A friend has seen the picture above of a fence on my business card and she made this comment: “Nice picture, it shows how people build their fences.” I hadn’t thought of the picture in that way before. It’s always fascinating how people see the same thing in different ways. I always thought of the picture as fences falling, the equivalent, symbolically, of personal defences falling. I guess it all comes up to each one’s individual needs. The friend most probably has a stronger need to build stronger fences/defences.
Defence mechanisms are who we are. We are not born with them. We acquire them from day one according to the environmental demands and in conjunction with our biology, our internal needs and drives. Defences need to be respected. We are the ones to determine the right time when our defences need to fall or for others to be built.