Defense mechanisms are crucial to good mental health - but not in the way you think.
Once upon a time, there was no such thing as defense mechanisms as a concept. We’re so used to them now that it’s hard to think of psychology without them, but they were gradually discovered over time, mostly due to the work of Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna. Freud’s theory of human psychology was conceptualized as the work of two conflicting systems: wishes for gratification of wants and needs, and the defenses or frustrations that prevented them.
Defensive blocking is innate to cognition.
We now know that defense mechanisms, or nonconscious information processing, work to protect a fragile or underdeveloped ego against either feeling something that the individual doesn’t want to feel, knowing something the individual doesn’t want to know, or experiencing something the individual doesn’t want to experience. What is lesser known is how central primitive defense mechanisms are to personality disorders and disorders of the self.
Defense mechanisms privilege one area of experience over another, necessitating distortions in perception in understanding. A person who is privileging their cognitive awareness of a situation is diminishing their emotional experience of it, and vice versa. These kinds of biases result in the exclusion of relevant information – if you are thinking too logically about observable events, you are minimizing the impact and influence of the emotional components. If you prioritize the way something makes you feel over what it actually was or what actually happened, you will misconstrue and misinterpret a person’s behavior and intentions. Both sides must be included in an integrated, multidimensional fashion in order to accurately interpret what happened and why.
At the top of this chart are mature, adaptive defenses that integrate aspects of both cognitive and affective experience in order to find solutions that satisfy both. Things like reaching out to others for help, anticipating future events and how we will feel about them, and sublimating negative affect into positive creative output require both sides of the brain to be online simultaneously. Mature, adaptive defenses are the most effective way of coping because they ultimately result in acceptance. When you cope in a way that allows you to have full awareness of both what happened and how it makes you feel, you reach greater, longer lasting resolutions to your problems. You can move on. (What’s the difference between suppression, repression, and splitting?)
At the neurotic level, a person is using cognitive defenses in attempts to minimize, push off, or eliminate troublesome and negative affect. Obsessively intellectualizing and attempting to mentally undo, repress, isolate, or dissociate from emotions are all ways of trying to use cognitive defenses to prevent the experience of unwanted affect. This is the difference between cognitive experience and affective experience – using cognitive defenses allows the individual to have awareness of the issue without allowing themselves to feel it emotionally. If you can’t feel how you are hurting or how you are hurting others, you are limiting the effectiveness of your coping and your ability to learn from experience, dooming yourself to repeat the problem over and over again. (What’s the difference between intellectualizing and rationalizing?)
The last level, immature defenses, are some of the most primitive ways of functioning. All immature defenses distort reality in either a minor or major way, because the individual is discharging emotions without having awareness that they are there. This is very damaging to continued growth of the cognitive brain and the ability to integrate feeling with knowing. By discharging emotions before even having awareness that they are there, a person is not only in denial about who he is and what he feels, but he is not learning what those emotions even are, in himself or in others. The severity with which a person uses these defenses would allow him to create a reality in which he always wins and you always lose – he simply does not have to feel anything he doesn’t want to feel, or know anything he doesn’t want to know. (Why is passive-aggression so much more harmful than people know?)
People with healthy, mature personalities and strong egos tend to be less defensive because they don’t need to rely on defensive distortions to face and accept their problems. A strong ego has a sense of self that is made out of brick walls, naturally supporting a strong sense of self-worth and greater protection against feelings of shame. Defense mechanisms are like the straw house that gets instead, a barrier that can only withstand so much mental and emotional overwhelm before it breaks down. A mature ego builds a stronger core sense of self, whereas the individual who must rely on defensive distortions keeps the ego fragile and enfeebled, constantly vulnerable external stressors and pressures.
If you want to know where your defensive levels are functioning, give us a call today!
