I would like to continue to use the latter vignette of a job loss to further delineate manifest and latent content and the way in which these concepts materialize in our emotional response to environmental stimuli.
If we continue to imagine that you are in a therapy session because you have just lost your job and you are feeling anxious and traumatized, initially, as a client you begin to explain the details leading up to losing your job and the feelings that you have around it. For example, you might explain that you think you were unfairly terminated or that you think that you were treated unreasonably throughout your employment and that you are experiencing feelings of shock, disbelief, shame, embarrassment and worry. Each of these thoughts and feelings are examples of appropriate and congruent responses to what is happening in the here and now. At this point in the session, you have just disclosed the source of your pain and stress, the manifest content, to the therapist.
Additionally, you might also tell your therapist that losing your job has created other thoughts and feelings such as:
- “I have never been able to do anything right.”
- “I am not good enough.”
- “No one needs or wants me.”
- “I am a loser and a failure.”
- “From a young age, I knew I would never be happy.”
Each of these thoughts and feelings are examples of emotional responses that are disproportionate to the problem at hand. At this point in the session you have disclosed to your therapist that the stress of losing your job has also stirred-up old or unresolved wounds from your history, the latent content.
Understanding the complexities of your emotional experience is an important part of the therapeutic process because conflicts outside of your awareness can impede your ability to stay strong and focus on conquering the problem at hand.
As a human being, you have a unique ability to defend yourself from emotional pain that has been produced by history of trauma. This ability is referred to as unique because it operates involuntarily outside of your conscious awareness. So, you are unconsciously building defenses all of the time to help bury emotional pain that might be too much to handle. Something positive about creating defense mechanisms is that you can prevent yourself from being flooded or inundated with painful emotions that you are ill equipped deal with, thereby allowing you to establish a sense of control over your own emotional experience.
While defense mechanisms work to protect you, they can also inadvertently hurt you. A defense mechanism that worked for a period of time in your life may no longer be appropriate for dealing with problems in the current phase of your life.
Because defense mechanisms tend to operate ‘under the radar,’ you may not even be aware that you are using them. This can result in you unknowingly trying to resolve a problem using a technique that no longer works. A therapist can help you to identify defense mechanisms that you have used in the past or that you are using presently that have now become a barrier for you, precluding more adaptive coping skills from taking place. Consequently, emotions that you repress because they feel threatening can motivate negative behaviors and thoughts.
Within the process of therapy, you can work through the layers of yourself and your problems; one step at a time, at a pace that you determine and with the support of your therapist.
Instead of being afraid to acknowledge your shortcomings or vulnerabilities, you can learn to embrace them and integrate all of the parts of yourself in order to become the strongest, most empowered individual that you can be.