If you live with a Holding In Defense, you were likely reared in a family which was loving but over-controlling as your childhood caretakers tried to manage your every behavior and put severe pressure on you to be obedient and follow the rules to the letter. One of your caretakers (most likely your mother) was dominant and self-sacrificing while your other caretaker was submissive and passive. Your dominant caretaker sacrificed everything for you as well as the other family members, but also smothered you with personal demands as well as micro-managing your physical functions and movements with admonishments like, “Be good! Don’t do it that way! Eat everything on your plate! Did you move your bowels yet?! Let me see what you’ve done to yourself! You need more sleep! Let me show you how to clean your gentiles! Did you wipe your butt well? Stop masturbating and wasting your energy!” These were the kind of minute by minute demands that you lived with day in and day out during this critical stage of your childhood development, especially from two to three years of age. Your dominant parent’s attitude during this period was, “I know what is best for you!”
Any attempts on your part to defy or resist being micro-managed or to declare your independence, including temper tantrums and even slight shows of defiance, were severely crushed. Even your smallest expression of negativity and ungratefulness produced a punishing reaction from your self-sacrificing caretaker which caused you to feel guilty and obligated to submit to it all. As a result of this extreme micro-management of your physical functions and movements, you tended to feel trapped, shamed, humiliated, and defeated. You saw no way out. The only possible avenue of expression that was open to you was to whine and complain, but even this was likely met with demands to “stop it”.
Because there was no way to express your own feelings and needs, you had to bottle them up, thus the origin of the term ‘holding in’ for this Holding In Defense. However, the intense micro-management of your bodily functions and movements at the age when developmentally you were trying to assert your independence, kept you stirred up. Metaphorically it was like putting carbonated soda in a bottle, capping it, and then shaking the bottle violently; with nowhere to escape, the contents of the bottle become highly charged and explosive. So it was with you. You became highly energetically charged with no way to release this charge except to leak it with whining and complaining, or exploding periodically, but paying a heavy price when you did so. This was both tortuous and enraging. Since you were not allowed to release the excessive charge by exploding, throwing temper tantrums, emotional acting out, or draining it off by whining and complaining, you were forced to bottle it up and live with and endure the pain and torture of it all.
As an adult, you still bottle up your negative feelings and block any expression of your anger and rage at being bossed, controlled, or treated unfairly. You restrict energy from moving into your organs of expression until it becomes unbearable. This produced severe muscular tensions in your jaw and throat thus restricting your voice. It created severe muscular tensions in your shoulders, arms, and hands which keeps you from reaching out for what you want as well as pushing away what you do not want. In addition, severe muscular tensions in your hip joints, legs, and feet prevent you from putting your foot down, walking away, or stomping and kicking in protest. Similarly, muscular tensions in your pelvis and buttocks cause you severe constipation as well as keep you from having satisfying sexual intercourse or masturbating as a way to find a release and have some pleasure.
Because of this severe holding which blocks energy from flowing into and being discharged from your peripheral expressive organs, they tend to be weakly charged while the trapped energy in your torso overcharges it. Since muscle builds in a body area that is highly charged similar to doing isometric exercise, your trunk expanded making you look short, thick, and overdeveloped muscularly. Yet, your head, arms and legs, which are weakly charged, tend to be proportionally smaller in size. Also, the combination of severe holding in your body and the severe external pressure from your demanding childhood caretaker tended to produce a tremendous compression of energy in your torso and made the expanding tissue there very dense.
This severe compression in your torso, along with the tucking of your tail due to your forced submission—much like a dog tucks its tail between its legs when it is forced to submit—produced a forward curvature of your spine as it bent under the burden of your body tensions as well as the extreme external pressure that was put on you by your dominant caretaker. Because your natural energetic impulses are blocked in your neck to keep them from flowing upward into your head and in your shoulders to keep them from flowing outward into your arms and hands as well as in your pelvis to keep them from flowing downward into your legs, feet, and genitals, it tends to produce a strong anxiety in you, especially when you become overcharged and over stressed. Further, because of your fear and unwillingness to stick your neck out, the pulling in of your head—much like a turtle retracts its head inside its shell to protect itself—tends to make your neck short and thick. Your skin also tends to have a brownish hue due to the stagnation of your core energy. This stagnation also produces in you a sense of being bogged down or stuck in a morass, unable to move freely. This is exacerbated by your defensive stance and attitude of hunkering down to endure the external pressure and torture.
Although submissive outwardly, inside you tend to hold strong feelings of negativity, resentment, spite, hostility, and superiority which you may have blocked, even from your own awareness, for fear that they might make you explode into violent rage. Because of your submissive holding in, your aggression and self-assertion tend to be greatly restricted. Instead, you gain some measure of release and satisfaction by whining and complaining in a very non-assertive and passive way as well as cautiously asserting yourself by the use of mildly provocative statements and behaviors.
