defensiveness

Questioning the Need to Justify Feelings

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Have you ever been aware you had to justify your or another’s feelings? In my life, I feel the need to search for and find what aids my life to continue. All life must serve the purpose of fulfilling this need. This results in an expectation of continuation.

When I’m serving my life, I experience what feels like one purpose: to fulfill my need to continue. Yet, that need creates discomfort, which motivates action. In that action, I experience two things: emotions and justification.

How Might Feelings Justify Needs that Justify Feelings?

My investment of feelings justifies the motivation. Perhaps the motivation inherent in feelings justifies them – self-referential. Thus, creating a self-justifying sense of purpose.

I’m unaware of a need until I experience sufficient discomfort to take action. At that point, my emotions justify it. From there onwards, all my actions serve the purpose of quieting the discomfort and so, fulfilling that need.

Achieving a goal gives me a sense of purpose. My need to be right justifies it.

There are few actual life-supporting requirements to continue living. Yet, my emotions convince me to desire more. My sense of reason attempts to interpret emotions to justify a goal. I interpret that sense as wants. At times, I’ve felt I was defending my actions for need-fulfillment, when I was justifying emotional wants as needs.

I’ve justified my emotions in every case to be right! I may not fully justify my actions. Yet, I have always, without question, defended my feelings, which justify my actions.

What if I questioned my feelings? For example, “Why do I feel this way?” and, “What do I need or want?” This can affect my behaviors and attitudes. When I question what I notice, I can focus on what motivates me to act. This offers me an opportunity for new understanding and may present me with new options.

Certitude and the Pursuit of Understanding

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Two seemingly conflicting need aspects of my thoughts work together for my experience. One aspect is my need to defend what I am certain of – the foundation of my beliefs. The other aspect is my need to pursue meaning and purpose for my experiences.

Each aspect offers a specific perspective to my experience. Knowing follows a process of learned experience through actions to achieve a particular end, the what and how of causality. Understanding adds why to the process of knowing.

I resolve uncertainty by justifying the causality of my actions with reasons. Thus, I satisfy the need for certitude by providing meaning and purpose to my actions.

A Paradox of Conflicting Needs

In what seems like a paradox, my resistance to adaptation threatens my ability to defend my knowing. That threat fuels my need to attend to what challenges my certitude. That attention is my acknowledgement of what I feel threatened by. The more I acknowledge threats, the more I need to know why I feel threatened.

The pursuit of knowing edges my curiosity towards threats to my security, creating risk in its departure from the known. I defend my need to know at the expense of that security.

The greatest threat to my pursuit of understanding is my defense of certitude. And the greatest threat to my certitude is my pursuit of understanding.

Satisfaction and the Pursuit of Understanding

The pursuit of the unknown seeks to satisfy my need to know, which adaptation serves to fulfill. In my certitude, I tend to resist challenges that feel threatening to what I already know.

Those challenges that lead to greater understanding of self lead to the greatest defense, adding value to my certitude. And yet because of my need to know, I accept the risk of change in adaptation.

Thus, my certitude helps me live a life of satisfied ignorance in a reality of uncertainty.

Recognizing Justifications in My Accountability

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Sometimes justifications make accountability seem impossible for me to recognize. I’ve thought of accountability as some authority that subjects me and others to a power that intimidates and requires obedience. Yet,  I can learn to recognize my accountability even though I’m unaware of it now.

I am often unaware of my accountability in an experience until I become aware of it through my discomfort. This manifests as thoughts, feelings, and body stresses.

When I notice sensations like distress and discomfort, I look for a cause outside me. To confirm this awareness, I might hear these questions in my head:

  1. What has happened to me?
  2. How did this happen to me?
  3. Why did this happen to me?
  4. Who’s responsible? (Not me!)

The last thing I think or want to do is apply these questions to my accountability. These questions provoke a response to a cause someone other than me must account for. I may actively be avoiding the awareness that holds me accountable – denial. Thus, I turn questions outwards to defend against the discomfort that awareness of my accountability to my rightness presents me. By the time I’ve taken action, I’ve affixed blame and missed a vital conversation with my accountability.

Denials and Justifications

The effort I’ve put into denial has exacerbated my need to expend more effort in denial. I’ve invested in my failure of accountability because I was busy denying my defense of it. Thus, I can attribute the suffering I’ve endured in my life to my unaware accountability.

Unawareness of my denial has an addictive quality that sustains itself through repetition. In its unawareness, my accountability rewards the defenses of my beliefs with justification of them. Under the addictive influence of my unawareness, my accountability assumes authority for the beliefs my ignorance denies.

I need justifications for my beliefs. Justifications come from my accountability while hiding it. When I am unaware, I justify what I feel the need to defend. Coming from unawareness, my justification acts as a reward of authority to my beliefs. Justified, my beliefs assume an authority to act for my accountability. That authority validates itself through the repetition of the defenses serving those beliefs. Repetition manifests as patterns of defense that affect my understanding of an experience.

The more I recognize how convincing my belief patterns are, the more empowered I feel to challenge them. From that point of awareness, I can use my accountability to make changes.

How My Accountability Turns Things into Beliefs

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Is a rock “just a rock” until my accountability for its meaning turns it into “a thing of significance?”

My accountability manages my existence in terms of need fulfillment as authoritative, which cannot be experienced except through things. That which represents things is what makes accountability authoritative.

My senses acknowledge the authority of things by validating the properties expressed as their defense, with a twist. The twist is my addition of emotional and mental impressions to judge those things – based on my experiences with them. I create beliefs from this construct of sensory plus emotions and supportive thoughts.

Accountability Binds Me to My Beliefs

Because my experiences of things are bound together with emotional and mental judgments, I bind myself to them as beliefs. That binding is my defense of the belief – over which I have no choice but to obey. Thus, the authority of defense in belief of who I think I am.

Core beliefs bind me to their defense because I need them for my survival. I suffer when I resist serving these beliefs. To neutralize my suffering, I apply a thing that complements my need with fulfillment. Needs and their fulfillment are complements to each other.

Complements are things equal and opposite to each other that compete over authority for my attention. I must serve the authority of those complements by acknowledging the things that represent them. They manifest their conflict in my accountability that I experience as suffering.

When complements equally surrender to the authority of their counterpart, they become neutral. That neutrality is expressed in conflict resolution – change – as it is in need-fulfillment.

What Can I Do to Relieve My Suffering?

When I suffer from belief in lack of a thing I need, application of a complement to the need neutralizes the suffering. That neutralizing interaction represents success to which things I apply authority. How do I get out from under this system of belief and defense that keeps me stuck in my current condition of suffering?

As I neutralize those things I believe have authority over me, I experience freedom from suffering. What if it’s not a matter of belief but a matter of allegiance? After all, nothing has authority over me until I give it my allegiance. The question then becomes, “To what authority do I owe my allegiance?” And then, “Why have I given my allegiance to that authority (thing)?”

This is how my accountability turns things I perceive into things I believe. And what I can do about that — like ask a question!

Choice, Belief, and Defense, Oh My!

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There seems to be three operating aspects of my mind in a matrix of thought that processes my experience. Together, they give everything I perceive value or purpose:

  1. Choice represents the comparing and choosing between ideas and concepts based on their value/purpose.
  2. Belief is the expression of a structured combining of similarly valued ideas and concepts used to support one another philosophically.
  3. Defense is the manifestation of resistance to change.

I use this process to guide me to right-thinking, to make sense of my experiences and achieve wholeness or rightness. My process offers me a sense of freedom to fashion my particular perspective into reality.

I can assign judgements of value/purpose to my perceptions of my experience and benefit from them as a sense of wholeness/rightness. The value I assign to my experience represents my personal value. The greater the value I perceive of myself, the greater the value I assign to my experience.

Choice

Ironically, my desire for independent thought conflicts with my intention for interdependent experience. So much so that I can’t:

  • imagine anything without choosing from options.
  • make a choice without comparing its values to other choices.
  • believe what I can’t defend for and against other beliefs.
  • re-choose the same choice.
  • defend what I haven’t chosen.
  • alter a choice without altering its fundamental value.
  • be fully aware of my choices.

If Heisenberg was right, there is always an element of uncertainty involved in any choice that no amount of computational effort can compensate. For example, I can’t know with certainty what will or won’t happen if I take or don’t take this or that action. There are too many possible timelines and outcomes for my limited mind to consider.

Yet, I can’t not try to know either. And because of my instinctive program to survive, I must find acceptable answers through choice. The beliefs I form I then defend with a sense of knowing. That knowing is about being right and being right is being whole.

Belief

I begin with a premise, if I am a living system and can validate that I’m right, I must endeavor to do so. I set myself up to defend a goal to achieve that end. My sense of lack challenges my ability to choose, believe, and defend a sense of wholeness. Wholeness, for me, can exist as value. Value is assignable and can be added up to represent wholeness. I get a sense of wholeness when I add up the value I’ve assigned to my experiences, which I then relate as my value. The more agreement I get for my value, the more value I have.

Defense

My process enables defense to express the collective value of my process through action. Three defined forms of expressing experience validate my three expressed forms of existence. My existence is defined by three expressions of intention:

  • Thought – defends for and against itself in its ideas and choices to create beliefs.
  • Emotion – defends beliefs by stabilizing ideas into feelings that motivate purpose.
  • Body – personifies physical responses that defend choice, belief, and defense.

The degree of value I assign to my needs and their fulfillment relates to the importance of their purpose. The value regulates the degree of energy invested in the defense expressed in the validation of my purpose. Resistance is the expression of need seeking fulfillment. Fulfillment cancels out need when the validation required is met.

Choice may seem to be a straightforward, “this or that” proposition. Yet, it involves such things as comparing the values of my choices with those I’ve previously defended. This I must defend as real to convince myself that my values are right, proper, and justified. Agreement adds authority to my value.

Choice funnels creativity by defining options. Defense of a choice further funnels wholeness to fewer and fewer options. Defining aspects as having value, purpose, authority, agreement, and etc. limits the potential of something to specifics. When I:

  • choose, I limit my thoughts.
  • create beliefs, I limit my creativity.
  • defend something, I limit what I defend.

I’m motivated to seek and find wholeness. The same is true for every operation of my process. The motivation behind my reasoning is why I choose to believe I have sufficient value to prove my wholeness. Each defense I create carries the energy of what motivates me to take action to protect and promote that value.

I interpret that which I believe has value. I use that value to add to mine to feel complete. Starting from a perspective of lack, my beliefs revolve around what reduces that lack. Seeking beliefs that validate my value motivates me to defend those values and convinces me of my wholeness. Is this process useful in actually understanding wholeness?