When is the last time you were in danger? And I don’t mean personal risks, like not buckling your seat belt, or voluntarily throwing yourself out of an airplane. I’m talking, truly in way of harm from external forces, like another human being or animal?
Ever? Never? Yet, I will bet that you have still exercised your feral fight or flight reaction plenty!
Flight for Ego
There is a reason I am a writer. I have more time to express my social self on the page than in person. In person, my lack of tact is sometimes unnerving.
I am not alone in this. I watch as co-workers, friends, and family members self-sabotage their emotional bodies after succumbing to the fight-or-flight reaction of their egos. It is a natural human experience. Animals experience no such phenomenon. The ego is absent in most of the animal kingdom.
Only in highly evolved, social structures, like we get used to as city dwelling hominids, does the fight-or-flight reaction extended out into the realm of imagination and memory.
When harmful emotions come to the surface, they are often due to our own failure to act. Inaction often occurs when an individual imagines the outcome of a response as negative and then foresees a conflict arising in the immediate future. But, often…