Feeling attacked

One of the most familiar feelings (and most frequently hidden from your awareness), is the one where your personality believes that he is attacked. Now this requires only very small input. Actually, as soon as something happens or someone says something that does not match in full the rules and standards your personality has assigned to this situation, he immediately feels attacked. Even though you can give these feelings various names, basically they are all the same. Perceiving yourself as attacked is about not feeling strengthened in your personal worldview. Since the image your personality makes of this world guaranteed differs from that of someone else, you have a wide variety of possibilities here. Be not deceived, even the smallest of issues gives rise to this feeling: someone is good in something and you are not as good as this person, when someone forgets to bring you something or do something, your interpretation of body language etc.

You may notice this is a quite normal experience, it may easily occur tens of times each day. Now your personality has come up with some fine mechanisms that will help you deal with this in a way that makes it controllable and hides it from your awareness as much as possible, but this does not diminish the number of times this occurs during the day. You may use some sophisticated reactions like "bringing it into perspective", or "recognizing that it is not realistic to overreact like that", "he sure does not mean it like that", telling yourself that the other person is not "licensed" etc., still all these reactions are based on the original judgment with which it all started, you only found a more or less acceptable way to deal with it, since it seems to take a way most of the stress that accompanies it. However, you will still notice some form of unpleasant feeling each time which may last for a short or longer period of time.

The first reaction of a personality that feels attacked, is: attack in return (since you know from experience that this is a successful way to make someone else feel uncomfortable). However, he has learned from experience that there are situations where he cannot win, or that this kind of behaviour will only make things worse, or that he simply cannot make it. These situations will almost immediately call forth the next reaction: smile along, hide, some subtle reaction etc. and later on you are likely to find yourself engaged in conversations with others in which you are trying to justify yourself, or find yourself using one of the many mechanisms to attempt to get rid of these unpleasant feelings: sporting, smoking, drinking etc. Although your personality prefers to deal with the person who causes these unpleasant feelings through attack in return, justification etc. in order to convince this other person that he is the one who was wrong (which means your personality is "good" after all), and/or assumes that this counterattack prevents you from repeating this behaviour in the future.

Attack calls forth aggression and anger in your personality, since he now has to face that his self-image is shattered, and he has to make sure that this damage is limited as much as possible. Should you deal with a situation like this through the vision of your inner Self, you are about to perceive these reactions of your personality, however, you would no longer believe that they are a truth in themselves. It is neither right nor wrong what happens, the situation in itself is neutral. It is only when your personality starts interpreting and judging that you are being "bothered" by it. You need not protect any self image, since your ultimate Truth about yourself is changeless by its nature, so no one, neither you nor someone else, can change that. And anything about yourself that you can change is not worth while protecting, the effort this will cost you only diminishes the amount of energy you have left for experiencing your inner Self.

Once you withdraw your belief in these mechanisms, your need to compensate make-believe attacks on your self-image decreases automatically. In this way you will find you are getting increased awareness of your inner Self, and the intensity of these situations will decrease each time you practice. You may also want to read the column "looking for safety".