I think that what insecurity is, is inhibition of feelings of disappointment/loss because of an implicitly learned belief that to express these feelings will have negative consequences (ie – it will only make things worse).
That’s almost the opposite of what I would consider feeling “insecure”. In the predictive sense, it’s being pessimistic. In the emotional sense, It’s not inhibition of feelings, but having them. Expecting something bad to happen to you and feeling afraid and anxious is to feel insecure. Generally usage of “insecurity” usually applies this to your own competence or other’s perceptions of you.
Reading through your post, I kept waiting for a some kind of delineation of what you were referring to with “insecurity” along those lines. What you’ve given above seems very idiosyncratic to me.
By insecurity I just mean it in the everyday sense of someone worrying a lot about how other people feel towards them and being afraid of being rejected, excluded, ostracized etc.. I suppose it was not quite correct to say that inhibition of feelings of disappointment/loss is what insecurity is. I think its more that’s what causes someone to be insecure. My thinking on this is that if someone is not afraid to feel disappointment or loss they won’t be insecure. Let me distinguish between loss itself and the feelings that result from it. Loss is always undesirable and its normal and inevitable to fear loss. What I’m suggesting is that it is not inevitable to fear the feelings that result from loss after the loss is incurred. We didn’t evolve the feeling of sadness (really I should switch to sadness from here on to avoid confusion) to deal with loss to make ourselves worse off. I think the evolutionary design is to fear loss but not to fear the resulting sadness. I believe that the sadness has a restorative function. I should read up on the best evolutionary theories on the actual function of sadness but for here its enough to say that it is serving a positive purpose and its not in our nature to be averse to our own feelings. But if someone has developed a fear of sadness, perhaps because it was not met with the comforting that it is probably designed by evolution to elicit but rather with some negative reaction, a person can develop a fear of sadness. The idea is that they then may come to not only fear rejection but to fear the sadness that comes with it. My hunch here is that if they don’t develop this fear then they will not be insecure. They’ll fear the negative outcome but not so much that they are unwilling to take the risk. That’s the idea I’m getting at.
By insecurity I just mean it in the everyday sense of someone worrying a lot about how other people feel towards them and being afraid of being rejected, excluded, ostracized etc..
That’s entirely social insecurity. One could also be insecure about one’s level of competence, regardless of the opinions of others.
My thinking on this is that if someone is not afraid to feel disappointment or loss they won’t be insecure.
I think that’s some of it. Failing to face a possible outcome and accept it makes anticipation worse. To face it is to usually see that you will survive, and it won’t be so bad.
However, some insecurity is an ingrained emotional response to actual events. If one grows up in a hostile or treacherous environment, your emotional reaction will likely be appropriate to that threat, with little regard for a change to a safer and less treacherous environment. Also, one thing I’ve recently considered, is that the habitual act of looking for threats makes the world seem more threatening through the availability heuristic, making you feel less secure than would be appropriate. Notice that heightened vigilance for threat is a natural response to a threatening environment, but it would leave one feeling less secure even after the threat is removed.
In both failure modes, there is a cost to anticipating future failure, whether in the pain of that anticipation, or in estimating the world to be more threatening than it is, again leading to painful anticipation, but also inaccurate predictions of risk that create suboptimal action.
That’s almost the opposite of what I would consider feeling “insecure”. In the predictive sense, it’s being pessimistic. In the emotional sense, It’s not inhibition of feelings, but having them. Expecting something bad to happen to you and feeling afraid and anxious is to feel insecure. Generally usage of “insecurity” usually applies this to your own competence or other’s perceptions of you.
Reading through your post, I kept waiting for a some kind of delineation of what you were referring to with “insecurity” along those lines. What you’ve given above seems very idiosyncratic to me.
By insecurity I just mean it in the everyday sense of someone worrying a lot about how other people feel towards them and being afraid of being rejected, excluded, ostracized etc.. I suppose it was not quite correct to say that inhibition of feelings of disappointment/loss is what insecurity is. I think its more that’s what causes someone to be insecure. My thinking on this is that if someone is not afraid to feel disappointment or loss they won’t be insecure. Let me distinguish between loss itself and the feelings that result from it. Loss is always undesirable and its normal and inevitable to fear loss. What I’m suggesting is that it is not inevitable to fear the feelings that result from loss after the loss is incurred. We didn’t evolve the feeling of sadness (really I should switch to sadness from here on to avoid confusion) to deal with loss to make ourselves worse off. I think the evolutionary design is to fear loss but not to fear the resulting sadness. I believe that the sadness has a restorative function. I should read up on the best evolutionary theories on the actual function of sadness but for here its enough to say that it is serving a positive purpose and its not in our nature to be averse to our own feelings. But if someone has developed a fear of sadness, perhaps because it was not met with the comforting that it is probably designed by evolution to elicit but rather with some negative reaction, a person can develop a fear of sadness. The idea is that they then may come to not only fear rejection but to fear the sadness that comes with it. My hunch here is that if they don’t develop this fear then they will not be insecure. They’ll fear the negative outcome but not so much that they are unwilling to take the risk. That’s the idea I’m getting at.
That’s entirely social insecurity. One could also be insecure about one’s level of competence, regardless of the opinions of others.
I think that’s some of it. Failing to face a possible outcome and accept it makes anticipation worse. To face it is to usually see that you will survive, and it won’t be so bad.
However, some insecurity is an ingrained emotional response to actual events. If one grows up in a hostile or treacherous environment, your emotional reaction will likely be appropriate to that threat, with little regard for a change to a safer and less treacherous environment. Also, one thing I’ve recently considered, is that the habitual act of looking for threats makes the world seem more threatening through the availability heuristic, making you feel less secure than would be appropriate. Notice that heightened vigilance for threat is a natural response to a threatening environment, but it would leave one feeling less secure even after the threat is removed.
In both failure modes, there is a cost to anticipating future failure, whether in the pain of that anticipation, or in estimating the world to be more threatening than it is, again leading to painful anticipation, but also inaccurate predictions of risk that create suboptimal action.