If our needs aren’t met during infancy when we’re utterly vulnerable and helpless, if our parents make us feel unsafe in the world from early on, it will shape our ability to trust and depend upon other people for the rest of our lives.

Shame is the crippling legacy of an impoverished childhood, one of the most powerful and least understood emotions that drive us to rely excessively on our defense mechanisms.

Defense mechanisms operate in the here-and-now, with no thought for tomorrow. They’re unthinking and reflexive; they aim only to ward off pain this very moment and don’t take into account the long-term costs of doing so.

Babies who come from such families never develop that fundamental sense of trust and safety in their world; they may be plagued by anxiety about what might happen. And instead of developing the self-confidence that goes along with trust, they may instead feel a deep sense of shame.

People with parents who consistently let them down emotionally and who failed to provide what was needed rarely feel safe in their adult relationships.

According to the many psychodynamic theorists who have written about this, from Freud onward, the unconscious carries all the thoughts and feelings we either find too painful to bear, or which conflict with our morality and values and undermine our self-image. In other words, we don’t want to know about the contents of our unconscious.

he hath ever but slenderly known himself. – King Lear, Act I, Scene i

Our defense mechanisms are invisible methods by which we exclude unacceptable thoughts and feelings from awareness. In the process, they subtly distort our perceptions of reality – in both our personal relationships and the emotional terrain within

Your habitual ways of interacting with the important people in your life tell us a great deal about the defense mechanisms you typically use.