As humans we all exhibit patterns of Self-protection; patterns of protection are the ways our systems have learned to link similar events/situations and to organise them in a manner that endows us with an assumptive or expedient form of predictability. Importantly, it is from such predictability that we then develop the implicit capacity to neurocept and ward off what we subjectively see as a vulnerability and/or a threat to our sense of Self.
More specifically, these patterns are neurobiologically based organising processes within the mind and body that, over time, link interrelated flows of energy and information. The function of this linking is to bridge these flows of energy and information into a system of sensing-perceiving-interpreting that in turn endows us with the implicit capacity to recognise and ward off vulnerability and threat.
Patterns of Self-protection are the adaptive modifications that a child makes to their spontaneous behaviours in order to prevent disruption in relationship with their parents: they occur to preserve relationship and throughout dependence serve as a mechanism of survival.
Patterns of Self-protection are thus adaptations that innately promote individual and collective survival.
Furthermore, patterns of Self-protection can be seen as analogous to what is named in attachment theory as ‘internal working models’ and may also be likened to any combination of: (a) what is seen in the medical model as ‘symptoms’; (b) within cognitive behavioural theory as ‘schemas’, ‘cognitive distortions’, or ‘cognitive bias’; (c) what Freud originally noticed within the human psyche and deemed to be ‘defence mechanisms’.
