People are confronted with three primary psychological struggles in their lives: 1) Their needs, dependency, and control in relationships. 2) Intense and often painful emotions. 3) Building a sense of self-esteem. The primary psychological struggles describe core pillars of human psychological development and mental health. These three struggles are interconnected, often influencing one another in a cycle that affects emotional stability and quality of life.
When these primary psychological struggles are out of balance, life feels like a constant uphill battle:
- Relationships: People frequently oscillate between the fear of abandonment (resulting in excessive dependence) and the fear of suffocation (pulling away for control).
- Emotions: Without tools to manage them, feelings like shame, anger, or anxiety can feel overwhelming rather than informative.
- Self-Esteem: This serves as the foundation. With a stable internal set of values, you’re less likely to seek constant approval from outside, which can often be unpredictable. Building this confidence helps create a more stable and fulfilling sense of self.
To elaborate on these three primary psychological struggles, it is helpful to look at how they are interconnected. When one area is unstable, it often creates a ripple effect that makes the others harder to manage.
1) Needs, Dependency and Control
Needs, Dependency, and Control in Relationships can be rooted in an attachment style formed in childhood. This struggle focuses on how individuals navigate connection, attachment, and autonomy.
- Dependency vs. Autonomy: Many people find it challenging to balance interdependence, which involves relying on others while staying independent, and dependency, where they depend on others to handle their emotions and life choices.
- Emotional Dependence: This occurs when you rely almost entirely on a partner to meet your emotional needs.
- Control and Security: Paradoxically, excessive dependency can lead to a need for control when a person obsessively tries to manage their partner’s behavior to ensure their own emotional safety and avoid the panic of abandonment. When people feel insecure or fear abandonment, they may use control or manipulation to hold on to partners.
- The Conflict: Many people feel a push-pull between wanting deep closeness (to avoid loneliness) and fearing a loss of freedom or being trapped.
- Attachment Styles: Anxious attachment styles often lead to a high need for reassurance and a fear of rejection.
People often struggle with their needs, desires, dependencies, and control within relationships, leading to feelings of frustration, disappointment, or helplessness:
Entering into a relationship naturally draws us closer to that person, making them significant in our lives and capable of influencing our feelings. When love comes into play, we inadvertently give that individual the power to cause us pain. A new friend might hurt us through indifference, insensitivity, or even outright conflict.
The dynamics of work relationships, like that between an employee and a boss, can also evoke feelings that feel deeply unsettling and beyond our control:
The fear of being hurt can leads to controlling or possessive behaviors, such as:
- The jealous partner who insists on knowing every detail of their significant other’s plans.
- The manager who feels the need to oversee every task their employees undertake.
- The friend who tries to claim you as their own, seeking to be involved in every aspect of your life.
Sometimes, when our desire for connection makes us feel completely helpless, we might try to control the people around us. For example, Dave, who married a woman who submitted to him in everything and then secretly watched her actions to obsessively ensure she complied:
On the other hand, some individuals find the prospect of vulnerability to be unbearable. If their early experiences with dependence—particularly in childhood—taught them that being vulnerable is too dangerous, they may choose to avoid intimate relationships altogether, opting for a life of solitude.
2) Intense and often painful emotions
People often have difficulty dealing with intense and often painful emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger, hatred, envy, or jealousy. This struggle involves emotional regulation—the ability to process and manage feelings effectively.
- Emotional dysregulation: Emotional dysregulation occurs when a person is unable to effectively manage intense feelings, which can result in feelings of losing control, mood swings, or extreme reactions to minor issues.
- Painful emotions: This includes chronic anxiety, sadness, rage, or feelings of emptiness.
- Trauma Response: Often, this difficulty originates from life experiences in which emotions were intense, dismissed, or judged, making it harder for the person to regulate their emotions and return to a calm state. This emotional struggle from past trauma might lead to self-destructive, avoidant, or impulsive behaviors to manage their internal experience.
- Hyper-Reactivity: When setbacks occur consecutively, even minor challenges can seem like major crises. As these emotions intensify and become overwhelming, it can feel as if you’re burdened by an unbearable weight.
- Inward vs. Outward Responses: These intense feelings can burst outward as anger and impulsivity, or turn inward as numbing, dissociation, or shutting down.
Many adults are afraid of the new and unfamiliar experience. This fear can lead to a reluctance or complete avoidance to step outside their comfort zone, making it difficult or even impossible to take chances on new jobs, relationships, or even something as simple as a new look.
As a result, these people become entrenched in rigid routines, hesitant to break away from familiar patterns. While the reasons for this can be complex, a common factor is the anxiety they feel if things were to change. The fear of unexpected and unpredictable emotions often triggers defense mechanisms, causing individuals to push those feelings out of their awareness before they have the chance to create turmoil.
3) Building a sense of self-esteem
This struggle is about developing a stable, positive sense of self-worth that is not very dependent on external validation. Self-esteem is not just “feeling good”; it is the positive internal evaluation of your own worth.
- Low Self-Esteem: A persistent feeling of being unhappy, unsatisfied, or unworthy, often leading to self-doubt.
- Fragile Identity: Without a solid sense of self, people often mirror others to feel valued, essentially letting their identity be defined by others, their partner’s approval, or their recent accomplishments.
- Internal vs. External Validation: Healthy self-esteem is built on a well-developed self, making choices consistent with your own values rather than constantly seeking external reassurance to feel “okay”.
- Dependence on Approval: People often struggle with low self-esteem when their self-worth is rooted in the validation, approval, or attention of others, rather than internal validation.
- The Vicious Cycle: Low self-esteem can make it difficult to set boundaries or maintain healthy relationships, which in turn causes further emotional pain, completing the cycle of all three struggles.
- Breaking the cycle: A key therapeutic goal is to increase your personal identity toward more independent, non-defensive thinking and the possession of an integrated set of values.
- Protection: A strong sense of self-worth acts as a shield, allowing you to handle rejection or criticism without your entire world crumbling. It also avoids you from triggering defensive behaviour.
Individuals often face challenges in cultivating a healthy sense of self-esteem, struggling to feel good about themselves and confident in their inherent worth, especially in relation to others. Many deal with issues surrounding their identity, personal significance, and self-expression. Profound feelings of low self-esteem can significantly impact one’s sense of self, leading to self-centered behaviours and a longing for both internal validation and the continuous craving that others value us.
- Consider the story of a woman whose tumultuous early family life has left her grappling with a deep-seated shame about her perceived abnormalcy.
- Then there’s Jim, who turned to exhibiting himself in public, driven by a desperate need for admiration and desire. Growing up with a depressed and self-absorbed mother who struggled to nurture him, he was left with a fractured sense of self and little understanding of his own worth and value.
- Low self-esteem can plague talented people who battles to realize their potential. Giving more than they receives, they finds themself caught in a constant cycle of toxic relationships.
These feelings of low self-esteem often stems from the scars of an emotionally deprived childhood, representing one of the most powerful yet misunderstood emotions that can lead us to depend heavily on our defense mechanisms.
How They Interconnect
These primary psychological struggles rarely occur in isolation. For example, low self-esteem often drives emotional dependency because you can’t be okay alone. This dependency then intensifies emotions, as every minor conflict with a partner feels like a threat to your self-esteem.
Sources:
– Why Do I Do That?: Psychological Defense Mechanisms and the Hidden Ways They Shape Our Lives – 2012 by Joseph Burgo Ph.D.
– The Psychology of Self-Esteem. A Revolutionary Approach to Self-Understanding by Nathaly Branden 1966-2001.
– 101 DEFENSES, How the Mind Shields Itself, Jerome S.Blackman, M.D., F.A.P.A., BRUNNER-ROUTLEDGE New York and Hove, 2004.
