Martin Psychology

The Codependent Triangle demonstrates roles in codependent relationships. The person assuming the victim role claims all his/her problems are out of his/her control, and that he/she is helpless. The rescuer tries to fix the victim's problem, because the victim claims to be helpless and the rescuer pities the victim. This pity makes the victim resent the help and the notion of further helplessness by having someone else deal with his/her problems, thus the victim assumes the perpetrator role. The newly formed perpetrator attacks the rescuer verbally or physically. This causes the rescuer to victimize themselves; the perpetrator then pities the victim, and assumes the rescuer role, etc.

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Sigmund Freud
Three kinds of conscious
Conscious - Your thoughts at the present moment.
Preconscious - Memories or things that can easily be made conscious
Unconscious - Things that are not easily made conscious.

He developed the free association method of psychoanalyzing where the patient talks in a stream of consciousness kind of manner without censoring his/herself. The psychoanalyst just listens, and only encourages conversation.

Unconscious is home to our drives, instincts, and things that we don't want to think about like emotions and memories associated with trauma.

Unconscious is broken into three parts
Id (pronounced like "it" with a d instead of t) - The id translates need into motivational force, and houses the most basic instincts that demand food, water, and the need to procreate.

Ego - The ego meets obstacles in the world – some that help, some that don't. It catalogs the aides and obstacles. Connects the organism to reality.

Superego - The superego uses the ego's catalog to tell the organism what to do and what not to do.

The ego balances reality, the id, and the superego of an organism. When there are conflicts within the ego you experience anxiety.

Kinds of Anxiety:

Realistic Anxiety – fear.

Moral Anxiety – guilt.

Neurotic anxiety – the feeling of losing control.

When the anxiety rises to the point of overwhelming a person the person uses defense mechanisms such as :

Denial – refusing to accept reality.

Denial in fantasy – twisting reality to make it more acceptable

Repression – forced forgetting. Phobias are explained by repressed memories.

Asceticism – deprivation of needs

Intellectualization – the separation of emotion from a memory

Displacement – redirecting an impulse, such as anger, to a target that is not the source of the anxiety.

Projection – placing your repressed desires in others

Altruistic surrender – when one tries to accomplish one's needs through someone else

Most of these anxieties are some form of repression of one's own needs.
Side note : Freud thought that people had life instincts which are the instincts in the id : food, drink, and reproduction. The only way to satiate all one's needs is to die, claimed Freud, and so everyone has a death instinct or a desire to die.


Anger is triggered by someone saying or doing something, but it is usually your problem. If you are angered it is probably from a problem you have, and it is just being brought up by someone else.

The threat of suicide is a call for help.

When you polarize something you are afraid to be wrong.
Polarization is when you put a charge on something; a charge is some kind of emotional reaction i.e. anger.

When someone asks you "how are you feeling?", good is not an answer. Good is not an emotion. When it is hard to or you cannot determine a feeling inside of you, you are numb.

I don't ever need to hate anyone or anything.

If you tell yourself "idiot", "I can't do it" you will create situations to fulfill these thoughts, and if you tell yourself something positive you will create situations to fulfill those.