Why I Don’t Talk About “Defense Mechanisms…
And Why I Help Clients Embrace Their Protections
If you were a soldier on the front lines taking on heavy artillery and I told you to abandon your defenses, you’d probably hand me over to the other side.
Many clients are aware of the concept of defense mechanisms (DMs). Often they even are aware of some of their own, confessing their tendency to “keep people at arms’ length,” or “make a joke when things get too heavy,” or “drink during social situations,” or “analyze my partner to figure out why they say mean things to me” or “shut down when someone is angry with me.” Just to name a few. I use the word “confessing” deliberately. These actions, whether recognized or pointed out, are assumed to be negative, some character flaw, something to be got rid of. Therapists can be just as guilty as clients in taking this dim view of these behaviors, categorizing DMs as “healthy” or “unhealthy,” breaking them down into “primitive” and “higher level, “mature” and “immature.”
Sigmund Freud (naturally) first posited the notion of DMs. His daughter Anna compiled the ten DMs Sigmund referred to throughout his writings, which became the subject of her 1936 book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. Other scholars and psychologists would continue to expand upon and categorize these mechanisms. Many DMs have entered into mainstream and are bandied about, often as accusations: “You’re in denial, man!” “Don’t project your shit on me, babe.” “My dad is so repressed, ugh!”
Even the words “defense mechanism” are clinical and cold. They bring to mind heavily guarded fortresses, whose only way in and out are through creaky wooden drawbridges as thick as the length of your arm. Is it any wonder DMs get a bad rap?
Which is why I no longer use those words, why I steer my clients away from them and away from the negative implications those words impart. Instead, I use the words “protections” or “protectors.” After all, that is the function and purpose of these behaviors and let’s face it, we all need some protection from the world. It can be scary out there.
It’s even scarier for kids who suffer from abuse and neglect, or who are left to fend for themselves, or who end up parenting their own parents, or who experience tragic losses, or bullying or any of the myriad traumas and Traumas that can burden a child. The world can be confusing and/or frightening for a kid who doesn’t have anyone to help them makes sense of it, and make sense of their various big feelings. In those cases, vulnerability is a liability to survival, and so must be hidden, buried, denied. Of course, we can experience traumas and develop protections throughout our lives, but it’s also true that, without intervention, the protections that emerge in childhood tend to follow us into adulthood. [See also my article “Why Your Childhood Matters”].
Those protections that we develop during childhood tend to be more steadfast than those developed later in life. Think about how fiercely most adult mammals will defend their offspring if those little ones are threatened. Our childhood protectors are mama and papa bears who learn to protect us as much as they can from experiencing, or sometimes even recognizing, emotional pain. Those protectors get us to adulthood — they do a remarkable job.
So when an adult who is “highly defended” comes into my office, I nod with admiration and say something like, “Wow, even with all you’ve endured, you’ve made it to here. That’s pretty impressive.” Often, I’ll get a “Yeah, but…” followed by whatever protection they’ve come to me to excise. “Yeah, but I push people away.” “Yeah, but I don’t really know how to love someone.” “Yeah, but I worry all the time.”
“Sure, of course,” I’ll say. “It makes a lot of sense that you do/feel that.”
And it does. Childhood hurts are the deepest, and therefore the most protected.
I hear some version of this a lot: “But I’m an adult. I should be over all that.”
And yet…
Sometimes healing those hurts happens through counteractive (i.e. healthy) relationships, sometimes it happens through a lot of self-reflection and and self-insight, sometimes it happens through helping others, and sometimes it happens in therapy. But it rarely happens spontaneously. Time does not, in fact, heal all wounds. Hurts don’t heal merely because you’ve grown up.
Helping my clients appreciate the function of their protective thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is a huge part of helping them understand themselves, and to begin to develop self-compassion.
Then we look at the places where protections might need not be so rigid, so resolute. This is the hard part of therapy, because what I’m asking my clients to do is to feel what they’ve been afraid to feel or to feel what they are routinely overwhelmed by. However, with their protections not eliminated but less fierce, I help my clients feel a little… A little bit of sadness, of anger, of hurt, of loneliness. I help them extend a little bit of trust a little bit at a time. In this way, they build resilience and the experience of feeling feelings without the overwhelm. And it paves the way to healing.
In my next article, I’ll be staying on this subject and addressing the two overarching issues most clients come into therapy with and what they would most like to eradicate — depression and anxiety. Spoiler alert: Both depression and anxiety can have protective functions. No, really.
Stay tuned!