A Love Letter To Our Defenses
There always comes a point in my work with adult patients where I do some good ol’ fashioned psychoed around what a defense mechanism is. I’ll usually say some version of, thank god we have defenses, or we would all be running around screaming about the horrors of this world!
Defenses get a bad rap. In pop culture, folks with some working knowledge of the psyche can misunderstand defenses as pathological and a sign that something is wrong with a person. Even in the therapy world, some therapists relate to defenses as a barrier to treatment and something that gets in the way of going deep. Poppycock, I say!
Defenses play an essential role in our innermost world and are important to understand and work with in therapy. As I will get to later, the good news about defenses is that they fall away when we no longer need them.
Remind Me, What Are Defenses?
As I talk about in my high level definition of Psychodynamic Therapy, defenses are internal structures and ways of organizing our thoughts and feelings that help keep us intact. We create defenses unconsciously using internal strengths that come naturally to us and what is happening around us (meaning, how much we have to emotionally deal with) impacts how defended we are and what defenses we choose. Defenses help us deal with things that are literally too much for us to handle.
Defenses Are Part of Normal Human Development
Some defenses are developmental. Meaning, when I write that something might be “too much” that can mean emotionally but it can also mean for someone’s age. There are some more rudimentary defenses, such as splitting and black-and-white thinking that take place in childhood for everyeone. Children are not developed enough to see the complex nuance of certain situations because their brains simply aren’t ready for that yet.
Additionally, children need certain defenses, such as idealization, in order to feel safe and secure. Children have some awareness that they are very vulnerable in the world and are dependent on their grown ups to keep them safe. They idealize the adults around them and put them on a pedestal in order to feel more secure. This is why, as I write about here and here, when there is abuse or neglect in a formative relationship, idealizing someone who hurts the child can cause a lot of turmoil and confusion for the child that carries over into adulthood.
Defenses Are Information
Some defense, such as splitting and idealization, mostly fall away as a child continues to develop and grow. Continuing with the example of idealization, as a teenager goes through adolescence, they “separate and individuate” from their parents (in ways that are often clunky and painful). They do this in part as part of a healthy process to gain autonomy. As these teens enter adulthood, they are able to see their formerly idealized parents through a more objective lens as more gray area individuals. However, for some people, these defenses stick around. This leads me to my next point, which is that defenses in themselves are data for us to learn from.
If an adult still leans heavily on something like idealization in their relationships, that tells us something. There is something that got in the way of a natural “defense upgrade” even as they grew older and developed an intellectual capacity to see people with more of a realistic lens. This is certainly an example of something that brings people into therapy. If a patient has a propensity to idealize others, it can leave them seeing other people with rose colored glasses, which can lead them to be very underprotected out in the world.
In addition to some “younger” defenses that might get stuck, there are some very strong defenses that are only called upon if there is some unsafety or insecurity in the child’s environment growing up. For example, dissociation, or a way that a person disconnects fully from a circumstance, is only a defense that someone does when it is necessary in order to emotionally survive it.
When I have a patient who has a propensity for dissociation in current day and/or who has swaths of missing historical memory, that is information for us that this patient has been through something in their lifetimes that they needed to not feel in the moment because it was too terrifying to do so. This helps us to really take in the weight of what the patient has endured, even if we do not know exactly what it is yet.
Why Do We Need Defenses?
When I use the language of us needing defenses, what I mean is that we as humans can only take in so much. This is why when someone close to us dies, it is commonplace for us to feel shock at first. It is literally too much to take in that this person is gone forever. The shock wears off little by little as we can bear the loss more and more. The defense acts as a backstop for us and eases as we are ready.
When children are little and endure abuse, the defense aims to minimize the impact. Even in the example above of a child who disassociates from a horror in order to cope, that sounds like a pretty extreme reaction. And it is. It’s an extreme reaction that is equal to an extreme action/horror. But it protects the child from further damage, such as a severe mental illness where there is a full break from reality (i.e. psychosis).
Defenses Ease When It Is Safe For Them To
If a defense is causing a problem in someone’s life and it is not easing up gradually, such as the example of someone mourning a death having their shock ease gradually, that is an indication that therapy is needed. We need to understand why the person’s unconscious feels it needs that defense.
Oftentimes when an adult or couple enters treatment, they have noticed a pattern that they find bewildering. Why am I doing this thing over and over even though it is not working out for me? Usually we learn that the “thing” comes from a place of self protection. Therapy is an integrating activity, meaning as we experience necessary feelings and mourn loss and pain, it makes us stronger and better able to tolerate the full breadth of our histories and internal lives.
