Choosing the underdog position

To your personality, one of the choices to deal with unpleasant input of other people and having to confess that he cannot make your life 'fun' here, is to choose for 'the underdog position'. This means that his reference point is about the worst case scenario, so that he can now only be better than he himself and others expected, and even if he is bad in the eyes of other people, he is still 'good' according to his own judgment. Almost everybody uses this idea now and then, usually as an alternative choice in a situation where others seem to be in control, and a group of people makes a structural use of it.

For your personality this is a way to hold on to his power and grip and feeling good about himself by living up to someone's negative picture of you, or to be the first to recognize that you do not live up to a certain standard and as a reaction make the choice that to you the safe standard is nót living up to it. The feeling of self esteem of your personality here is directly connected to háving a problem or being rejected or such. When you understand this, it is easier to understand that a personality who has chosen such a reaction pattern, is not interested in solving the problem or being accepted, since according to his new standards, that is now 'wrong' or unwanted.

And even though your personality somehow knows that this solution in itself would at least bring you a more normal behavioural pattern, it also holds out a huge risk: the one where, once you have reached that normal pattern, you can fall back and then have to face in all its terrifying fullness that you are not living up to expectations, cannot make things work or such. And that was exactly why you had chosen the underdog position in the first place, to avoid that experience. By the way, this defence mechanism also takes care of limiting experiences that threaten to get too pleasant, since otherwise the difference with your normal experiences becomes too big and then your everyday life no longer fits your expectations.

This choice for weakness often irritates personalities who identify with other ways to deal with unpleasantness: those with regard to success, making it happen, and who recognize the impossibility to avoid the unpleasantness that they tried to camouflage through their illusions of making things happen. Their approach is to rebuild their shattered self image through doing something: actively deal with problems, focus on positivity, and this approach does not work at all here.

Personalities that make a choice for an underdog position do something as well, however, their aim is different. They are 'happy' when they are having more problems than other people, they can relax and lean backward when they can say: you see, they do not like me anyway - things do not work out anyway, thus allowing themselves to stay where they are and feel relatively good about it too.

And yet: actually it does not really matter which one of these approaches your personality has chosen as a way to create a worldview that still works for him, whether it be an underdog position or something that you have learned to label as 'normal'. Becoming aware of the principle that you are using here is the first step in creating awareness. Taking responsibility that you are the one who creates your own worldview, which turns out to be not a truth in itself, and neither to be 'you'. The essence of a new approach is to remember that neither of these is a truth in itself, and then start looking for new ways to deal with it within you. In both situations, your personality has to learn to let go of the energy he invests in upholding his approach, standards and values without replacing it with new ones, instead open up to something that is not of himself but still is about you: your inner Self.

It can be helpful to write down some assumptions about yourself and use this to name the one you are using in a specific situation. This will help you to become aware of the feelings that are truly involved here, and not only the unpleasant ones, but also the recognition that you indeed have the tendency to choose an underdog position in certain situations.