The mental trap of Chronic Insecurity

In the coming few articles I hope to explain and explore the practical ways in which we (all of us that is), as humans create our own mental traps and how this happens despite our best efforts to avoid them and how despite our best efforts we seem to remain trapped in them.

In doing this I hope to take you through the different traps we create and then propose some new, positive and innovative solutions, which we have devised through our laborious experimental work at The OCD Clinic in Dublin.

I will begin first of all with a problem that is not in itself pathological or diagnosable, but can block us in our everyday lives. That’s a problem we call chronic insecurity, which is a problem we are seeing with increasing regularity in employees, in couples and in single adults, it is even growing with children and adolescents.

Chronic insecurity cannot be called a form of ‘disease’ but when it is generalised it becomes a disabling source of frustration, rendering us incapable to make decisions and to take effective action. Many of my patients have experienced this affliction, as a kind of condemnation akin to a curse they feel is unchangeable. However as I will show in subsequent articles from our new and evolving research and perspective, there is nothing that we cannot change, and I fully reject any terminology that would convict people to such a life sentence.

With this problem people feel constant uncertainty about decisions and find themselves unable to implement actions, continually seeking certainty before they act. The mechanism leading to the formation of such a deep-rooted distrust in their abilities is that they have a tendency to over analyse things and while this has the appearance in the beginning as being careful, it eventually leads to a detrimental effect of overestimating others capabilities, underestimating their own capabilities, which leads to a delay in taking action which in turn creates more fear and increases their anxiety.

In fact, the more insecure someone is the more they overestimate others and the difficulty of things that they have to deal with, while consistently underestimating their own resources. This leads to increased procrastination which can present itself, even in those specific areas of their lives in which the person may well know that they are very capable.

The repetition of these tactics of postponing something merely increases once again their contempt for themselves, which exacerbates further their feeling of impotence and incapability in the face of others and the life generally.

Obsessive Compulsive Insecurity and Doubt

There is also a variant of chronic insecurity that derives from an obsessive-compulsive disorder and this form of problem is known as pathological doubt. In this case the dynamic that leads the person to delay the act is not the tendency to underestimate themselves or to overestimate others abilities, but the obsessive need to evaluate all possibilities and possible effects of taking action before they do so. This way of thinking is supported by the mental trap that I will mention in the next article, and that is the mental trap of a belief in being able to reason perfectly.

In both of these problems, I see that people often appear totally blocked in their lives because they cannot take any kind of responsibility or very limited types and therefore become incapable of carrying out projects of all kinds. I also find that they can often bind themselves to people whom they feel offer protection and that this help and protection seeking in relationships, often creates a real form of relational dependency through another mental trap (which we will discuss another time) and that is the trap of ‘help that actually hurts’.

The Practical Solution

In the case of people that feel incapable to make decisions we have to create in him/her a fear of asking for help, blocking on one hand the relational dynamic that feeds the disorder and in using what we call the ‘worst fantasy’. This is taking proper time to use our technique of blocking fear by taking time to increase it. This will deal with the phobic part of avoiding decisions. They should also be taught how to take very small risks and decisions at the start, progressively increasing to more and more complex situations and decisions until they reach confidence in their own resources and in building their self-confidence.

If the problem is more the obsessive-compulsive type, like I mentioned with pathological doubt, then first phase of our treatment will be very different, and we will want to focus on short-circuiting their mechanism of reasoning and their illusion that we can reason perfectly. In order to deal with this we have to give them a technique based on the philosopher, Immanuel Kant’s belief that, “there is no correct answer to an incorrect question’’ and we must maintain our intervention until the vicious circle between their provision of answers to their irrational doubts over and over again is blocked and by doing this we completely dismantle the problem and they can take effective action.