A great deal of emphasis is laid down towards the development of a child.  And there is a very good reason for it. A child is innocent and is ready to be molded into the person we empower them to be.  Every individual’s childhood plays a significant role into the person they become as adults. They say no childhood is perfect, everybody has scars!

I want us to understand what went wrong in our childhood and help us correct the course of our lives.   First, we need to understand and accept that there is no right or wrong here. As a child we are dependent on our parents to help us: feed, bathe, clothe and provide a loving home as shelter.  But the people that were entrusted with our precious Life’s were humans after all, flawed by their own misdoings. They did the best they could with what they had to offer. But sometimes they failed, and that’s okay. Common, there isn’t like a school where people go to, in order to learn parenting skills. Ask yourself how you feel about parenting. I’m sure you’ll say something like ” I want to be a better parent, I want my child to have what I didn’t have”, almost every person I interact with gives me a similar answer. Don’t you think your parent’s may have felt the same and truly did their best. Hence the conclusion, every individual does their best according to their understanding. As a child, we were helpless, hence learned to adapt to our environments to fulfill the basic need of survival. But today we’re not helpless; we can live independently, capable of surviving on our own.  We owe it to ourselves to live a fulfilled and Happy Life.  

What if I told you there’s more to you than meets the eye?  What if I told you there’s so much untapped potential in you? What if you could live a life you envision? All that you desire can be yours. All we need is to understand and become aware of our repeating patterns.  Once we do that, we will be able to understand why we sometimes feel: “We’re not good enough”, “Why we feel unaccomplished in our careers”.  “Why we feel like a failure in a romantic relationship”, “Why we feel so detached from our family despite the attachment”. I’m sure we are all aware we have memories stored in our conscious mind, subconscious mind and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind includes such things as the sensations, perceptions, memories, feeling, and fantasies inside of our current awareness. Our subconscious mind has something called a homeostatic impulse, which regulates functions like body temperature, heartbeat and breathing. (Brian Tracy explained it like this: “Through your autonomic nervous system, [your homeostatic impulse] maintains a balance among the hundreds of chemicals in your billions of cells so that your entire physical machine functions in complete harmony most of the time.”) But what many people don’t realize is that just as your brain is built to regulate your physical self, as does it try to regulate your mental self. Your mind is constantly filtering and bringing to your attention information and stimuli that affirms your pre-existing beliefs (this is known in psychology as confirmation bias) as well as presenting you with repeated thoughts and impulses that mimic and mirror that which you’ve done in the past. Unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that is outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. Accessing your conscious mind is easy, the subconscious a little difficult but possible with training and practice. Subconscious basically stores patterns, but it’s the unconscious mind that has all repressed emotions which influence our actions and behaviors. Hypnosis is majorly used to access the unconscious mind, but since the unconscious is responsible for our behavior, there are subtle signs in everyday life. Example: slip of tongue reveals more of what’s inside the unconscious. Because most times you will notice you’re speaking and suddenly you have a slip of tongue not realizing how that happened. Example: We Welcome on stage our Honorable chief guest ” becomes ” We welcome on stage our horrible chief guest”. A genuine slip of tongue you’d say, but is it?

Defense mechanism is developed in childhood, where you’re still learning to understand where you fit in this world. In simple words it’s an effort to protect yourself from anything you perceive as harmful towards you.

Defense mechanism is an act of denying a certain thought or behavior that existed / still exists. It is a strategy used to manage uncomfortable situations. It is often an unconscious method of buying time to deal with unpleasant situations in a healthier way later. — but they can affect a person’s well-being, and other people around them, particularly if left unchecked.

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian Neurologist and the founder of Psychoanalysis. He made a huge contribution in the field of Psychology. He’s works include Talk Therapy, Personality Driving Forces, The Psyche, Psycho-sexual Development, Dream Analysis, Defense Mechanisms and Contemporary Views. His work was further enhanced by his daughter Anna Freud. Let’s explore theories on defense mechanism.

Defense Mechanisms Listed by Name

1. Compensation
2. Denial
3. Displacement
4. Identification
5. Introjection
6. Projection
7. Rationalization
8. Intellectualization
9. Reaction Formation
10. Regression
11. Repression
12. Suppression
13. Ritual and Undoing
14. Sublimation

• Compensation: Is a process of trying to overcome a weakness by excelling in some other ability. Basically, emphasizing your strengths over your weaknesses. But I want to argue on how that can be detrimental. If we say no one is perfect, then it means we’re all good at something but surely have our own shortcomings. In my opinion compensation becomes a defense mechanism where inadequate feelings are compensated by excelling at something else, hoping the inadequate feelings will go away.
•  Denial: Refusal to accept reality. You know the truth, you know what is happening in each situation, but you make excuses and rationalize the excuse in order to escape from admitting or accepting reality. Because the moment you accept that a certain event is happening or has occurred, you will then have to accept the pain that comes with it. Example: a family may pretend and act as if their father is only sick or having a hard time when it is evident to everyone that he is an abusive alcoholic.
• Displacement: Venting out your frustrations, feelings, and impulses on people or objects that are less threatening. Example: Your Boss yells at you, and instead of yelling back you hold on to that frustration until you can place it somewhere else like yelling at your subordinate’s. Displacement is basically suppressing your frustrations until you express them elsewhere.
• Identification: Identification involves identifying with someone else like a mentor, or a film star / a cause like Save the Rivers / Tsunami Relief Funds (NGO’s) taking on their personality characteristics or feel-good factor in order to solve your own emotional difficulty and avoid anxiety. In totality I personally don’t think it’s a bad defense mechanism at all. If you’re a part of something bigger and making a difference to humanity keep at it. The problem arises when you lose sense of self or doing a certain thing only in order to escape a certain negative emotion.
• Introjection: Introjection is a form of identification where you imitate attributes of another person or an organization. Basically, internalizing other people’s ideas and beliefs and making them your own. Examples: Religion: One associate’s themselves to a particular religion and follow the principles or values laid down with no questions asked, in fear of retaliation from the community. But importantly fear accepting that something is wrong there, because religion is mainly a part of who you are. It’s your identity and if that is challenged one starts to question their very existence. Another example is Parents: We Love and admire our parents and somewhere aspire to be like them. We internally know sometimes they are wrong, but fear saying it out loud, because somewhere we feel shame in questioning our own parents, even if all this is an internal dialogue with ourselves. It still is painful. My question is if a family is loving and supports growth of every individual involved, shouldn’t one be open to self-improvement as well then?
• Projection: Projection is blaming another for your bad behavior or action. Basically, blame shifting. Example: If you don’t like someone, you will think that person doesn’t like you and hence you not liking them in return is somehow justifiable. Another Example: You are mad at your spouse / partner and subconsciously damning them, but you instead think or claim that they are mad at you and damning you in their mind. Alternatively, you may believe that you are inferior and therefore attack another race, ethnicity, or belief system, claiming it is inferior.
• Rationalization: Rationalizing one’s thoughts to justify the action, making excuses for one’s mistakes, and by doing so avoiding self-condemnation or condemnation by others. Basically, it’s at attempt at making excuses using logical reasoning. Example: You don’t get through Law College. You May say something like ” It’s for the good, I don’t think I wouldn’t have liked it anyway ” Or ” I didn’t get through Law College, maybe this is an opportunity to explore what I truly desire”. Let me give you another example you can relate to easily: When in a relationship, if you’re love is not reciprocated, you rationalize your partners behaviors thinking there’s a logical explanation to it. Example: He / She is Busy and doesn’t return calls / texts. You make excuses for this, rationalizing that he/she is busy, but the truth is, it’s all about priorities. Simply put he / she is simply not invested in the relationship as you are. And clearly are not interested in you.
• Intellectualization: It involves acknowledging only the facts and ignoring the emotions. In this situation, when faced with adversity, an individual will objectively / Intellectually look at the facts and come to conclusions without feeling guilt or remorse. Example: A Breakup: One uses logical reasoning to ascertain why it didn’t work. Or A Cop working at a crime scene only focuses on solving the case. Or a doctor performing a surgery will detach emotions while doing so.
• Reaction Formation: Very Similar to Compensation, however here you’re making conscious efforts to replace a negative feeling for another person. Example: You don’t like an individual, maybe your boss, maybe a parent or a colleague at work. However, you mask your dislike for this individual by going out of your way to prove that you do like them. In my opinion this particularly isn’t bad, because you’re channeling your hate to a positive feeling. It is bad however if you deny the real underlining feelings. I believe in this situation; you can make yourself aware of the reasons for dislike. If there’s a fundamental disagreement for dislike, then you must be upfront about it, there is no other way to it, not even channeling it for the positive. Because the pursuit of Positive is a negative experience and the acceptance of the negative is a positive experience.
• Regression: Regression is returning to an earlier time in your life. Returning to a former level of development or a childlike state. Example: In moments of pain, one coils in bed with a teddy bear they held dear as a child. Or assuming a fetal position to cry your heart out like you did as a child. Basically, using a particular habit or material thing as a safety blanket, to soothe away your pain. But again, this defense mechanism in my opinion is highly debatable. Can an individual return to a childlike state or is it just a temporary behavior and not actually returning to being the child you once were! The reason I say highly debatable, because there are examples of people assuming childlike states in extreme traumatic situations, but as a whole 95% of the population use such behavior only as a way to soothe away the pain and not actually return to being a child.
• Repression: Repression occurs when a thought, memory, or a feeling too painful for an individual to bear, unconsciously pushes the information out of consciousness and becomes unaware of its existence. The repressed thought may still affect behavior, but the individual who repressed the thought is completely unaware of its existence or effect. Repression is a central concept in psychoanalytic theory, and many of Freud’s ideas center around the concept of repression. Freud did not classify repression as a defense mechanism; he argued that it occurs before the ego develops. Freud found that the people he worked with in therapy were more likely to recall things under hypnosis than consciously recall things without hypnosis. This led to his development of the concept of repression.
• Suppression: Consciously numbing unpleasant events or memories. Unlike Repression where you’re not aware of how it happens. In suppression you know exactly what you’re doing. You consciously make a choice of not wanting to talk about a certain something, because of the emotions it triggers. Example: Not wanting to talk about a recent death in the family, divorce / separation, recent breakup, a recent failure. In my experience: Anything you resist persists more. But in case of suppression, with enough time, the pain is more bearable or healed completely.
• Ritual and Undoing: Is an attempt of trying to compensate for a bad behavior or action. Example: Parent’s buying many gifts for their children, in attempts to make up for not spending enough time with them. Or a millionaire might give to charities for the poor to make up for profiting from them.
• Sublimation: Is a process of diverting your feelings / impulses to socially acceptable activities. Sublimation can be thought of as defending yourself from unacceptable behavior by doing something else instead. Example: The criminally minded often become police to think well of their meanness and attitudes of being entitled to take advantage of and abuse others.

Defense mechanism is simply a learned behavior to survive and fit into this world. Anything that you learn can be redeveloped. When you start paying attention to how you react in different situations based on these theories, one can choose a different approach towards it, make better choices of dealing with it. In my experience defense mechanism interfere with your ability of connection with people and the world around you. However, with enough time and patience of understanding our own behavior patterns we can empower ourselves to a better life. It’s not going to be easy though, anything worthwhile isn’t anyway. It is going to be uncomfortable. I won’t tell you what you should do or how you should go about with it. Because the truth is we only change if we really want to, not because someone said so. But now you have the information you need and channel it in whatever direction you need for the good. Become the person to want to be!

(A special thank you to my INTJ best Friend for asking me to write this Blog.)