Defense mechanisms are unconscious psychological processes that protect the self from anxiety-producing thoughts and feelings related to internal conflicts and external stressors (Wikipedia).
Our defense mechanisms can flar up when we feel: ignored, attacked, afraid, abandoned, judged, trapped, offended, mistaken, cornered, etc.
There are many types of defense mechanisms, varying from healthy to very unhealthy. Let's go through some of them to see how your characters can realistically react to others and why!
You can also be interested in checking out my post about trauma responses or attachment styles.
2. Denial
3. Repression: unconsciously keeping unpleasant information from the conscious mind
4. Suppression: consciously keeping unpleasant information from the conscious mind
5. Sublimation: converting unacceptable impulses info more acceptable outlets
6. Projection: assigning own unacceptable feelings of qualities to others
7. Intellectualization: thinking a lot about emotions and events and "figuring them out" on the intellectual level without feeling them
8. Regression: going back to past behaviors OR to previous developmental stages (for example acting a few years younger)
9. Compensation: overachieving in one area to compensate for failures in another area
10. Avoidance: refusing to deal with unpleasant situations or emotions
11. Fantasy: escaping reality by going into your mind. Click HERE to read about daydreaming.
12. Dissociation: mental process where a person disconnects from their thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of identity. Click HERE to read about dissociative disorders.
13. Withdrawal: removing self from events or interactions that remind them of painful stuff
14. People-pleasing: putting others before self
15. Rationalization: justifying an unacceptable behavior with logic
16. Splitting: Failing to reconcile both positive and negative attributes into a whole understanding of a person or situation, resulting in all-or-none thinking. Commonly associated with borderline personality disorder
17. Humor: Decreasing or combating the negative emotions associated with a situation by using comedy. For example, telling a funny story while sharing something upsetting
18. Sexualization: Associating sexual aspects to one’s experience of certain people, places, objects, or ideas. One can become hypersexual or give different situations sexual subtexts
19. Acting out: the development of detrimental behaviors that distract attention and energy away from other stressors
20. Introjection: incorporating the values or characteristics of another person into one's own personality.
21. Cognitive avoidance: individuals try to control their unwanted thoughts and emotions by actively avoiding them; they jump into doing things after things to not have to face the unpleasant thoughts and emotions
22. Reaction formation: replacing an unwanted idea or thought with its opposite
23. Undoing: trying to make up for what you feel are inappropriate thoughts, feelings or behaviors
24. Distortion: reshaping external reality to meet internal needs (for example overlooking that your partner is toxic)
Let's now have a look at an example. Let's take a character called Eddie, who's fourteen and has been stealing from his classmates for the past few weeks. He gets into trouble for it, but he doesn't want to pay the issue too much attention. Soon it turns out his parents are going through a divorce, which makes Eddie very stressed. To run away from the painful reality, he's acting out.
Let's have one more example. A character called Emily never complains about her parents; every time something bad happens, she rushes in with explanations, such as "they're tired from work" or "my mom had a headache". Emily doesn't react to her friend's remarks that she's actually being neglected. Instead, she's rationalizing her parents behaviors.
| A defence mechanism can become pathological when its persistent use leads to maladaptive behaviour such that the physical or mental health of the individual is adversely affected (Wikipedia). |
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