The Inner Shield: How Mental Defenses Shape Your Reality
For many of our clients and friends, the last month has been a difficult one. There’s been stress in our local community with the recent SPS fire, and there have been more far-reaching challenges nationally and globally. For many families, this has certainly been a time of uncertainty, worry, and upheaval when the future for their family feels unclear.
Because of this climate, folks are activated in various “defenses” right now. Defenses are what psychodynamic therapists call the processes we all use to protect ourselves from uncomfortable or stressful events, actions, or thoughts. These are unconscious strategies our brain deploys to distance us from things like stress, guilt, shame, or other negative emotions.
You can imagine your subconscious as a stealthy bodyguard monitoring you as you go about your life. When it believes danger is nearby, it reacts with a defense mechanism to protect from psychological harm without you having to ask and or even notice. Because these defenses activate subconsciously, they can prevent us from accurately perceiving our reality.
Imagine that your stealthy bodyguard eliminates all threats before you even face them. Some challenges might be small things that you can manage on your own, or some might be true dangers that you should be aware of.
If the defenses take them out preemptively, we might not recognize the sources of our problems or see our circumstances clearly. The defense blocks us from understanding our world and the root causes of our experiences.
However, healthy defense mechanisms do important work. In life’s most difficult tragedies and trials, we need to deploy defenses to get enough emotional space to care for ourselves in basic ways.
Mature defenses allow us space to process overwhelming stress or negative emotions while encouraging us to return to them when we have more bandwidth. They can also help us to acknowledge hard feelings while channeling them into more socially acceptable behaviors or allow us to function.
Below are just a few of the common defenses we’re either experiencing ourselves or encountering in others as they navigate this stressful climate.
Acting Out: Easily identifiable in toddlers’ tantrums, acting out happens when we act impulsively to meet our immediate desires at expense of social decorum or our long-term goals. This still happens with us grown-ups too when we find ourselves responding to life stressors with alcohol, emotional outbursts, picking a fight with our partner, a stranger online - or other out of character behaviors that help us to “blow off some steam.”
Denial: We all are familiar with this defense during grief, but denial is a primitive defense used in many other arenas. It involves dismissing something that is readily apparent to other people. For example, you might have someone with failing eyesight who can’t admit they can no longer drive safely because doing so would threaten their independence.
Avoidance: When certain people, places, or circumstances bring up unpleasant feelings, we might avoid those triggers rather than address the underlying issue. Maybe there’s certain topics that people are forbidden to bring up with a family member. Perhaps current events are too distressing, so someone needs to disconnect from media. Avoidance can help us when we need a break, but long term it isn’t a solution to addressing whatever is upsetting us. Problems don’t go away just because we aren’t talking about them.
Projection: This one found its way into the common lexicon. A person projecting wants to distance themselves from what they find unacceptable in themselves. They do this by turning outward instead of inward. A common example is a cheating spouse who assumes their partner is unfaithful, but this can happen in less obvious ways. If we’re very insecure, we might project criticism out onto others for example. This defense prevents us from seeing ourselves and others accurately, so it is a roadblock in communication.
Splitting: This defense first appears in small children who, when overwhelmed with too much complexity, resort to black and white thinking. There are good guys and bad guys. You are best friends or nothing. They love you and then they hate you. This defense can pop up in adulthood too when we face a complicated threat. It can be individual—someone must be all good or all bad. It can apply to groups to make us feel a sense of safety and belonging—there’s us, and there’s them. Anyone who has spent much time debating American politics the last few years has run up against someone stuck behind this defense. This defense prevents us from seeing the complexity and nuances of both a situation and its solutions.
Identification: This defense involves taking on the thoughts and characteristics of someone in power because aligning with them makes us feel safer. Famously, this includes the concept of Stockholm Syndrome, but don’t think it’s not at work in more common scenarios. We see people adopting the phrasing of powerful social media influencers, celebrities, and politicians all the time. This is a big part of the type of radicalization that happens on YouTube or the type of people who have hero worship for a figure who is harmful to them. It can be someone with power due to our relationship with them (significant others, family, friends) or someone with power over our lives (bosses, politicians, or kidnapper as the case may be).
Displacement: When we are carrying a big emotional burden, but we don’t feel safe to address it, our brain starts looking for a vent. We experience this when we have a difficult day at work and then lose our temper with our kids. Neither the recipient of our misplaced emotions nor the originating situation benefit.
Intellectualization: This defense kicks in when we turn a situation that is upsetting or emotional into an intellectual exercise. We take our feelings out of it and try to rationally explain why things happen the way they did, but it doesn’t do anything to help process the emotional impacts. We distance ourselves from the feelings of ourselves or others to make ourselves feel better.
Compartmentalization: This defense involves separating aspects of our life to keep stress from one area from bleeding into another. People use this all the time with things like work/life boundaries or choosing not to discuss religion or politics at dinner. In deeply stressful times, we all need places to get things done, and compartmentalization can help with that if we are able to recognize what we are doing and choose if it is still serving us.
Humor: Laugh so you don’t cry. Humor can diffuse a situation enough to make it more manageable. It creates space for people to connect with us by laughing and relating on a less intense level. Of course, we want to move beyond humor eventually, but it can be a great way to connect when anything else is too intense.
We don’t want to fire our mental bodyguards; we want to train with them, to communicate with them, and to collaborate with them. We can let go of more primitive defenses that distort the world around us and cultivate ones that help us to function in the real world.
The defenses are a tricky thing to navigate both in ourselves and in people we interact with. By their nature, defenses are happening without our conscious thought (if we knew that we weren’t accurately interpreting our reality, they wouldn’t make us feel better).
Seeing the world as it really is, even when we don’t like the reality, is a crucial step in being able to change or improve it.
Sometimes, if we carefully and respectfully present someone with mature defenses with reality, they can get their defenses to stand down and accept reality. You can imagine this like someone else respectfully approaching our bodyguard to share information.
On the other hand, a person with heavy or immature defenses is relying on them to make reality tolerable. If we try to force them to confront reality, they feel threatened—not enlightened. They will double down and become more entrenched.
To use our bodyguard analogy, if we’re relying heavily on that protector and someone tries to tackle our bodyguard, we are going to feel even more threatened. We might even want to hire more. Anyone who has been in an emotionally charged argument has experienced this. And even trickier—if the topic is emotionally important to us, we might be dealing with our own distortions at the same time.
Untangling that knot is the work of therapy. As a third-party, a therapist is uniquely positioned to observe you and your reality. They collaborate with you to help strengthen you emotionally so that you feel stronger and more capable of protecting yourself. Gently you can work together to have your bodyguard stand down so you can make intentional choices that better serve you and your values and goals.
If we can recognize when we (or our friends, neighbors, or relatives) might be employing defenses, we can better respond. We can choose differently if we better understand what is happening.
