Don’t Underestimate Your Survival Instinct
***NOTE*** I believe our survival instinct and what people call “ego” are one and the same. I’m choosing to use the phrase “survival instinct” because people have such a negative connotation of the word “ego”. I didn’t want the repulsion of the word to influence your understanding of my message. But you can interchange them if it makes more sense to you.***
In the last post, I talked about the importance of acknowledging the emotions within you, and how journaling helps with this mission. But in all honesty, placing your attention on the turmoil within takes enormous amount of courage. They were hidden for a reason. They were too painful. You filed them away because you didn’t know how to deal with them. Why dig them out purposely and go through the pain again?
Because even though you’ve buried your emotions deep inside, they don’t disappear. They resurface every time there’s a trigger and forces you to react irrationally. Strong emotions occurred initially because you felt like your existence was threatened at the time. And in order to make sure you stay alive, your survival instinct remembers them all and take over when anything even remotely similar happens.
Your Survival Instinct on Auto-Pilot
Our survival instinct is hard-wired. Most of us don’t live a life in which our survival is constantly threatened, but our brains think we do. We all still have a strong need to belong in a group because being in a pack gives us a better chance at survival even now. So when we feel like someone doesn’t value you, dismisses your ideas, or rejects you even in the gentlest way, we panic. We get angry and point out what the other person is doing wrong. That way, we can feel like “they” are the ones that don’t belong. Otherwise, the alternative is a downward spiral into self-criticism and a terrifying admission that the people have every right to reject you.
By choosing to become aware of the emotions within and gaining better understanding of what triggers this fear of rejection, you stop being on auto-pilot. You are choosing to regain control over your life instead of allowing the survival instinct to take over whenever it wants to.
So How Do I Gain Back Control?
I don’t think we can ever completely turn off our survival instincts. We are going to have a knee-jerk reaction to a situation and get angry. We HAVE to accept that it’s a natural part of human life.
What’s different for me is that now, whenever I get angry, I know it’s a bright red flag that says I need to take a better look at myself. I’ve learned that people around me are mirrors of myself. If I get angry about someone’s action, I know that I’m probably guilty of doing the same exact thing to someone else. Either that or I’ve enforced a strict rule upon myself, and I resent them for not following “THE rules”. My anger is an opportunity to see myself more clearly. I get to discover a worldview that may have been helpful before, but doesn’t serve me anymore. My anger is now a sign post to self-acceptance. And as I accept more and more parts of myself, I see more similarities among us all. I have fewer trigger points because of this, so I don’t get angry as often.
It might sound like a roundabout way to regain control over your emotions, but it’s the fastest way. If you demand that you act rationally and stop getting emotional, you’re going to be disappointed with yourself. You’re going to hate yourself when you lose your temper, and the fear of rejection will eat you alive. You’ll be in a worse mood and have a worse temper. Trust me, I did that for years! Acceptance is an absolute must in moving beyond this terrible loop.
That being said, I also know from experience that acceptance is a word tossed around easily, but very difficult to actualize. I will share how I finally achieved it in my next post, in the hopes that my experience may help someone out of the loop too.