007: secondary adjustment techniques
We didn't actually study this in class, but I thought it was pretty interesting when I read up on Karen Horney on the internet, so I've decided to write about it.
There are four major adjustments to basic anxiety (which is like the root of all problems, according to Horney): (1) moving towards/against people, which I've written about in the last entry; (2) moving away from people or detachment, which I also wrote about; (3) moving away from the "real self" and attachment to the "ideal self," which can result in suicidal ideation; and (4) externalization, or projection, which I've also written about.
I was more interested to know about the secondary adjustments to basic anxiety, because they're the little things that I never really noticed myself taking part of before.
Compartmentalization is one, wherein people recognize incompatible or inconsistent behaviors, but then you separate them in different compartments in order to make sense of things. I am, for example, the youngest child at home. I'm used to being babied, being the youngest one in the family. This is true also for my extended family on my mother's side - even though I'm nearing my senior year at college, everyone thinks I'm in the second grade. Outside my family and my home, however, because of my awkward birthday (Feb. 2, which is too early/young to be in the batch ahead of me, but too old for the batch I'm currently in), I'm the older person amongst my batchmates and peers. That means that outside, I act more mature and more like the ate (older sister, pronounced ah-teh) of my friends. I don't mind it - it was weird at first but then I got used to it. My father recently talked to me about this, actually - how I act like a child around him but am stronger and more mature when he sees me in my org. I told him it'd be hard and tiring if I had to be strong all the time, so I can at least be little bit less headstrong at home. Haha. In this sense, I compartmentalize these conditions in order to make sense of how I behave inside and outside my home - I never realized that before.
I also take part in rationalization, which is basically the justification of your actions. I always do this, especially when I procrastinate or do something that is in a gray area. The example given by the article I found says that over-agressive people (which I see myself as a lot of the time, haha) usually rationalize their behavior by saying that the other person isn't competent enough, etc. I took part in that behavior in the first part of the year as one of the committee heads in my org. I was the publicity head, and I was pretty much hording all the work because I was afraid that my committee members wouldn't do as good a job as my standards dictate (haha, yes, now you see how I am), so even though I was balancing some very intense field work with this, I still somehow pushed through with it.
Excessive self control was interesting, and is the stuff fictional characters are made of - which is not to say that real people don't exhibit this type of secondary adjustment, just that I see it all the time in books and movies. Excessive self-control pertains to shutting out emotional attachment, muting emotions, which leads to rigid avoidance of sex and alcohol. This is evident in that super-ego type characters in media - Piggy in Lord of the Flies, Hermione (kind of, but not totally) in Harry Potter, Blossom in the Powerpuff Girls, Annie Edison in Community (again, kind of), and Rachel Berry back when Glee had any semblance of character consistency and development (and Emma, actually!).
Elusiveness is also interesting - it's kind of like moral ambiguity or ambivalence, wherein nothing is wrong or right because the judgment of one over the other might harm a person's ideal self. You can't pin them down, because they are anxious at the thought of such. Some real people come to mind (politicians, in case it wasn't obvious enough, haha). Interesting stuff!
Really, part of the reason I love psychology is because it reorganizes things I thought I knew in order for everyone to make sense of this sea of madness (I love my hyperboles). Will look around more for these!