THE BIGGER PICTURE: Every single human being is defensive. We must fight for ourselves. We must be heard and understood. There are times, however, when our defences stand in the way of our own freedom and growth.
It is these times that we need to walk the most difficult path of faith and self-belief, through what feels like potential annihilation, to emerge with much deeper connections and a stronger imagination. This is truly possible.
Defensiveness provides us with an important tool for survival. We need our defences to provide protection from exploitation, or simply from being hurt. Without them, we lack the tools to preserve our most valuable possession - self-worth. Yet, more and more commonly, our defensiveness is contributing to little more than our own destruction.
There is a natural way to how our defences should work. They should come up when we are under threat, and protect us through that short period. Once the incident has passed, they should come down again and we should gain the opportunity to become truly vulnerable - with people we know love us, where no defences are required. It is in this moment that great things can happen. We can consider what we have been through, release our indignation (at having been subjected to such an encounter), grieve, and gain relief that we have survived. When we do this, we are able to think again.
This process allows us to become stronger. Only by retreating our boundaries and digging deep can we grow upwards and outwards, embodying greater empowerment. Ironically, as a result, we become able to survive more and more situations while using less of our defences, all the while reaching more people more deeply.
Despite this, most of us struggle with a malfunction of our defence system (easily corrected, I might add, when injected with determination, hope and courage).
In the absence of the love and safety we needed to come through our potentially life-threatening experiences in the past, most of us have been unable to disengage our defence mechanisms once they have been evoked.
We approach each new encounter as if it were the same one we experienced in the past. There is no reflection, no release of fear, no vulnerability and so, no opportunity for new thinking. We are stunted and deeply frustrated by it.
Nonetheless, it will always hold true that everything we are about to experience is different from what we have been through in the past. History, once completed, is fixed. The present, on the other hand, brings with it an endless list of new opportunities. Even the same conflict with the same person, over and over again for years, carries in it the possibility for new choices and directions each time we face into it in the present.
To access this, however, we must bring our defences down. In the absence of truly feeling loved and secure, this requires a conscious decision based on the facts.
Is our life continuing to be a threat? Does the evidence stand to say that the person before us does indeed not love us or think well of us? Is there really a need for this level of defence?
In the absence of a real need to protect ourselves from an external danger, the misfiring of our defence system always occurs to protect places where we feel very bad about ourselves.
Although it might seem like we will leave ourselves open to being destroyed, all that will happen by letting our defences down is that we will reveal the places where we feel destroyed. We should never have been forced to house these feelings in the first place. We have nothing to lose by letting them go. We are infinitely more loveable than we will feel at that moment, and that's what we deserve to believe in.
Every human being can be reached at a human level. We cannot reach anyone with our defences forward. We certainly cannot reach them through theirs. Defences come down when we feel acknowledged and understood.
We can achieve this by listening to each other, choosing to let each other in, and offering our sincere respect to discover why one might behave as they are. This requires us to employ our true intelligence - our warmth, sincerity and simple logic. No one really wants to hurt another. We certainly don't want to keep hurting ourselves. What we want is to know that we are significant, and that you have noticed us, trust us and believe in us. Once these things are clear, we can and will move mountains - for you as much as for ourselves.
Our enemies can become our allies. This is possible because the strongest thing that will ever come between us is our common humanity. Only when we extend and receive care to each other is it possible to truly have each other. For this to happen, defences must come down. More than anything else that might be gained from this, we will gain a complete and wonderful life without limits.
Shalini Sinha works as a life coach and counsellor and presents the intercultural programme, Mono, on RTÉ Television. She has a BA in comparative religion and anthropology and an MA in women's studies.