious desire for mythological consistency, but even archangels deceive themselves as well as others. Humans sometimes do the same in inventing the transcendence they need or think they want - creating a regime from which the priestly classes rule, even theorizing the alienation of the divine. Deceit is an essential device of cultural adaptation. It constructs needed beliefs that at high and low levels of thought or action complement their existence with modes of self-defense, which protect them from not only needed analysis but also the importance of failure.

When we feel safe, the parasympathetic nervous system brings about rest and relaxation. However, when we feel threatened, the parasympathetic nervous system can go into a defensive mode associated with trauma, known as a “faint response,” which includes feelings of helplessness, fatigue, and eventual collapse. When a child spends an extended period of time in a faint response, these feelings of heaviness, sluggishness, and tiredness persist into adulthood and can influence their overall sense of self.