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 %DEFEND PROTECT DISHONEST COLLUDE ADDICT INTEGRITY 900307

     Efforts  to defend and protect are often designed  to
defend and protect the dishonesty of collusion, addictions
and  their  supportive networks of codependent  behaviors;
rather  than  designed to promote  personal  and  communal
integrity.    It  is  important to  recognize  the  actual
effects of efforts to defend and protect; for such effects
are often disintegrative rather than integrative.

     Insecure  people are more prone to attempt to  defend
and protect,   than  are  people  who  have clear personal
identities  and are well grounded in a  healthy  community
which gives them the gift of being free to be  vulnerable.
People  who  are free to be vulnerable are  not  defensive
people;  they are usually open and honest, responsive with
personal  integrity  within  a  community having  communal
integrity.

     People  who  have  not been given  the  gift  of  the
freedom to  be vulnerable,  are prone to be  defensive; to
engage in efforts to defend and protect in ways  which are
designed to make them invulnerable,  because they are  not
free to be vulnerable.  To be invulnerable you must engage
in  efforts  to hide your weaknesses,  your errors,   your
mistakes, your failures, your fears, etc.

     Your   enemy  must  not know where  your   weaknesses
are, and  perhaps  should  be misled to attack  where  you
are strongest.   Insecure people are prone to be defensive
in  ways   which  decrease  openness and   honesty,    and
promote misleading behaviors.   Thus efforts to defend and
protect  tend  to  be  efforts  to  defend   and   protect
dishonesty  which is   characteristic   of  all  collusive
games   of    self deception,    all  forms  of  addiction
and  all  forms  of codependent support of such behavior.

     When  people are on the defensive we need to  discuss
just  what  is  being defended;  for it may well  be  that
dishonesty  is what is being defended.   We cannot be well
so  long  as  the defense of dishonesty  is  respected  in
uncritical  ways.   We cannot recover from the diseases of
our  collusions,  addictions and codependencies unless  we
honestly examine what motivates our defensiveness; and are
willing  to examine and see if it might be our  dishonesty
which motivates our defensiveness.

                                                                                                                               
                         (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in      
                    (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy)  
                                                                                                                               
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