The defense mechanisms that are holding you back in life and love
Does everything good in your life seem to fall apart? Take down some of your defenses.
by: E.B. Johnson
What defense mechanisms do you use in your everyday life? Perhaps you use them to protect yourself from a relationship that’s heading downhill. Or you use them to eject yourself from a toxic work encounter. However your defense mechanisms manifest, they can get the best of us if we don’t take the initiative to manage and control them. That ancient ancestor brain is still at work within us, seeking to protect us. It’s up to us to mindfully bring it — and ourselves — into the modern age.
The defense mechanisms that are holding you back.
There are dozens of defense mechanisms we can employ to protect ourselves from everything, including bad relationships and disappointing work cultures. While some are as subtle as projection, some like denial are far more overt. In order to build happy lives, though, we can’t allow our defense mechanisms to sabotage us or slow us down. We have to take charge and understand how they impact us.
Endless projection
Projection is one of the most common defense mechanisms, and it’s commonly used by those with low self-esteem or insecurities of their own. When we project onto someone, we take something we’re concerned about and pretend that it is someone else’s problem. It’s easier than confronting our own issues and gives us justification in lashing out at others (rather than turning that ire inside).
Toxic redirection
Sublimation is a coping mechanism that can be extraordinarily powerful when used within a cohesive plan. On its own, though, it can cause some avoidance problems. This strategy involves redirecting intense emotion or energy into positive outlets. Rather than becoming overwhelmed, you ease off the intense emotion by doing something fun or something or something productive. Doing this without also taking time to confront your problems head on, though, can lead to major messes you have to clean up later.
Into compartments
When someone engages in the defense of compartmentalizing, they separate their life into separate sectors or “categories” which they keep fenced off and separate. At first, this seems like a good idea, but the more that things are compartmentalized, the less energy and focus we have to give each fenced-away thing. While there’s certainly something to be said for healthy barriers, compartmentalization can take us too far in the opposite direction.
Insistent denial
Denial is a particularly nasty coping mechanism, and it’s particularly common (and subtle) one too. To deny something is to blank it from your mind or pretend it didn’t happen. Instead of fessing up to infidelity and working to put things right, you turn your back on the behavior altogether and pretend as though nothing is wrong. This doesn’t keep the stress from mounting up, though, or the increased challenges that will continue to arise.
Dissolving backward
Someone who goes through regression is often someone who is struggling to deal with an array of mental, physical, or emotional hardships. They often don’t develop the mental or emotional resilience skills that are needed to navigate life’s challenges, so they regress whenever they’re put in a hard position; going back to an earlier stage in development that feels more “comfortable” or easier for them the handle. The major problem, though, is that this makes things worse and doesn’t resolve our problems.
Conscious reaction
One of the truly strange coping mechanisms we employ on a social level is that conscious reaction. This occurs when you consciously force yourself to react in a way that is contrary to your thoughts or feelings. For example, rather than getting upset or loud with your partner — maybe you get sickeningly sweet in order to avoid confrontation. It’s a lot of hard work for you, but it serves a higher purpose that you believe to be the right one…in the moment.
Rationalizing the bad
While rationalization can be one of the most powerful tools we possess as humans, it can also get us into a fair bit of trouble. It is possible to over-rationalize things, especially as a defense mechanism. Rather than admit honestly to the reality of where you are in the moment (or a relationship, or a career) you look for any reason to explain away your right to emotion, and your right to authentic needs and happiness.
Displacing emotions
Have you ever noticed yourself pointing displaced emotions toward someone who did nothing wrong? Maybe you let yourself explode all over a close personal family member, or you rush to your partner with a major blowup that has nothing to do with them. This is called displacement, and it occurs when we cast our emotions onto someone else, and then pretend as though that person is at fault. You direct strong emotions toward a person or object that doesn’t feel like it’s dangerous to your health and sanity.
Repressing emotions
How often do you engage in the act of repression? It’s understandable, human emotions are complex and they can be hard too. Burying negative thoughts away and pretending they don’t exist is not the way to move past painful or uncomfortable situations, though. In order to put our off-setting emotions to the side, we must confront them and work our way through them honestly with those involved.
How to become the master of your defense mechanisms.
Are you tired of your defense mechanisms undermining your happiness? You can step up to the plate for yourself and take charge, but it’s going to take some concentrated action. Figure out where you’re at, then weigh out the pros and cons. Figure out how these defense mechanisms are tearing you down and you can figure out how to climb out of the hole that you’ve dug.
1. Do a self-assessment
If someone asked you to write down your top 3 toxic defense mechanisms — what would they be? Taking more than a few seconds indicates a need to take it back to the drawing board to think things through. Until we know exactly what our issues are, there’s little chance we can effectively fix them. In order to get yourself back to peace, you need to complete a brutally honest self-assessment.
Figure out where you’re at and what defense mechanisms you’re using. Pinpoint your reactions, the emotions behind those reactions, and the triggers that set off those emotions. Everything is connected. In order to get to the root of all your issues, you’re going to have to follow the path backward and get back to a clear vantage point.
Question how you interact with others. Question who you are in times of hardship and who you are in times of elation or success. When you’re feeling insecure, do you lash out? When you’re feeling as though something is going “too well” do you self-sabotage and run away before you can be hurt by others? Beat your toxic self-defense tendencies by starting with some honesty.
2. Find out if it’s worthwhile
Once you know the lay of the land with your defense mechanisms, you can honestly weigh out how they positively and negatively affect you. Not all defense mechanisms are created equal. Some of them bring along really nasty results, while others can actually bring us closer together when managed delicately. Until you honestly analyze the feedback, you’re getting from your behavior, though, you’ll never know.
Be honest about your defense mechanisms and be honest about how you’re using them (or overusing them). If they are disrupting your happiness or your life, then you need to admit it to yourself and begin thinking of ways to settle and resolve them once and for all.
Don’t flinch away from the uncomfortable truths. Does your tendency to self-sabotage push away your friends, or detonate your most intimate relationships? When you deny your negative emotions, do you just make yourself feel worse in the long run? Question every inch of who you are and then think about who you want to be. If you discover more good than bad, then it’s time to make some changes.
3. Tap into emotional awareness
Emotional awareness is such a powerful thing, and it can unlock a lot of doors for us in terms of self, relationships, and even our careers. When you become aware of your own emotions and how they affect you, you often also end up with a better understanding of those same emotions in others. This — in turn — helps you to related to them, and it helps you to see things from their point of view (as well as your own).
Don’t just focus on beating your defense mechanisms into the ground. Focus instead of being as mentally strong as possible, so that you are capable of managing and navigating challenges whenever they appear. Rebuild your self-confidence and be present in your body and your mind. Take notice of your emotions as they occur.
Listen to what they tell you and the paths they guide you toward. Are your emotions bringing you closer to a greater good? Or are they archaic shadows of a past you’re not ready to let go of yet? The more emotionally aware we become, the more empowered we are to cut ties with the past and any relics that are eating away at our present life. Don’t run from your feelings if you want to control your defense mechanisms. Embrace them.
4. Allow yourself to let go
More often than not, our defense mechanisms are leftover pieces of the past; lessons left unlearned that manifest as violent overreactions to emotionally challenging situations. Each time we encounter a situation that reminds us of a painful instance in our past, we can find ourselves reverting and regressing into old habits like putting up walls or lashing out. In order to let go of our defense mechanisms for good, we often have to cut ties with our past for good too.
Spend some time breaking down your defense mechanisms and make sure you pull back the cover to see where the roots are lurking. Does your tendency to deny or over-rationalize come from a childhood in which these behaviors were necessary in order to survive emotionally? There’s often a much deeper reason that we choose to run from struggle than simple “discomfort”.
Let go of those past hurts and know that you no longer have to hold on to them to be safe. Those days are gone. You can choose right now who you want to be, and you can decide what type of life you want to build for yourself. You can build happier, healthier opportunities without selling yourself short or cutting yourself off with sabotage. Reach out to a mental health professional if you’re struggling. Let them guide you where you need to go.
5. Figure out who you are
Defense mechanisms are especially toxic because they can get in the way of who we are really meant to be. Your defense mechanisms are a bit like an autopilot or alarm system. Taking over when we’re not emotionally aware enough, or emotionally strong enough — these mechanisms handle our battles for us. Do you want to be controlled by your hard-wired responses — no matter how toxic they may be? Or do you want to become powerful enough to embrace who you want to be?
Decide right now, in this moment, who you want to be. Until you take responsibility for cultivating this person, all your little mechanisms will continue to out themselves and take over. Your weak spots are triggers which bring your worst defenses to life. Be conscious of that, but don’t let it become a barrier between you and the person you want to become.
Are you tired of being the person who blows up? The person who storms off, or who denies their feelings altogether? Then you need to become a stronger, more capable version of yourself. If that’s your aim, you have to start being more authentic and taking that action which is authentically aligned to your values, morals, desires, and needs. When we are confident in who we are and what we’re doing, there’s rarely a need to go on the defensive.
Putting it all together…
As humans, we have a number of defense and coping mechanisms which are meant to protect us from the dangers of the world. When these mechanisms are allowed to run unchecked, though, combined with our ingrained insecurities and doubts — we can find ourselves waterlogged in toxic relationships and poor choices. In order to get back on track, we have to increase our emotional awareness and understand how our defense mechanisms impact us.
Take a full inventory of your defense mechanisms, and all the ways in which you allow your subconscious to protect you or control your life. How are your relationships impacted? Your health? Your career? Once you pinpoint your mechanisms, you can figure out the pros and cons and what you want to work on. Increase your emotional awareness and learn how to be more mindful and present in your feelings and who you are as a person. The greater our emotional awareness, the more in-tune we become with life and other people. Cut ties with the past for good and any of the experiences which encourage negative insecurities and emotions. You are capable and you are deserving. Embrace who you want to be and become that person by taking charge of your life and your feelings.
- Lindblom, J., Punamäki, R., Flykt, M., Vänskä, M., Nummi, T., & Sinkkonen, J. et al. (2016). Early Family Relationships Predict Children’s Emotion Regulation and Defense Mechanisms. SAGE Open, 6(4), 215824401668139. doi: 10.1177/2158244016681393