John donne said: "No one is an island ... everyone's death is my sorrow, because I am a member of mankind."

Human suffering is also interrelated. Many years ago, Freud revealed the mechanism of human suffering, summed it up as an objective law and named it "defense mechanism"

What is the defense mechanism? Psychologist Donald melzer has a popular and short explanation for this: "All defense mechanisms are lies we lie to ourselves to escape from pain."

Most themes of human life are related to pain and challenges. Humans instinctively use defense mechanisms to resist pain, especially when we are very fragile and very small. The defense mechanism can make us not linger for a while, but the consequence of long-term use of the defense mechanism is that the defense mechanism will be solidified and become our instinctive and only response when we encounter difficulties. This will greatly limit the width of our lives and eventually bring us new pain.

What we usually call "know yourself" is to know our own defense mechanism, what kind of pain, trouble and challenge we avoided at the beginning, and then try to face what we avoided, eliminate the old model and let ourselves return to a state of free choice.

Of course, it is impossible for a person to have no defense mechanism at all, and not all defense mechanisms are negative. But if it bothers our lives, it means that we need to stop and feel:

Have we been running away from something?

Are we really not getting rid of those things we are running away from?

We might as well try to face them.

From habitual escape to deliberate face, it is not only a change in thinking, but also a change in attitude towards life, and it is also a process of reopening the world.