Every day throughout our lives, each of us solves the problems thrown up by life in one way or another. Each of us has within ourselves a number of tools and capabilities in order to successfully solve these problems. And inside each of us there are invisible bastions that help us cope with internal discomfort, a certain dissonance that arises if we are unable to successfully solve some life problem. Ideally, each of us should be able to: understand our needs and be able to satisfy them in socially acceptable ways, without harm to ourselves and others; be able to communicate, negotiate, while defending your rights, without violating anyone’s boundaries; recognize your feelings and be able to express them in such a way that no one gets hurt from it. But this is ideal. In reality, everything is much sadder, because learning the wisdom of life does not go as smoothly for us as we would like, and the skills and knowledge we acquire during this training, most often, are far from the desired ideal. This leads to the fact that we tend to perceive some life tasks as an insoluble problem for ourselves, as a threat to our calm and prosperous existence. When a person cannot cope with some situation at the level of action, he feels some discomfort, then the first bastion of defense comes into play - psychological defense. Psychological protection is a special system of personality stabilization aimed at protecting consciousness from unpleasant, traumatic experiences associated with internal and external conflicts, states of anxiety and discomfort. The main task of psychological defense is to eliminate psychological discomfort, and not to actually solve the situation. Well, for example, we can forget, repress, deny or devalue something; at some point we will decide to “escape” the situation in order to avoid responsibility; we will behave “childishly”, become helpless at the most inopportune moment and wait for someone to solve this situation for us; we can replace feelings with actions and actions with feelings; we can replace “unworthy” feelings with “worthy” ones, etc. Thus, psychological defenses help you and me not to pay attention to some conflicts and failures, so that we are not distracted from the implementation of our plans. We all use such defenses and this is absolutely normal, but only as long as a person copes with life situations quite successfully . However, these protections may no longer work. This usually happens in those moments when we find ourselves in a stressful situation, when we have to make a choice between “I want and I need”, in conflict or difficult life situations, etc. By the time such tests arrive, our “basement” of the unconscious is already overcrowded, and healthy psychological defenses can no longer work. That’s when we encounter the following symptoms: asthenia, hypochondria, apathy, depression, obsessions (thoughts and actions), inappropriately violent and uncontrolled expression of one’s emotions, uncertainty, anxiety, panic attacks, phobias, etc. The presence of these symptoms indicates that your first bastion of protection has fallen, and you have to either restore it or retreat to the next bastion. Usually at this stage, people resort to the help of doctors or psychologists, which ensures restoration work to repair the first bastion. However, somewhere something may not work, we simply may not have enough patience to reconstruct what was destroyed, and then a person retreats to the second bastion. Psychosomatic response will replace psychological defense; a person’s problematic situation will cause certain painful symptoms, which, oddly enough, will bring some relief to the person. Body and psyche are inextricably linked. At the moment when we feel different emotions or feelings, our body works differently: certain muscles contract, different substances are produced,_3265...