When a clear and present danger is actively closing in on you, your defense system arouses anxiety to signal your awareness that all is not well.
When feelings of unresolved anger or jealousy arise from within, your defense system sends those same signals that all is not well.
So how can you tell when a clear and present danger is actively stalking you vs when your negatively focused feelings towards another person causes you to feel unstable in their presence?
In both cases, anxiety arouses the fight, flee, or freeze instinct, thus creating enough mental static to shatter any thought processing patterns that lead toward solution seeking logic.
As soon as my anxiety arises, I've conditioned my mind to open my tool box, and choose one of five, simple, self calming tools.
These self stabilizing tools encourage my sense of logic to maintain control over my defense system.
Just as my brain was trained to say please and thank you, I've trained my brain to sense the difference between a clear and present danger marching toward me vs. a sense of unresolved anger or jealousy arising from within—me.
Now, imagine this tool box implanted into the brains of your family.
A mind trained to maintain self control has a better chance of securing loving relationships, built upon self confidence vs. offering the kind of love that strikes out each time anxiety is aroused.
Love based in insecurity cannot overcome the fearful need to fight or flee.
Love based in insecurity cannot overcome the need to put the other person down.
Love based in insecurity cannot overcome a sense of victimization, which breathes life into the blame game.
As insecurity is confounding, love feel unstable.
In essence—when securing a stable, loving relationship, one mind can not do the subconscious work for two.
When one mind works to deepen a sense of reality while the other clings fearfully to denial, the mind working alone, over long, in hopes of penetrating two boulders may exhaust.
So how does sailing away to a peaceful place differ from fleeing?
Each time I sail to a peaceful place, my intention is to rest and reflect upon a conundrum of negatively focused nonsense until confusion clears and bigger pictures emerge.
In short, fleeing differs from finding a peaceful place to think things through in this way: Fleeing is due to anxious defensiveness, which results in keeping the blame game alive. Choosing to retreat to a peaceful place to think things through relies upon relaxing the mind until emotional static clears, thus allowing an expanded sense of logic to penetrate more deeply into my conscious mind.
Each time my sense of logic expands, I 'see' my self defeating patterns with a greater sense of clarity. And as I come to understand my self defeating patterns, ever more deeply, my reason for having engaged in negatively focused nonsense makes sense.
Once my mind makes sense of nonsense, born of subconscious fear, I'd have to be crazy to consciously jump into that self defeating, hazy maze, again.
As I'd mentioned in my very first post, crazy is one thing that I definitely am not! Zany, okay. Crazy, no way. Thank goodness for my toolbox. J
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