Fabricated personalities : The ego's protection shield

Years after our birth, we start accumulating setbacks , deceptions, humiliations and emotional wounds.

We develop as a result forts and varied defense mechanisms to protect ourselves, or to help us avoid situations where we would feel weak and uncomfortable.
These situations are far from being life-threatening, they are more ego-threatening, they invoke in us feelings of shame, degradation, insignificance or extreme uneasiness.
To alleviate our angst and pain, we slide into harsher, less forgiving and fabricated personalities and social masks. 

We hope, that using these stratagems, we would intimidate others and keep them from causing us additional emotional damage.

With time these layers become embedded into psyche, only deserting us situations of extreme emotional weight, where our minds sinks back into its basic constitution, circumventing those conscious habits and behaviours. 
We see these personalities around us, with taut faces, moving with rapid, uncertain steps, squinting at at the floor, as a stern, dejected countenance plagues their general disposition.

To these intimidated and disturbed souls, everyone and everything is a potential threat.

A substantial portion of the energy available to them gets depleted in trying to fend off any assault, mostly imagined, on their frail ego.