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How Insecurity Generates Dysfunctional Self-Reinforcing Cycles
An insecure sense of self creates a ripple affect, emanating from within, reverberating through one’s personal and professional life, and confirming problematic views about oneself — leading to further repetition. But through self-recognition and practice, change is within reach.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud discusses why people keeping doing the same things, when they are manifestly detrimental to oneself and others. He ascribes this “repetition compulsion” to unrecognized influence within oneself:
“The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.”
Many of these influences are related to what today we might call “insecurity”, which can have its basis in both temperament — how we are born, our genetic proclivities and epigenetic factors from prior generations, personality factors such as how neurotic we might be, or resilient, how open-minded, and so on— as well as…
