Courage as an Ego Defense

Courage as an ego defense shows us something more than just a mature level of development. As you have seen in the Rescue Map of Anxiety we learned about in the emotional attraction of the mammalian brain, it is an instrumental skill for transforming one of the two most prevalent negative emotions - anxiety - into a positive, and is really the only route to self-generating that part of self-esteem we call confidence.

For our purposes we have defined it as “doing the right thing, no matter how you feel.” Others have described it as a willingness to directly confront conflicts, fear, pain, danger, uncertainty, despair, obstacles, or the narcissism of others. If confidence is the emotional ability to withstand risk, change and loss, then courage is the precursor to acquiring that most valuable of emotional resources.

Courage highlights and integrates several things for us that we have learned.

For one, it is a decision, and if we have learned that a decision is the smallest unit of a habit, then courage makes sense being called, “a defense mechanism.” Defense mechanisms are social, psychological habits.

Secondly, courage can be just a decision, or as is often the case, it can also be an action. This means that either way, we can know courage when we see it. As a mature ego defense, it is a virtue. Virtues are always constructive, meaning that they produce benefits and win/win interactions for everyone who comes in contact with it.

When one person makes a courageous decision or takes a courageous, heroic action, we can know for sure that they are constructive as a partner. The forces which come to bear to highlight courage, also show us the nature of courage as a combination of all the things which make us mature as basic elements: good boundaries, constructive, win/win decisions, which is to say, high ethics. We already know that ethics is built into courage by way of its definition: “do the right thing no matter how you feel.”

Courage is an amazing thing as such a valuable emotional resource, because one can employ it without prior experience, or without the backing of others. In fact, we are most alone in the world when we most effectively use it. It is also something that we don’t need in already-present supply when we use it, because it is, in essence, not really an emotion. It is a kind of decision, a constructive, mature one, which is also why it is considered a mature ego defense. It is a patient, constructive decision no matter what emotions are being felt, even terror, simply because decisions characterized by it tend to lead to heroic actions, and ones which we do not need bravery or boldness to execute on, just a knowledge of what is right and wrong, destructive and constructive - then to choose to do right.

Through the Rescue Map of Anxiety, we already know how to use this defense, and what its rewards are - the very valuable confidence. Which means that through that map and through our understanding of the emotions, we have actually learned how to literally build a relationship virtue in a step-by-step way. We don’t have to “fake it til we make it” anymore. We can study the ways on that Anxiety Map, how avoidance and impulsivity, victim-thinking and masochism, and the passiveness and destructiveness of those will lead to no good ends, where the constructiveness and win/win strategy of courage always manages to generate us confidence, that crucial ingredient to value, happiness, friendship, self-esteem and love itself.

Consider the absence of courage in a partner. This would automatically mean that we have an unconfident person on our hands who is on our team, pursuing goals. This will not bode well in terms of any stress we may encounter on the way to our joint goals, and we would likely find ourselves struggling to carry the burden for two.