InsecurityLaughing

Do you feel insecure?
Well, if you do, you're not the only one!

Would it surprise you to know that most people feel insecure
in one way or another? Many of us don't know it, some of us do.

Do people hide insecurity?

People hide their insecurity in many, many ways. The mind is full of
self-defence mechanisms - it can be very creative indeed. I
nsecurity can turn us into someone we really are not.

For instance, someone who is life-and-soul of the party may well
be that extrovert in order to keep an inner hurt from being discovered.
It's a kind of camouflage, and it works like this: "If people don't see
the real me, they cannot hurt the real me. If they upset the outer me,
that's OK. But they won't because I'm the life and soul of the party."

Insecurity as a child?

There may be an insecure "child" inside our emotional makeup; where part
of our personality was trapped in childhood by a traumatic event -
something that caused great emotional upset. It could be from a general
lack of love in the formative years, which caused a stunting of the normal
emotional development of a whole human being as God intended. Or it could be
the trauma of an accident, or a violence, in which someone they loved and depended on was badly injured, or left the family, or died. Or it could have been a trauma to the child in the form of physical, emotional, mental or sexual abuse. These things can do terrible things to a young mind. Fortunately the mind of a child is resilient, and creates defence mechanisms to handle the insecurity caused. However, in many cases, it is as ineffective as putting a sticking plaster on a broken leg, so it never heals properly, and the person grows up with an imbalance in their personality.
Insecurity in other people?... or in you?

You probably recognise these things in people around you. But you may also be aware of these things in yourself. Are you insecure? How does your insecurity show itself?

But, what can we do about it? Some things look so impossible that we just learn to live with them. Live with our awkwardness, our difficulty with other people, or our bad reaction in certain situations.
The root of insecurity

It may well be that insecurity is the root of it. But we're afraid to look, afraid to face up to what lies behind it. We know of the "presenting problem" on the surface; but what is the root problem, what's at the bottom of it all? Maybe we don't know; maybe we do, but it's too frightening to look at it, or to talk about it with someone else. After all, we wouldn't want anyone else to know about where we hurt, do we?