The Dark.

I feel the dark part of me is beginning to take over. The feeling of not being loved, cared about wants to dominate again despite clear facts to the contrary. The power of a learned scheme or behavior is enormous. . . All you can do about it is try to weaken the god damn phenomenon each time it happens. Why does it have to repeat itself? Why by sheer understanding of our own history and by discovery of meaning of various events in our lives we can't get rid of these awful "reaction schemes" that we learned during our lives to defend our psychological systems from what the life used to bring us? Why isn't the knowledge of these mechanics enough to say goodbye to these phenomena? Why simple things just by means of repetition get embedded so deeply in our heads that it is so difficult to un-learn them? You know what it is. It is how the nature made us. It is intended to have positive effect of survival actually. If you observe/come up with a resolutive behavior to a stressful situation you want to repeat it as you see it was helpful with the stresses you've sustained in the past. Then you just repeat it and it becomes a habit to react to the same or (worse) similar situation in a certain way. The way which helped you once.

It though becomes a problem when the original stress along with its original circumstances which originated your specific defensive reaction fade into the past. . . There is no original problem nor original circumstances. You forget that both actually took place in your past. What do you do then when a similar stress comes along in your adult life? Most of us will repeat the defensive reaction to the situation though we are in a totally different circumstances which do not at all require us to apply the same defensive mechanism that we used to apply to the original repeated stressor. It is our smart brain who recognizes in this new stressor an analogy to a well known previous one and begins its run-or-fight routine by an automatic application of a set of reactions which it once learned helped to survive. What do you do then? Let's say you even understand the mechanics... Nothing -you're fucked... You're helpless.