Defences play a very powerful role in our lives. Defences are first developed when we are children. They arise when as children we might have felt vulnerable and unable to effectively cope with our environment. What a child learns to do, to cope with these difficult emotions is to find ways to sooth and comfort themselves. It may take the form of talking to an imaginary person, sucking a thumb, singing to oneself, etc.
This lessens the discomfort or pain and enables the child to manage and negotiate their surroundings. This is how we lay the ground work for our individual styles of defending ourselves later in life, ways of coping.
As we become adults, if we don’t learn how to face or tackle our emotional difficulties more clearly and honestly, we resort to our earliest ways of coping. This may work for a while, but it invariably becomes ineffective over a period of time and the emotions no longer managed, start to seep and leak out, taking the form of destructive behaviours.
These may be addictions, extreme misplaced, unfiltered anger and various other harmful coping mechanisms. In the long term, these defences rob one of a satisfactory life.
Defence mechanisms are applied as adults when people want to distance themselves from having to face unpleasant thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
When adults are unable to learn of better ways of coping with stress or traumatic events in their lives, they often resort to primitive defences which reside in their unconscious minds.
These primitive defence mechanisms are things like ‘denial,’ which is simply a refusal to accept reality or fact. In other words, refusing to accept, acknowledge the existence of a painful event, thought or feeling. This is in the face of it being glaringly obvious.
For example a man’s wife or girlfriend may have been seen by many in compromising situations with other men and she has been observed to treat her man with contempt publicly. However the man, rather than admitting to the reality of his partner’s behaviour, he chooses to deny its existence and blames everyone for trying to defame and discredit her. This is because he is incapable of facing up to the painful emotions and feelings that the situation demands of him.
‘Regression’ is another form of denial. This is the reversion to an earlier stage of development in the face of unbearable thoughts or impulses. For example a teenage girl who has experienced fear from a physical attack, may become clingy and childlike soon after, exhibiting earlier childhood behaviours.
Another form of denial may take the shape of ‘acting out,’ which is performing an extreme behaviour in order to express thoughts and feelings the person is unable to otherwise express. When a person acts out, it can offer them some release and they may feel calmer.
For example, if a person feels provoked, hurt or angered, instead of expressing their painful emotion verbally, they may respond by going out drinking for several days or by becoming promiscuous as a way of dealing with the difficult feelings. Join me next week Sunday for more forms of expressions that denial can take.
