First defined in detail by Anna Freud, Dr Freud’s daughter, in her book The Ego and The Mechanisms of Defense, Defense Mechanisms are, more often than not, the way in which we protect ourselves from the anxiety caused by acknowledging our weaknesses.
This self-deception has become commonplace in our day-to-day relating and is the cause of much strife and fallout, as the use of defense mechanisms scuttle our ability to communicate effectively.
A survey, involving 100 mental health professionals, reports communication difficulty as one of the main reasons why 65% of marriages end in divorce. Furthermore, John Gottman, a professor emeritus from the University of Washington, who’s conducted research on couple behavior for 40 years, cites defensive behavior as one of the four main communication issues in a relationship.
Let’s take a look at the nine most common defense mechanisms:
1. Denial:
This is an essential aspect to defensive behavior and, therefore, will be found as underlying many of the other examples as well. Denial is used to protect your self-esteem from acknowledging a behavior you see to be negative.
It is most commonly used to negate addictive behaviors, immoral behaviors or behaviors which, when exposed, make you vulnerable to others.
“I’m just a social smoker” is an example of denial.
2. Repression:
This involves bottling up negative feelings or memories in an attempt to avoid dealing with them. This will only result in greater difficulty later on when they are inevitably released, it will also result in a lot more collateral damage.
3. Regression:
This involves returning to a child-like state by abandoning coping strategies and reverting to patterns used in early development. In relationships this state is often that of psychological/emotional dependency. It may also involve throwing temper tantrums or refusing to speak to the person that you are angry or upset with. This makes the adult communication required difficult to achieve as one is too caught up in their momentary maturity lapse.
4. Displacement:
This is the transfer of your feelings of anger or irritation away from their true focus onto someone/something that is less likely to cause you further difficulty. For example: You and your boss have an altercation at work. You know that your boss is in a position of authority and that you cannot express your anger without eliciting large consequences. You suppress your anger. Then, when you get home, you express this irritation/anger at things your family do, even the insignificant things that you would usually let go. Thus you have displaced these emotions. This causes unnecessary conflict in the home environment.
5) Projection:
According to Encyclopedia Britannica;
“Projection is a form of defense in which unwanted feelings are displaced onto another person, where they then appear as a threat from the external world. A common form of projection occurs when an individual, threatened by his own angry feelings, accuses another of harboring hostile thoughts.”
For example: Let’s say that you are insecure about your body. You buy a new pair of jeans that you are worried are a bit too tight. You decide to wear them to a family function. Because you are already insecure about your body, and are now more acutely self conscious because of the jeans, when you greet your family members and they look at you, you will automatically interpret their looks as critical of your appearance. Even when their looks are everyday-ordinary and they haven’t even registered that your jeans are tight.
This may cause you to become upset with them or even hostile despite the fact that no criticism has actually been made. You are therefore “projecting” your insecurities onto others and alienating them in the process.
6. Reaction Formation:
This is essentially the outward expression of the opposite behavior to what you are feeling inwardly. For example: You might be a big fan of reading Mills and Boon in order to wind down and relax on weekends. However, you are aware that society sees Mills and Boon as low level literature and many of your friends have expressed how distasteful they believe reading it to be. Therefore, when anyone brings up the topic of Mills and Boon, or poorly written literature, you go out of your way to ridicule and condemn it, you become it’s greatest aggressor, whilst secretly still reading it in your free time.
7. Intellectualisation:
This involves thinking away an emotion or reaction that you do not enjoy experiencing, rather than dealing with it directly. For example: Someone diagnosed with a terminal illness may focus all their attention on learning about the disease rather than dealing with how they feel about death.
8. Rationalization:
This is the process of explaining an unacceptable behavior or feeling in a rational manner in order to avoid the real reasons for the behavior. For example: if someone’s love interest rejects them they may avoid negative feelings by telling themselves the reasons why it would never have worked between them and that person.
9. Sublimation:
This is similar to intellectualisation, however, where as the former occurs over a short period of time, sublimation occurs over an extended period of time. It involves a person converting his or her conflicted emotions into constructive outlets.
For example: someone with great anger taking up kickboxing. While kick boxing in itself is not an issue and certainly preferable to engaging in violent behavior, the problem remains that the constructive outlet is being used as a diversion. It is being performed instead of the individual dealing with and moving past how they feel. As such the negative state of mind does not get resolved.