You might see this social habit as being somehow related to the much more primitive, “denial,” in that it is an automatic, unconscious attempt to excuse one’s self from culpability for a moral failing or mistake. Anyone who has ever been in a love relationship knows it well, both from doing it, and being on the receiving end. It causes us to continue to function without guilt, and deal with the aftermath later.

Unlike the more primitive, denial, it does acknowledge that a negative social occurrence has happened, but it automatically shifts the question, “why?” to somewhere else for the purpose of not having to deal with emotions arising after a bad decision. Guilt has a very useful purpose in our growth of a conscience, as we’ve seen, but it can also be overwhelming, and get in the way of success at our goals. When the Superego that Freud talked about is overgrown, guilt can also do us harm and make us ineffective as partners by punishing us.

Convincing oneself that no wrong has been done or that everything will be all right may be the verbal explanation to others, or the silent mantra whispered to ourselves, but it arises out of inaccurate assessment and erroneous reasoning. This social habit is all about “convenient excuses,” and you have seen and done it many times.  While you may come out appearing on the surface as courteous or collaborative, somewhere inside your partner or your social connections will sense that something is just not right with your explanations.  When they are repeated numerous times in similar scenarios, it will eventually become “an issue” with them and they will become conscious of your impairment.

GO BACK TO NEUROTIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS.

We have covered this one as an example, which involves automatically changing unconscious instincts or impulses that are consciously thought to be in violation of or unacceptable to our higher brained, moral codes (Freud’s Superego) into their opposites.

This unconscious social habit is interesting as a tool for “reading” and decoding others. It has been said that “the unconscious only thinks in positives, not negatives.” This is one of the popular methods of detecting a lie in others - that when one negates something in conversation, the idea first had to exist as a positive, and so what the person was really thinking at the unconscious level was the positive version.

For example, if someone says to you, “It’s not that your looks are not my type. It’s just that I’m spoken for right now,” then what the person’s unconscious is thinking is that it is your looks that they don’t prefer. It’s just too uncomfortable to make that known.

Another one is when someone says to you, “It’s not that I was out meeting other people. I was just busy with work,” then there was at least the instinctual desire on their part to meet other people behind your back. That is what was in the unconscious before they negated it out of their discomfort with the moral dilemma of either telling you, or doing it. Of course, this is not to say that they were meeting other people or cheating on you. It’s just that the desire, instinct, or urge to was there. Hopefully they negated the impulse by using their higher, conscious moral sense.

And so reaction formation is saying, feeling, or overtly believing the opposite of what one really wants or feels in the instincts. We take the opposite belief because the true belief causes anxiety.

GO BACK TO NEUROTIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS.

This social habit is one of those which has become part of the popular lexicon, and while people generally know what it means, it is important to see its core element as one of going backward in one’s level of maturity in response to a threatening stress or emotion. This means that the person has reached a certain level of development in their life, but the way they are behaving now is a response to some emotional trouble they are going through.

It is important to tell the difference between someone who is emotionally underdeveloped to start with, versus someone who has the capacity to be more mature as their norm, but has run into some trouble lately.  There is a third category though, and the reason that this defense mechanism is notable, which is that when someone more mature has a frequent tendency to revert to a lower stage of development when they are under stress, this does not make for the best of partners. It suggests a weakness of the boundary, a fragility in the face of stress, and most importantly, for the ability to contain their own unacceptable impulses in a more adult way.

You may have seen this automatic, unconscious social habit in play in blatant or subtle ways. For example, when you have to reschedule a social outing due to work, and the man stands there like a child, saying, “That’s not fair!” You see the child in the man. Or on a more subtle note, when you confront the woman who has cheated on you, and rather than address it directly, she simply breaks into tears. You see the child in the woman.

And so if ever you see a person behaving in a way that is not normally like them, and in which you can see a bit of a child on the inside of them, running their behavior, even for a moment, you may be looking at regression as one of their unconscious social habits. If intellectual attraction and commitment has at its base, the need to team together to reach mutual goals, then regression is not optimal for your success together. You need to be partners who don’t crumble at the smallest pressure when you are striving for success.

GO BACK TO NEUROTIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS.

Regret is similar to guilt in that it is an anxiety emotion, but it is more often self-administered or realized, as opposed to being dispensed by others or by the public, as guilt is.

Regret can form self-correction morally, and in so doing, fills us up with more conscience (ethics) and or intuition (shrewdness), from our lessons learned.

Its most unique feature is that it is directly caused by the lack of the mature character skill called, "Observing Ego," in which one who has this core virtue of personal growth, may see the right things to say or do, and then do them, rather than failing in attention to the social circumstances, and then make mistakes of decision-making or action.

When we lack Observing Ego, we often have regrets.

When we employ Observing Ego, even if we fail to get to goals, we have "done our best," and so have no regrets.

We have talked about “beliefs” as a construct of memory, and how it is that emotions tie to ideas in order to make a complete belief. This social habit might be said to be the opposite of intellectualization in a way, since it is one where the emotion is allowed to remain present, but the idea or knowledge of a conflict is what is sent out of the conscious mind.

To prevent the conflict caused by pleasurable instincts, should they be satisfied, the desire is “stuffed” into the unconscious, and with it, knowledge of the conflict between one’s morality and their instincts.  You might see this as an inexplicable naivety, forgetfulness, or lack of awareness of one's behavior and how it is perceived.

An example would be a man who shows up late each and every time to the Friday dinner with her parents, and isn’t making excuses. He is genuinely sorry, cites the traffic as a problem, as he does work that day, but never seems to learn a better way to go instead. It seems like he is too naive to figure out that the problem would best be solved so that there is less relationship conflict, and he is intelligent enough to know better. It’s just that he does not have the skill to address that he would prefer a different weekly schedule, and doesn’t always want to have dinner with her parents on Fridays. He likes her and her parents, and so he represses that information from his own mind.

A major usefulness in understanding repression rests in the annoying habits that people have - those which annoy others, but which they, themselves, don’t seem to be aware of. This, then, is one you must have seen often in your romantic life.

Say that a woman has a tendency to hold things out to her partner all the time while his hands are already full. He wonders when she picked up the tendency to do that - he is carrying the dry cleaning into the house, while she holds out the keys to him. What is he to do? Drop the laundry? Or while he is driving her to work, she holds out her coffee and says, “Here, can you hold this for a second?”

No, he can’t. He is driving. But she persists in burdening him in ways that he can’t accommodate at the moment that she wants, which is upsetting to her. It feels disrespectful to her that he does not accommodate her needs, and this may be projection on her part as well, but she is also repressing the conscious knowledge that she feels unimportant, perhaps based on an abusive past, and  it would be too painful to have the direct knowledge that what she really wants is to be considered “number one” by him, more important than anything else, including carrying the dry-cleaning or driving a car.

GO BACK TO NEUROTIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS.

The "software" of the unconscious mind, including the instincts, both in terms of gender instincts, and for survival purposes, as well as where one's unconscious beliefs, values and habits exist.

Its operations have two, prime directives - to keep us alive long enough to reproduce.

These are both about the state of feeling passion, to greater or lesser degrees - more excited and full of life, or else more empty, melancholic, and unmotivated. The reptilian brain unconsciously, automatically steers us toward our mission in life, or purpose in being, usually through our masculine and feminine instincts that are also thought to be governed by the reptilian brain.

These gender instincts help us attract the opposite sex in the sexual attraction phase of courtship. It governs our physicality and sense of identity through the body.

In the field of Evolutionary Psychology, the model called the "Triune Brain Model" has the reptilian brain as one of the three, interdependent areas of the mind. The other two are the Mammalian Brain and the Higher Brain.

Resignation is a character "vice of deficit" stemming from what would otherwise be a character virtue of Inspiration. It is not the same as not caring or lacking curiosity about achieving a goal, but rather is a clear vision of the goal, but sitll being "faithless" or "down in the mouth" about the goal - lacking passion for it, when it is a core part of the self. It is intellectually narcissistic, whether directed toward the self or toward others, which is to say that it contains either the intellectual narcissism of ignorance or prejudice.

One may be ignorant of how much potential their partner has for reaching their life's goals. One might also be ignorant of their own potential. They may be prejudicial against those who even try to encourage them, assuming things about them such as thinking that they just want advantage or superiority over them, when they really are just trying to help. If there ever was a character feature owed to one's partner it would be the virtue of Inspiration and the absence of Resignation, an insidious and harmful vice to detect. At least with the other vice, Propaganda, someone with mature, healthy boundaries can sense that they are being controlled or taken advantage of.

Someone who is "resigned," is by definition, negative or pessimistic about your, or their, very life's essence. Your life's goals and dreams are the most precious things you have, more even than the romance itself, or the welfare of your children. Without your dreams, you have nothing to give children, actually. Resignation about one's own life's prospects or those of a mate shows poor boundaries and a lack of mutual respect for the very life of the other person, beyond even their ideas or emotions. It is their spirit itself - their masculinity or femininity - that is on the line, and needs Inspiration as its cure.

As a vice which makes partnership within relationships fail to get to goals, and intellectually unattractive, consider this vice to be negative in many ways, including in sexual attraction, since it actually depletes the reserves of one's own, or the other partner's masculinity or femininity, making them less attractive and feeling less attracted back to you.

RETURN TO CHARACTER COMPATIBILITY

Respect is a clear feature of our outer, Personal Boundary. Through seeing where we end and others begin, where our responsibility and ownership of resources ends and that of others begins, and where our control ends especially, and that of others begins forms the essence of respect. We have to respect the impossibility of controlling what belongs to others.

This is a clear feature of boundaries that are solid and not riddled with holes, yet which does not place us in a lonely world, but one which gives us doors to open or close to others, depending on how constructive or destructive, how win/win or win/lose they are to us.

When you are with a person you have sometimes felt is inconsiderate of you, if it is in moderation and occasional, you may find it in yourself to be forgiving.  You may see right there how well two mature partners with mature ego defenses may get along in life. We are not robots who operate mechanically, or who have only one chance ot get things right with each interaction. When we are mature, we see how boundary doors are meant to open and close dynamically, helping each other reach a constructive steady state by blocking normal human, bad behavior, and encouraging constructive behavior with openness, literally, and acceptance. We have moderation in our behavior, then forgiveness, acceptance, and patience, all virtues which may help reestablish respect.  All virtues, and all mature defense mechanisms.

Respect can be a specific well-regard for the qualities of a person or specific conduct in them. This is the psychological source of the age-old self-help mantra, “What I do is not who I am.”  People with this ability can see the frailty of humanness, that we make mistakes and correct course, like Jean Valjean. That what we do need not represent who we are for life. People with this maturity can understand not to “judge a book by its cover,” and not to “judge by words, but by actions.” Respect can be for specific instances of behavior, or for the sum total of a relationship “track record.” However, beware of the quality and length of that track record, as our partner may reach a breaking point if it is too negative.

Relationships and commitments that are built without respect are seldom sustainable. The lack of respect, and the poor boundaries, with holes in them, is at the very heart of most conflict in relationships. When there is this lack of respect in a partner’s constitution, something very insidious happens in the codependence that can emerge: nearly every investment we make slips out the bottom of the relationship boundary, and is wasted. We may awake one day to see we have wasted our lives on such a person, and so the good boundaries of respect must be checked for, early on.

GO BACK TO MATURE DEFENSE MECHANISMS.

In Romantic Dynamics, Responsibility is an action and character virtue in one, correlating with the exact same amount of Authority that one inherently possesses to the same degree, especially in the third phase of courtship (partnership, Intellectual Attraction.) Example: 80 % of the responsibility taken on exactly equals the amount of authority they possess and which the partner must surrender, accept and encourage for the greater good of the team.

Therefore, like Authority, Responsibility is a combination of the Skill of Compromise with the trait (or Commonality) of Intelligence.

Compromise as a skill of commitment, takes us into a whole new arena of study, in that as partners, we will have grown the maturity to accomplish more that just curiosity about each other's inner workings, and more than just communication about our private and joint goals in life. Now we are ready to start truly aligning with each other in a more strategic, and in Romantic Dynamics terms, "synthetic" way.

This means that mature, advanced Compromise as a set of skills does not just amount to "sacrifice" of our personal goals (which would be deadly to any relationship, "killing the spirit" of our personal dreams.) Instead, it is a mature effort to truly pick through what aspects of one's personal dreams can be aligned into a common goal, and what other parts of them might at least be avoided in terms of interference from the other partner's dreams.

A type of data-processing, where our style of using data is creative, artistic, experiential, future-oriented, and visionary. It is the opposite of being "left-brained," and an intellectual style that is good when partnered with a left-brained person.