TRANSCRIPT
I would like to analyze the subject of psychological defense mechanisms. I first heard of this concept, had it introduced to me back in intro to psychology some 28, 30 years ago. I remember when the professor talked about it, and when I read about it in our psychology textbook, I couldn’t make sense of what this was about. I thought about it a lot over time. While it was maybe eight years after I took that class that I ended up becoming a therapist myself, I thought about it a lot over the last 10 or so years since I quit being a therapist. I realized actually they’re not that complicated. It’s actually very, very simple. So that’s what I’d like to talk about—how simple they are, and what they really are, and what I wished my first psychology professor, when I was 19 or 20 years old, would have said to me, said to the whole class, that would have helped me really get a grasp on what they are.
Well, here is what I have found. Defense mechanisms, at basic, are a very simple thing. What are they defending against? Well, defense mechanisms are a defense against feeling the feelings related to the traumas that we went through. Really bad stuff happened to everyone. People often don’t relate to children so well, so they don’t see what happened to children when they were young. Even if they’re witnessing it, parents often don’t relate to their children’s feelings. Parents lack empathy, so they don’t know what their children are going through. But children go through all sorts of overwhelming things in their childhood, often in relation to their parents.
What happens is when children go through these things, when they go through bad things, often they’re not allowed to feel their feelings. To survive in their family system, they have to push down their feelings. They have to make their feelings go away because if they felt their feelings, their parents would reject them even more. Well, what happens as a result of that is they have to find ways to get rid of their feelings. They have to defend against their feelings. They have to live their life without having those post-traumatic feelings. They can’t be their full, honest, spontaneous self. They have to defend against their rage. They have to defend against their sadness. They have to defend against their anguish, their feelings of overwhelming upset, unhappiness, feelings of betrayal, feeling like they just want to cry all the time. All these feelings so often are simply not allowed. So they have all these different mechanisms by which they can defend against their feelings, and those mechanisms by which they defend against their feelings are known as defense mechanisms.
What’s interesting is often, even though I’m very critical of the psychology field, when I look at the defense mechanisms that are the most popularly known ones, I’ll try to talk about some of them in more detail. What I see is those defense mechanisms often really do cover the ways by which children—children who grow up into adults who still use these defense mechanisms—keep their feelings away, keep their feelings buried and at bay.
Well, the primary defense mechanism that people use—children use, and adults continue to use—is dissociation. Very simple defense mechanism: take their feelings and split it off, cut it off, put it in the unconscious. Totally not feel it. It is gone. It’s out of there. They are dissociated, disassociated from their feelings. That is a defense against feeling their feelings. Very closely related to this is denial. You can still have the memory, perhaps, of what happened, or maybe you even deny that something happened entirely. But you deny your feelings. Maybe they’re still there. Maybe you even feel them to a degree, but on a conscious level, you deny that this is how you feel. You deny your behavior. A lot of times, the behavior is a replication of what you went through, so your behavior is still expressing the traumas that you’ve felt. That’s part of what people do when they go through bad things. They continue to repeat it, even in their dreams sometimes, but certainly in their interactions with other people, especially people over whom they wield power. They replicate their traumas.
We can also project our feelings onto someone else. We can feel our feelings through them. “Oh, that person is so full of rage! Oh, that person is so nasty! Oh, that person is so manipulative! That person is so cruel!” Really, it’s how we’re feeling. We’re just split off from it. So I think still it comes back to that fundamental defense mechanism of dissociation, and a lot of these other defense mechanisms come after that. So if I dissociate certain of my feelings, and then I, oh, I see it in someone else—even though it may not be there at all—I project my feelings. It’s like that other person becomes the screen of my unconscious. They are playing out in my mind the movie of my past denied and dissociated history.
Now, what I’ve seen that’s interesting is when people tend to be more—I’m going to use a dangerous word—mentally healthy, psychologically mature and sophisticated, sane one might say. What they tend to do when they use the defense mechanism of projection is they project their feelings onto other people. They project their denied, dissociated, post-traumatic feelings onto other people who actually have some of those feelings. So they find someone who is full of rage, let’s say, or someone who is manipulative, and they take their own rageful, manipulative feelings and they put it on that person. So basically what it is, is they’re really still projecting their feelings, but they’re projecting it onto a person who actually is kind of that way. So it makes it a lot harder for that person to say, “No, you’re projecting your feelings onto me. I don’t feel this way,” because they’re projecting it onto someone who already is like that.
Then there’s people who are less mentally healthy, more troubled, more dissociated, more out of touch with reality. What I’ve seen sometimes in those folks is they tend to project their—because they do a lot of projection also, just like most people do—they project their unresolved, buried, split-off, denied feelings onto people who may actually not have those feelings at all. For instance, I think of some people I’ve known. Like, it happened in therapy. Actually, it happened all the time in therapy. Being the recipient of projections is part of being a therapist and helping someone often very, very slowly sort that out. Well, often people would project things onto me. “You’re full of rage, Daniel!” And I’d be like, “Actually, not in the way you’re talking about. Yeah, I have my areas of rage,” but I would say they’re projecting feelings that don’t match at all. Or I see it on other people. Sometimes they’ll project, “Oh, that person is so manipulative,” and I’ll look at the person and I’ll say, “You know, that other person is not actually that manipulative.” I’ve seen this in a bigger sense also. People say, “That person is such a narcissist! They’re such—and that person’s such a narcissist!” But often they’re projecting their own narcissism, which they’re denying, onto someone else. Well, sometimes they’re projecting it onto people who really are narcissists. Sometimes they’re projecting it onto people who really aren’t narcissists. So that’s interesting.
Another defense mechanism is introjection. I remember I heard about that, oh, some 20, 30 years ago. I’m like, “What the hell is that?” I remember the professor saying, “Introjection is the opposite of projection. Projection, blah, blah, blah, outside. Intro!” And I was like, these are words that were just like gobbledygook. This was real psychobabble to me. What I eventually figured out with what is introjection? Oh, we feel all these terrible feelings from our childhood, from the traumas. We’re being abused by this outside person or outside people. Well, this is what underlies Stockholm syndrome. It’s identifying—and this is another defense mechanism—identification with the aggressor. Basically, the exact same thing as introjection. What you do is you take the personality, you take the point of view, you take the feelings of the person who is traumatizing you. You internalize it. You introject it into yourself, and essentially your personality becomes them. You identify more with them. You feel them. You become them. You look at the world through their eyes. But inside of you, when people say, “Oh, you are your own worst enemy,” introjection is becoming your worst enemy. You literally, on a psychological level, become your worst enemy. You take whole parts of them and you bring it into yourself, and you identify with them.
You become them, and the real you, the true you, the true self of you, that’s being harmed and attacked by them, gets buried, split off, dissociated. To feel more comfortable in a disturbed family system, forgotten. And instead, you feel their feelings, and it’s safer, it’s protection. The more you identify with the person who is harming you, the more you become on their side. You become their ally against yourself. You don’t threaten them as much. You become comfortable to them, and then your life becomes easier. You survive your childhood, and they don’t keep on crushing you. Instead, you keep on crushing yourself. And so many people go through lives in an introjected manner. They go through lives attacking themselves, abusing themselves in all sorts of different ways, acting out what happened to them once on themselves, and then actually replicating it on other people. Then there’s also this defense mechanism called sublimation that artists do. They take their unresolved feelings and they convert it into art. They convert it into something of higher beauty, but really it’s just a metaphorical expression of their unresolved feelings that they cannot consciously feel. So that sublimation is a defense mechanism. Well, that kind of makes sense to me. I’ve certainly seen people do that. I see no lack of art that just seems to be a metaphorical expression of someone’s unresolved trauma. But then I’ve heard some people, some fancy researchers, psychologists, therapists, who across the boards say that all art is sublimation. Well, that I don’t agree with. I consider this to be my art right now. Is this just a sublimation? Am I taking my unresolved feelings and just playing them out through a YouTube video? Are my songs, is the music I play? I see people who are painters who do beautiful paintings. Is that just sublimating their unconscious unresolved dissociated split off feelings? And I would say no, because what I’ve seen is when people really connect with their true self, they stop defending against what happened to them. They stop defending against their denied, hated, buried feelings, and they start to reconnect with their shadow side, their dissociated, split off, hurt, wounded side. They grieve it, and they make sense of it. What happens then is their conscious mind regains a channel down to their true honest core of a self. And when the true self can exist in an open manner with the personality of the person, what comes out is real, true, uninhibited, unfiltered, non-metaphorical creativity, truth, inspiration, light, even real enlightenment, if you want to call it that. Though I think a lot of what’s called spiritual enlightenment, a lot of people out there who are considered more enlightened are actually using a lot of defense mechanisms. Because I think there can be pretty false enlightenment, very grandiose enlightenment, where the person really isn’t connected to their shadow side, their traumatized side. And instead, actually, they are just sublimating a lot of their feelings or converting them into, in a way, into sort of a grandiose spiritual vision. Well, I know I’m not covering all the defense mechanisms. There’s lots more, and I see sometimes lists and lists of endless numbers of defense mechanisms. But in the end, I think this, to the best of my ability right now at this point in my life, explains in a simpler way this subject that so long ago, frankly, made no sense to me whatsoever.