I have been prompted to think about the psychological ‘defence mechanisms’. In general, these come out of Freudian tradition of psychological therapies. A detailed account of some of these mechanisms can be found in several places but have a look on:
https://www.psychologistworld.com/freud/defence-mechanisms-list
The full list is long so I will only sample some of them here.
Acting Out: when our energies are diverted into some other action to alleviate a strong impulse.
EXPERIMENT: recall a memory of a time when he felt you were acting out of character. In retrospect, how would you have preferred it to be? How might you have ‘acted in’; that is, used a Body Scan to notice your internal thoughts, feelings and sensations so you could ‘label’ then more authentically?
Avoidance: walking around an obstacle rather than looking it in the eye.
EXPERIMENT: recall a time when when you were angry with some-one important in your life. With the benefit of hindsight, was there something you might have said and done differently that would have addressed that feeling more directly?
Conversion and somatisation: when a high emotion stores itself in the body. For example, finger-picking or repeated hair pulling might be a preferred action when fear and anxiety are too intimidating. Babette Rothschild wrote an interesting text about this called The Body Remembers. Her website is well worth a visit if you are keen on researching.
EXPERIMENT: the Body Scan exists to help you be in touch with internal sensations, among other things. When you do the Body Scan over a period of time, it is likely that you will notice a pattern; a discomforting sensation that persistently appears in one particular part of your body. Can you use meditation and relaxation to relate to that experience differently?
Denial: what better way to put something to one side than to pretend it does not exist. If legend is to be believed, then Lord Nelson did this with his “I see no ships” at the Battle of Trafalgar. He got away with that by covering his good eye (he was blind in the other)! This phenomenon is important in safe experimenting and it links very closely to the notion of Discounting, I touch on elsewhere.
EXPERIMENT: call to mind a recent time when you avoided a ‘problem’ in your life. Think about how much you denied that problem using the ‘scale’ I identify below. You might have said of this problem that:
- I have no problem at all.
- I have a problem but its not really important in my life.
- I have an important problem in my life but it is beyond repair.
- I have a problem and I could fix it if I knew how – but I lack the ability to get it sorted.
Which one applies to you? It may help if I say that finding a do-able thing becomes easier and easier once I move toward stage four, above. At that ‘level’ I understand that it might be difficult for me to sort it, but I have the ability and I will apply myself to it.
At this point, consider what the ‘missing’ skill is and how you might improve it just a little bit.
Displacement: involves diverting spare energy into an action with some, or little, relevance to the stress we are experiencing.
EXPERIMENT: consider whether you have been frustrated about a persistent obstacle in your life. How have you responded to that frustration? Challenge yourself to consider whether you may have benefited from the displaced energy, e.g. by working harder. compensating for an apparent loss or short-coming. Equally, you may resolved in your mind to say ‘dammit’ and rebelled against the issue by becoming the ‘bad boy’ or bad girl’.
Dissociation: this is an important behaviour touched on in the website but too complex to address in passing, here.
Humour: why not laugh it off? I’ll leave you to find the time when you did this as I think you’ll find an example without too much prompting. Emergency service personnel are notorious for ‘black humour’, an understandable protection against the horrors of their daily round.
Idealisation: placing some-one on a pedestal may be easier than looking at a ‘truer’ picture. By the way, have you noticed we can idealise ourselves or, in compensation, damn ourselves. Anything rather than looking at who we are?! You may notice how Hollywood makes a virtue of this tendency in some films!
EXPERIMENT: use the image below to write down one or two words of description for some-one important in your life. Take a break and return to the descriptions later. Notice ways in which see that other in a rather partial way. In what way do you miss the ‘true person’, whatever that is?
Identification: a specific case of this is the so-called Stockholm Syndrome – when individuals taken hostage in a bank raid came to side with their kidnappers. Baloo the Bear had this right when, in the Disney film The Jungle Book, he sang the song: I want to be like you. When did you sing the same song, and about whom?!
Intellectualisation: I’m good at this. Let’s explain it all away, rather than feel it! A special case of this is called “mustabation”, when we explain something away with a few rules and commands to ourselves to others.
EXPERIMENT: take some time to listen to a conversation in a group of people – preferably one involving in you. Attend to the language and notice the use of words like ‘should’, ‘must’, ‘ought’ and ‘absolutely’. Later, as you reflect on this conversation, consider how helpful those words are. Are they a ‘cover’ for telling self and others what to believe, rather than helping the other person really think something through.
Projection: or, dump it all one some-one else, especially our nearest and dearest. That is a good way to get rid of bad parts of ourselves! bad
EXPERIMENT: how often have you felt bad about something in your life and dumped any bad feeling inside yourself on some-one else nearby, e.g. accused them of being angry or perverse? What might you have done differently to express yourself more directly or, as they say, authentically?
Rationalisation: or explain it all away. How many experiments are there for that.
Reaction Formation: or go in the opposite direction just to be perverse. That is, when love turns into hate. In the transactional analytic (TA) model there is a useful diagram called the Karpman Triangle that demonstrates just how quickly we can move from one extreme to another when passions run high. Well worth some exploration, if you are interested. Does the triangle help you formulate an experiment in your world?
Repression: a bit like denial, but potentially more accessible. Denial is a high level of discounting whereas repression is maintained by our personal ability to detach from reality – whatever that is.
Regression: flight into the security of yesterday when today feels a bit harsh.
EXPERIMENT: Use the ‘inverted tree’ model or your road-map. described early on in my blog.
This may help you recall times when -on later life – you floated back to your early years in an attempt to find comfort. The blog EXPERIMENT: finding a Safe Place is, for me, an OK version of this process.
Splitting: or “nothing to do with me, Gov; it was him (or her)”.
Suppression: conscious repression often of a temporary nature; something we can put out of our mind for a while.
Transference: when we take qualities of one person and project – see above – those qualities on to another person and act towards the other as if. The end result is an unreal relationship. There are several forms of transference, including the intensities involved when we fall in love. It is a potential complication in therapy as therapists can be cast into the role of expert, when they are unable to be an expert in you. Tranferential experiences can emerge from real or imagined childhood relationships, such as parent, teacher, or charismatic school friend. It is knowledge of this phenomenon that led me, in my blog, to caution against the tendency to relate to the idea of some-one rather than their present self.
Bear in mind that the original psycho-analytical model – formulated it is worth remembering well over 100 years ago – was both implicitly and explicitly judgmental. Originally, some of the defence mechanisms were labelled “mature”, that is OK in some ways. Others were vaguely disapproved of and needed ‘treatment’ or, at least, worked through (especially the transferences).
To be an effective experimenter, you will need to approach all of the defence mechanisms with more respect and to appreciate that they are there to do an important job. Your task is to harness your energy to find ways in which those reactions will help you to do something different.
In what way may these ‘mechanisms’ help you with designing your safe experiments?