Personal Empowerment
Personal Defenses
The shadow side and the light side of your
defenses work together toward your personal balance. Recognizing
these Defenses in the moment and acknowledging them will be helpful
in your communications and in knowing yourself
Increasing your awareness of how your defenses may
help you increase communication in your relationship
Filtering:
You take the negative details and magnify them while Filtering out
all positive aspects of a situation.
Polarized Thinking:
Things are black or white, good or bad. You have to be perfect or
you're a failure. There is no middle ground
Over-Generalization:
You come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece
of evidence. If something bad happens once, you expect it to happen
over and over.
Mind Reading:
You assume you know how others feel and
expect others to know how you feel and what you want or need and how
people are feeling toward you.
Catstrophizing:
You expect disaster. You notice or hear
about a problem and start "what if's." What if tragedy strikes? What
if it happens to you?
Personalization:
Thinking that everything people do or say is a reaction to you. You
also compare yourself to others, trying to determine who's smarter,
better looking, etc.
Control Fallacies:
If you feel externally controlled, you see
yourself as helpless, a victim of fate. The fallacy of internal
control has you responsible for the pain and happiness of everyone
around you.
Fallacy of Fairness:
You feel resentful because you think you know what's fair but other
people won't agree with you.
Blaming:
You hold other people responsible for your pain, or take the other
tack and blame yourself for every problem or reversal.
Shoulds:
You have a list of ironclad rules about how you and other people
should act. People who break the rules anger you and you feel guilty
if you violate the rules.
Emotional Reasoning:
You believe that what you feel must be
true -- automatically. If you feel stupid and boring, then you must
be stupid and boring.
Fallacy of Change:
You expect other people will change to
suit you if you just pressure or cajole them enough. You need to
change people because your hopes for happiness seem to depend
entirely on them.
Global Labeling:
You generalize one or two qualities into a
negative global judgment.
Being Right:
You are continually on trial to prove that
your opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable
and you will go to any length to demonstrate being right.
Heaven's Reward Fallacy:
You expect all your sacrifice and
self-denial to pay off, as if there were someone keeping score.
You feel bitter when the reward doesn't come.
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