What are the steps to temper survival behaviors?
In order to temper survival behaviors, you can follow these steps.
Step 1: You first need to identify if your current behaviors fit any of the following survival descriptions.
30 Survival Behaviors
1. Refusal to Grow Up
This is a pattern in which you think, feel, or act in a way that lets others know you have no intention to grow up to think, feel, or act like an adult.
2. Authority Figure Conflict
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, or acting which places you in direct conflict with the authority figures in your life. This often results in your jumping from job to job.
3. Unapproachability
This is a pattern of behaviors which is often unintentional and is based on your shyness and aloofness with others. This is a perception which others have of you and as a result they avoid contact or involvement with you. They often perceive you to be arrogant, better than thou, or together when in fact you are just the opposite.
4. Shyness and Aloofness
This is a pattern of behaviors which reflects your fear of involvement with others. Others perceive you as being distant and non-communicative. It reflects your fear of rejection and non-approval.
5. Chip on Your Shoulder
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting which reflects your tough guy approach of challenging others to take the first move to try to get the chip off your shoulder. This is a reflection of your unresolved past hurt and pain and tends to put off new people.
6. Need for Nurturance
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting which reflects the deficit of parental male or female nurturance in your life. It often results in your intentional or unintentional compulsive or addictive searching for male or female affection, attention, or approval in your life.
7. Addictive Relationships
This is a pattern of your developing relationships with others in which you lose your ability to control or temper your thinking, feeling, or acting to the point where you are obsessed and lose yourself in the other.
8. Enmeshment of Relationships
This is a pattern in your relationships where you cling on so that there is an over-bondedness between you and the other. You hold on tightly so as to ensure that no outside influence intrudes to upset the balance you have created.
9. Loss of Emotional Boundaries
This is a pattern in your relationships in which you and the other become unable to differentiate feelings, attitudes, and beliefs from one another. If one hurts or is in pain, the other is hurt and in pain. This over-identification is a way to try to ensure bonds of loyalty, trust, and fidelity.
10. Lack of Emotional Empathy
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting based on the inability to be open to the feelings of others so as to prevent your getting involved with them at an emotional level. This is a way to protect yourself from being vulnerable to being hurt in relationships if you get too close.
11. Inability to be Intimate
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting which prevents you from getting emotionally close to others. This is a method to protect yourself from the hurt and pain if the relationship should end in a negative way.
12. Icebox Behaviors
This is a pattern of acting which freezes others out of emotional involvement with you. This is a way in which you keep others from getting too close to you lest if they know you too well they could hurt you as you have been hurt in the past. Other names for this are: Ice Woman, Ice Man, Freezer, Refrigerator, Eskimo, Ice Cube, Icicle, or Cold.
13. Lack of Commitment
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, or acting by which you never commit to anything so as to prevent yourself from being entangled or tied into anything in which you might fail or be hurt.
14. Antagonism
This is a pattern of negativistic thinking, feeling, and acting which reflects your self-protectiveness from real or perceived threats to you. This is a hostile pattern which puts others off and maintains emotional and physical distance between you and them.
15. Defensiveness
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting by which you are always on guard from real or perceived threats to you. This on-guard attitude protects you from being wronged, hurt, unwanted, or unloved. It reflects the I knew it wouldn't work out anyway attitude in which you enter into relationships with other people, places, and things.
16. Indecisiveness
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting which prevents you from ever being tied down to a decision lest the decision be a wrong one. This prevents you from being hurt by a mistake but it keeps you stuck from making progress in your life.
17. Irresponsibility
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting in which you try to accept as little responsibility for yourself or others as you can. This results in your never having to be accountable for anything which may go wrong or fail in your life. Never wanting to be answerable for anything keeps you functioning in an irresponsible way.
18. Out of Touch with Reality
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, or acting which allows you to deny the reality of past hurts, injustices, or pain which you have experienced. This denial of reality is based on the belief that if you admitted reality for what it was you would go insane from the shame, pain, misery, suffering, horror, rage, anger, and shock you would experience from facing it the way it was. This being out of touch, however, keeps you from progressing with life due to the amount of unfinished business you avoid by denying and being out of touch.
19. Lack of Conscience
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting by which you never allow yourself to be bothered by anything negative you have done to yourself or others. This is often a result of your inability to face the harm you've done to others. Since you feel you have been so badly treated in the past, you have a hard time admitting you have or are doing the same to others.
20. Denial of Feelings
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting by which you do not admit to having any positive or negative feelings about your past or current life. This is a way to protect yourself from pain, hurt, shame, and upset. But it also keeps you from experiencing the enjoyment, pleasure, and satisfaction of the positive aspects of your life. This makes it difficult for others to relate to you since they can't get a clear picture of who you are by pinning you down on how you feel towards them or anything else in your life.
21. Invisibility
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, or acting by which your goal is not to be seen, heard, or attended to by others so that they not focus any negative actions or behaviors your way. This is to protect you from future real or perceived hurt, pain, or abuse by others.
22. Self-Medicating Behaviors
This is a pattern of behaviors by which you medicate or anesthetize the pain, hurt, shame, suffering, or emptiness you have experienced in your life. This includes alcohol or drug abuse, sexual addiction, compulsive overeating, shopping, or gambling, etc. This pattern can accelerate to habitual or addictive levels if allowed to go unchecked and then creates new problems for you.
23. Inability to Trust
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting by which you do not allow yourself to trust anyone in your life. This lack of trust prevents you from making the mistake of becoming vulnerable with another lest the other hurt, abuse, or take advantage of you like others have done to you in the past.
24. Playing It Safe
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting by which you play it safe lest you take a risk and be hurt, abused, or taken advantage of by others. This also prevents you from making a mistake or failing in decisions or actions in life. Playing it safe keeps you secure in a cocoon sheltered from the hazards and risks of life.
25. Self-Containment
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, or acting by which you try to convince yourself and others that you don't need anyone else in your life but you. This keeps you from seeking or asking for help from others so as not to be let down if they don't respond. I know I can do it on my own attitude keeps you from being open to the support, advice, and assistance of helpers in your life. This pattern feeds on itself and can lead to exacerbation of your sense of isolation, abandonment, and loneliness.
26. Mask Wearing
This is a pattern of behaviors to hide from others your true feelings. This helps you to keep others in the dark as to how you are actually reacting to people, places, or things. By masking feelings you prevent real or imagined abuse, rejection, non-approval, or condemnation from those who would be offended by your honest assessment, reaction, or judgment.
27. Running Away
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting by which you run away to avoid having to face any hurt, pain, abuse, suffering, anxiety, stress, or tension. Running away either in your head or in reality helps you to avoid confronting the unpleasant realities of your life.
28. Lying
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting by which you hide the truth from others so as to avoid real or perceived abuse, hurt, or conflict. Lying or omitting the truth of details is a way to cover up anything which you believe could cause trouble for you with others.
29. Overreaction
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, or acting by which you blow things out of proportion to keep people concerned, confused, and upset. Overreaction is a way by which you gain attention for yourself when ordinary means fail. It is a way to ensure that you are not forgotten or ignored.
30. Escape into Fantasy
This is a pattern of thinking, feeling, or acting by which you avoid the unpleasantness of your present circumstances by fantasizing how it could be. Flight into fantasy gives you momentary relief from the stress, anxiety, or tension of the hurtful, abusive, neglectful, punitive, shameful, negating reality you are experiencing at the time.
Step 2: Once you identify which survival behaviors you are currently engaged in, you then need to identify what are the negative consequences of these behaviors so as to motivate yourself to change them.
Step 3: Once motivated to change them, you need to identify the unhealthy thinking and feeling which lies at the root of the behaviors.
Step 4: Then you need to identify new, healthier alternative ways of thinking and feeling to help you change.
Step 5: You now are ready to identify new, alternative healthy replacement behaviors.
Step 6: Implement the new, healthier behaviors.
Step 7: Monitor your progress with the new behaviors and seek feedback from others if you are relapsing into old survival modes.
Step 8: If you find yourself falling back into use of old survival behavior patterns, return to Step 1 and begin again.
