From my
perspective, it would be understandable to say that I felt a sense of shock upon
hearing my dad's diagnosis. Honestly, it
is difficult to describe all of the emotions that enter into your consciousness
at once upon hearing such news. I
certainly felt fear, foreboding, anxiety, and sadness all at once after I
learned of dad's prognosis. In order to
cope with this traumatic news, I instinctively turned to denial, repression,
and escapism in order to cope with the harshness of reality. Before I go into further details about how
these different types of defense mechanisms played a role in my mental state upon
hearing the diagnosis of my father's cancer, I must comment briefly on the
effect this news had on me while living in China.
To say that I
was completely unprepared for this type of news would have been an
understatement. Truthfully, even in the
best of circumstances my support system in China would have been hard-pressed
to absorb the blow of hearing such devastating news back home. I have maintained several good relationships
with friends and colleagues during my time in China; however, I cannot say that
they can bear the weight of such grave tragedies as well as my support system
back.
Life can become
a burden to maintain when distance separates you from the ones you love. It is cliché to say it, but just being able
to comfort a loved one in a time of crisis is a central part of the healing
process for humans.
Through
experiences with different emergencies in life, I have learned that growing up
I tried to stay optimistic during a crisis in order to show a sense of calm to
those nearby. My belief being that
remaining calm in a time of crisis equated to nothing being amiss in
reality. The next logical step my mind
took was that since nothing had changed nothing was actually wrong. Obviously, this type of defense mechanism
promotes escapism with a capital E.
During the banal
vicissitudes of life we tend to completely forget about the tenuous state our
existence is in. Literally at any moment
our lives can become irrevocably changed by some unimagined devilry; yet, we
tend to exert much more time worrying about the minor frivolities of life. In reality, if the mind focused on all of the
threats it might face a person would not be able to leave the safety of their
beds in the morning.
Careful analysis
of the aforementioned habitual mental processes at a minimum corroborate that
human beings have a biological threshold for analyzing their own
existence. If a human crosses that line and
begins to think too often about their own demise then they risk suffering from
debilitating depression.
I would also
like to point out that the above evidence argues that humans are extremely
conflicted creatures who instinctively recoil against accepting the harshness
of reality. Avoiding problems might seem
like the safe thing to do in the moment; however, the longer we hold off
accepting reality the more we risk facing a debilitating depression at some
point in time following the inevitable realization that things are quite
different now. The reality that your
deportment is literally under the micro scope during a crisis only works to
exacerbate the problem for those of us who feel consciously aware of the
societal norms supposedly needed to be filled in the midst of a crisis.
No comments:
Post a Comment