This Holding Back Defense sub-type is prevalent in both women & men. If you live with a Willful Determined sub-type of the Holding Back Defense, your caretakers most likely were stern, strict, rigid, rule-bound, exacting task masters who may have been disgusted and threatened by your spontaneous, alive, full of energy, animal nature and emerging sexuality. Or, they were raised as children to value a strict code of conduct, ethics, and morality which might have been religiously based or not. Your childhood caretakers wanted to curb your animal aliveness and reform you to become the perfect little lady/gentleman. They may have also done this because unconsciously they were threatened by the possible competition of your success which they felt would diminish them in comparison. This reconstruction of your essential being was done in such a willful, determined way—through instruction, reward, reinforcement, punishment, values inculcation, and moral imperatives—that you introjected and identified with your caretakers’ rigid standards, moral imperatives, and conventional values, and therefore tried, using all of your will power, to meet and live up to these rigid, life-denying, body-alien parental standards and values. Thus, you became just like them—that is to say, you copied and adopted the exact mirror, ‘spitting image’ of their false self thus leaving you with a false self as well.
As a result of adopting your false self, you now spend your energies attempting to ward off and keep in check your unacceptable sexual, aggressive, competitive, and spontaneous animal impulses. Your go to words are, “I should….” You constantly remind yourself that, “I should be more polite!” and, “I should be more respectful!” or “I should be more considerate,” for example Thus, you live ‘under the gun’ of constant tension and pressure to feel, think, and do the right thing and avoid doing the wrong thing. And, your intense attention to detail, to follow the correct rules and procedures keeps you busy and separated from any spontaneous behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that might displease, anger, or threaten others as well as your higher moral authority. You are driven in all areas of your life to carry out the moral imperatives that you have a duty to do and the moral authority that you must serve. You also live with unconscious internal conflicts, serious doubt, crippling indecision as well as procrastination. You suffer intensely from the depression and passivity that is a consequence of living untrue to yourself, but rather living true and devoted to a higher authority that was imposed on you by your childhood caretakers..
