Although the neurotic patient has made great efforts to pursue perfection, and although his belief in pursuing perfection has been realized, he has not received his most urgent need: self-confidence and self-respect. He lacks simple self-confidence and inner security. He still feels unnecessarily needed, feels vulnerable, and needs to be constantly confirmed to his worth.
To develop self-confidence, children need help from the outside world to develop "basic confidence", which includes both confidence in others and yourself.
Under internal pressure, a person may alienate himself from his true self. Then, most of the energy will be transferred to the task of shaping oneself, and through a strict internal command system, one will be shaped into an absolutely perfect person to satisfy his image of his idealized self and the conceit he (who thinks) has already possessed, can possess, or should possess. What he got was not self-confidence, but neurotic conceit.
The conceit of neurosis depends on the characteristics that an individual claims to have in his imagination, and on all characteristics belonging to a specific idealized image. Neurotic patients are not proud of their actual selves. Usually he is not even proud of his existing strengths.
A neurotic patient attributes his own infinite power to the power of his mind after all. The idealized image is the product of his imagination. The more a person is alienated from his self, the more his thoughts become supreme reality.
The neurotic conceit obtained by fulfilling the inner command is actually unstable because it is intertwined with the disguise. The extremely high standards of a neurotic patient make him feel that he is a moral miracle to be proud of, no matter what he actually did and actually did.
Once we pursue honor, we no longer care about the authenticity of ourselves. All forms of neurotic conceit are false conceits.
In terms of subjective experience, the self-conceit of neurosis makes people vulnerable to harm, and its degree is completely consistent with the degree to which an individual is troubled by self-conceit. Neurotic conceit is susceptible to harm from both internal and external. Two typical reactions to the pride of being hurt are feeling ashamed and humiliated. We will feel ashamed if what we do, think, or feel goes against our pride. We feel humiliated if others do something that hurts us or fail to do what our pride requires them to do.
Usually, the same thing can cause one of two reactions: shame or humiliation, that is, shame or humiliation prevails. Our reactions do not depend only on what is happening, but more on our own neurotic needs.
feels humiliated by others and feels ashamed by the fact that one is hurt. This kind of person is almost always in a dilemma: he is so vulnerable that he is ridiculously fragile, but his ego does not allow him to be at all vulnerable. This inner state greatly leads to a diffuse irritability.
Any damage taken by our ego can inspire retaliatory hostility. This kind of hostility goes from dislike to hatred, from irritability to anger to rage.
If we offend our pride, the same hostility, hatred, or contempt may point to ourselves.
Fear, anxiety, and panic may be either a reaction to being humiliated in the prediction or a reaction to humiliation that has already occurred. Predicted fears may be about exams, public performances, social gatherings, or dates. In this case, they are often described as "stage fright." Those who suffer from this fear often see them as fears of failure, shame and being ridiculed.
The factor that constitutes a person's failure is subjective. It may contain all the places where honor and perfection are not achieved, and the prediction of this possibility happens to be the essence of a mild stage fright. A person is afraid of not being as good as his strict "should" require him to perform, so he is afraid that his ego will be hurt. There is a more harmful form of stage fright, in which the subconscious power will act on it, hindering the use of his talents.Therefore, stage fright is a fear: through the individual's tendency to self-destruct, he will be in ridiculously embarrassed, forget his lines, and be speechless, thus failing to gain honor and victory, and thus feel embarrassed.
Revenge may be a self-defense method. It involves a belief that by retaliating against the offender, their own ego will be repaired. The purpose of the retaliation of neurotics is not to "even up", but to win by fighting back more heavily. Only victory can fix the greatness that conceit has given him in his fantasy. It is this kind of reparative pride that makes the revengeful nature of neurosis incredibly stubborn, which also explains its obsessive traits.
Because the ability to retaliate is extremely valuable for the recovery of self-confidence, this ability itself carries self-confidence. For certain types of neurosis, this ability is equivalent to strength in the patient's mind, and is often the only strength they know. When such a person feels humiliated, whether it is the environment or his own factors that fail to allow him to take revenge, he will suffer double harm: the original "insult" and the "failure" of unrequited victory.
In the way to fix ego, it is secondly important to lose interest in all situations or people that hurt ego in some way.
All this retreat brings great energy waste and often leads to a lot of pain. But the most devastating aspect of them is that we lose interest in our true selves because we are not proud of it.
