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Show '''fm point. Only rarely is there total peace. N When this conflict becomes too formidable, too threatening, you do the obvious thing you try to run. That seems to be the thing to do, but often the escape is worse than the conflict and more lives are damaged by these escape or fight mechanisms than by any one thing. Maybe, you'd like to have me tell you very briefly about the various escape routes that the mind follows when things get too hot. They are 13. First comes regression, regres-sion, which means to go backward, do childish things. Then comes extroversion ex-troversion that means to turn to excessive activity to cover up the conflict. The opposite of that is introversion in-troversion to think excessively, to dodge real issues. Rationalization Is to indulge in false thinking, while segregation is not to let your right hand know what your left hand is doing. When you practice repression, you forget unpleasant things; and when you disassociate, you pass the buck. Sometimes you resort to conversion that means to have a breakdown or illness in place of a conflict. Displacement Dis-placement is to worry over one thing when another is to blame, and projection pro-jection is to attribute your own faults to others. Another escape is called identification; identifica-tion; that means to form phantasies. When you follow compensation, you TOU CAN'T RUN AWAY One of my younger friends, a man in whom I always have had considerable con-siderable confidence, did something last week that caused my confidence to be shaken. I'll tell you about it. When the pressure in a job he has held for two or three years became too great, he quit. "I am going to pull stakes and go to another town," he told me. "I just couldn't take it any more." I say that my confidence was shaken. What I mean is this, that whenever anyone tries to run away from a crisis, a situation, a condition condi-tion or himself, he's doomed to fail. Yet every day you see someone who is trying to run away from himself. him-self. Psychologists are very much interested in the roads which these runaways take, and one of their first considerations in evaluating a personality per-sonality which is broken or unhappy is escape. You probably know that you live every day with a conflict raging inside in-side yourself. Sometimes the conflict con-flict is subdued by a quiet sort of guerrilla warfare of the mind. At other times it reaches the battle overdo some particular thing in order to overcome your inadequacies. The final escape route is the only one which is wholeheartedly recommended. recom-mended. It is called sublimation that means to turn the effect of the conflict into some useful channel |