Have You Built Walls In Your Relationship With Others?
There are people who build walls in their relationships with others. Some build thick walls of unbreakable materials. Others build thick walls, too, but with easily breakable materials. So somehow that robust and strong appearance, scratching a little, already gives a feeling of weakness …
Other people build different walls depending on the people they interact with. You probably relate to this. Many times we meet people who, due to their aggressiveness, their invasion into our living space or their toxicity, make us have to build a wall that protects us from the damage that we guess on the horizon. Facade that, on the other hand, we do not usually build with other people.
To speak of our walls is to speak of our limits. Limits help us protect ourselves. They appear instinctively in dangerous situations. However, there are many people in whom these are not established, leaving them vulnerable to the dangers of others. In some ways it is like having an open wound. If I expose it, I run the risk of infection, if I cure it and cover it to protect it, I minimize the risk of infection.
It is important to consider how we have been building our wall
Something similar happens in human relationships. Limits are necessary. The question is to what extent we use them. We are building them based on our relationships with others. We learn from the experiences and experiences that are happening in our life journey.
But when we are young, the only reference we have to judge the outside is our parents and those closest to them. If we are taught that the world is a hostile and dangerous place, we will tend to build this wall. Unconsciously and totally involuntarily we will create a fortress that protects us from this world that transmits so much insecurity to us.
As we grow, one becomes aware of the barriers that have been built. But the most important thing is to be aware of whether they are barriers that have been imposed on us, or barriers that we have actually built ourselves based on our experiences.
Fears and prejudices raise many walls
It is important to consider how permeable this wall is and to what extent it is preventing me from having an authentic relationship with the other. If my wall is very large and opaque, it will be difficult to have a relationship from our most genuine being. Since at the end of the day the part that we show of ourselves would only be the one that others would try to guess from the outside.
Sometimes we become our own wall. We are our wall. So we lose genuine contact with ourselves and with others. These barriers, therefore, speak to us of fears. Fears that have become enormous and prevent us from seeing reality with a prudent criterion, but at the same time close and open.
Having fears is not bad, on the contrary, they tell us about who we are and what we care about in life. What is bad and totally pernicious is letting them take control. Without wondering where they come from. The insane thing is to let these dominate our existence without having had a previous dialogue with them.
Defensive mechanisms protect us and at the same time keep us away
Defense mechanisms are the stuff we use to build a large part of our walls. The more I project outward what I hate about myself, the more I deny my inner reality, the more I repress my true desires, the greater the wall that separates me from myself. The liberation of this wall begins when we become aware of how we have built it, if it was me, if it was my parents or my friends …
As you can see, having limits is good and necessary, since they protect us from what we want in our life. Where we have to put the focus is on how these have been built and to what extent they help us or harm us in the relationship we maintain with ourselves and with others.
