Being watchful

There is an alertness in your personality whenever he enters into a contact with another person. When it is a person he knows, he is familiar with the aspects that are likely to cause trouble for him (e.g. where his image of himself will be attacked), and what he believes he can expect. Even though he usually cannot prevent these things from happening in itself, he does prepare himself for them, may try to prevent them from happening or have a good reaction at hand beforehand. When it is a new contact, he is on the alert for unforeseen reactions, and whether or not they will fit in his ideal picture. Use the next situation where you are about to meet someone to become aware of this.

Now this can hardly be described as an open minded way of approaching people. What does this bring your personality? A self-image and worldview which are as stable as possible. Which will not turn against him and hurt his feelings. It is a protective action. For what? Any preserved self image will sooner or later be attacked, simply because through this attitude, attack and defence are fostered. When you no longer want to defend any self image made up by your personality, it is no longer interesting for other people as well. Now there is mental space available for other aspects in your relationship.

You will experience that this can be very pleasant. My partner recently experienced this himself once again. He told me that with a specific person at his work, he is usually quite protective beforehand. Now this time he choose to let this go. Some remark was made about something that my partner would have overlooked. Normally this would have caused anger in him, and have lead to some unpleasant remarks in order to try to blame the other person, who, in return, would have tried to do the same with him. Only this time my partner simply said: "yes, I see, well, I will do it over." Now the pleasant feeling which results from this surprisingly simple shift of awareness is so nice that you do not understand that you would want to deny yourself this. However, you will, in the future, be tempted to choose the focus of your personality once again. By the way, the other person involved is touched by all this as well, be it that he has somehow noticed that the normal reaction pattern he expected, was not re-enacted this time.