The mind is a powerful thing. It works hard to help you face challenges and protect yourself from adverse experiences. But the mind is not flawless, and sometimes, the way you view and react to situations does more harm than good.
Defense mechanisms refer to the subconscious reactions your mind has to stress, anxiety, threats, and other challenges. These reactions influence your thoughts, words, and actions, but that does not mean you are always aware of what they are and how they affect your life. Learn more about the psychology of defense mechanisms and how they might appear in your life with this guide.
Defining Defense Mechanisms
Defense mechanisms are, at their core, survival behaviors formed in childhood years based on experiences with primary and secondary caregivers that shape individual’s primitive reactions to cope with emotional adversities. They are your brain’s attempt to cope with adverse experiences and navigate stressful situations. However, many defense mechanisms cloud your perception and make it difficult to view a situation with objective clarity. Defense mechanisms can block your awareness in a primitive attempt to protect you from experiencing cognitive dissonance. While this might seem beneficial in the moment, it can make it harder to process difficult situations in the long run and in future adult relationships or intimate encounters with romantic partners.
The Defense Mechanisms Rating Scale (DMRS) presents seven levels of defense mechanisms, ranging from lower adaptiveness to higher adaptiveness. Understanding the defense mechanisms associated with these levels helps Licensed Clinical Psychologists and their patients identify defensive behaviors and use them to their advantage to promote adaptive coping processes.
Action Defenses
The first level of the DMRS revolves around action defenses, which tend to be the least adaptive form of defense mechanisms. Action defenses stem from two factors: the belief that the source of your stress is external and the feeling that your stress is so intolerable that you must act. This can lead to you trying to manipulate or attack the supposed external source of your stress. It can also lead to impulsive actions and decisions as an attempt to relieve tension or avoid facing your stress.
Acting out, whether aggressively or passive aggressively, is an action defense. Another common action defense mechanism is help-rejecting complaining, where you complain about your situation as a way to seek help while simultaneously rejecting any support or advice you receive.
Major Image-Distorting Defenses
Major image-distorting defense mechanisms involve extreme and unnuanced patterns of thinking. This simplifies your perception of situations, things, and people—including yourself—until you see things as either entirely positive or entirely negative.
Examples of major image-distorting defenses include the splitting of self-image and the splitting of other’s images—or viewing yourself or others as either good and powerful or bad and powerless. Projective identification is also a major image-distorting defense. This involves subconsciously projecting unwanted traits onto other people who then internalize those qualities. Projective identification also contributes to the split, unnuanced patterns of thinking of other major image-distorting defenses.
Disavowal Defenses
Disavowal defenses stem from a refusal to acknowledge your role in your own problems and sources of stress. These defense mechanisms revolve around denying or redirecting blame to avoid having to address the source of stress directly. This denial can obscure your view of reality and put you at odds with others involved in the situation.
Denial is a common disavowal defense mechanism—and one of the most well-known defense mechanisms overall. Other disavowal defenses include rationalization, which is when someone tries to justify their actions rather than acknowledging their wrongdoings, and projection.
Minor Image-Distorting Defenses
Like major image-distorting defenses, minor image-distorting defense mechanisms involve rejecting nuanced reality in favor of simplified perceptions of situations and people. These patterns of thinking are less severe than those of major image-distorting defenses, but they still make it difficult to view a stressful situation clearly.
Some of the most common minor image-distorting defense mechanisms include the idealization and devaluation of your self-image and other’s images. These distort your view of yourself and others, causing you to see people as entirely good or entirely bad.
Neurotic Defenses
The goal of neurotic defenses is to prevent complete awareness of a source of stress or conflict. Neurotic defense mechanisms do not necessarily keep you from experiencing negative thoughts and emotions. Instead, they numb or redirect those feelings to prevent you from having to face the true source of your problems. There are two subclasses of neurotic defenses: hysterical defenses and other neurotic defenses.
Hysterical Defenses
Hysterical defense mechanisms include repression and dissociation. Repression is the subconscious blocking of unpleasant emotions and memories so that you do not have to think about or remember them. Dissociation, on the other hand, is a numb mental state that causes your mind to shut down in an attempt to avoid facing stress, conflict, or traumatic situations.
Other Neurotic Defenses
Other neurotic defense mechanisms include displacement and reaction formation. Displacement involves redirecting your feelings from one situation to another. For example, if you are experiencing conflict in your relationship, a displacement defense mechanism might cause you to lash out at work instead of addressing the source of the problem.
Reaction formation also involves manipulating your reaction to avoid dealing with an issue. However, reaction formation is the act of replacing your initial mental and emotional reaction with opposite feelings or behaviors. For example, someone who is grieving might act energetic and put together instead of letting themselves feel devastated by the loss.
Obsessional Defenses
Obsessional defense mechanisms attempt to separate the emotional component of a negative situation so that you can focus on the problem without experiencing fear, grief, anxiety, or other painful feelings. Intellectualization, isolation of affect, and undoing are the three obsessional defense mechanisms.
Intellectualization is when you prioritize the intellectual facts of a situation over the emotional aspects of it. For example, someone who is grieving might talk about death in a very factual way rather than addressing the complicated emotional aspect of grief. Intellectualization is a very analytical, pragmatic, and sometimes cold way of viewing negative experiences.
Isolation of affect similarly divorces the emotions of a situation from the facts of it. This defense mechanism involves discussing a situation through facts alone without acknowledging or discussing your feelings on the situation. For example, that same grieving person from our example above might discuss the hard facts about the death of their loved one. However, they will refuse to talk about how they feel and how the death affects them.
High-Adaptive Defenses
The seventh level of the DMRS includes defense mechanisms that offer the most effective and healthy way to handle stress, conflict, and other negative experiences. These defense mechanisms help you navigate hard situations without distorting reality or denying certain thoughts and emotions. High-adaptive defense mechanisms include:
- Affiliation
- Altruism
- Anticipation
- Humor
- Self-Assertion
- Self-Observation
- Sublimination
- Suppression
- Isolation of Affects
- Undoing
- Repression
- Dissociation
- Reaction Formation
- Displacement
- Idealization of Self-Image
- Idealization of Other’s Image
- Devaluation of Self-Image
- Devaluation of Other’s Images
- Omnipotence
- Denial
- Rationalization
- Projection
- Autistic Fantasy
- Splitting of Self-Image
- Splitting of Other’s Image
- Projective Identification Passive Aggression
- Help-Rejecting Complaining
- Acting Out
- Regression
- Intellectualization
- Compartmentalization
- Conversion
- Identification
- Compensation
- Avoidance
- Repression
- Aim Inhibition
These types of defenses revolve around managing negative thoughts, channeling energy into positive expressions of those thoughts and feelings, acknowledging your own limitations, and turning to external help when necessary.
A Licensed Clinical Psychologist understands the psychology of defense mechanisms and will help you develop more adaptive ways of dealing with stress, conflict, and other challenges. If you are looking for an experienced Therapist in Los Angeles, Irvine, Beverly Hills, Newport Beach, Bel Air, Century City, Brentwood, Westwood, Huntington Beach, Mission Viejo, Aliso Viejo, and the surrounding areas, contact Blair Wellness Group to see how our evidence-based treatment plans can help you.
