Defense mechanisms, explained in plain language

Have you ever caught yourself saying, “I’m not upset” while your jaw was tight and clenched? Or maybe a time where you blamed someone else for something you later realized you were feeling? Maybe you laughed your way through an uncomfortable conversation or threw yourself into work after receiving difficult news.

These are kinds of instances that happen to all of us, and are examples of what psychologists call defense mechanisms. In this blog series, my hope is to share information and thoughts from a therapist’s perspective on defense mechanisms, including what they are and why they show up.

Defense mechanisms are the mind’s automatic ways of protecting itself from feelings that seem too dangerous to feel. You have them, and so does everyone you know. They are not character flaws. They are protections your mind built, usually long ago, and usually for good reason. Rather than saying defenses outright are bad, as a therapist, I tend to think about what function a defense could be serving. At times, that may very well be adaptive. In other times, they may also get in our way.

The tricky part with defenses is that they work best when you cannot see them. A defense that you noticed every time would not protect you from much. Much of the work that is done by defenses happens below a person’s conscious awareness, which is why people can run the same defense for decades without ever naming it.

What is a defense mechanism?

A defense mechanism is a mental strategy, mostly unconscious, that serves a function to protect you from anxiety, shame, grief, uncomfortable wishes, or conflicts that you are not yet ready to face directly. The idea of defense mechanisms originates from psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud noticed that his patients pushed painful material out of awareness without ever deciding to. This concept of repressing one’s thoughts, feelings, and wishes was formative in Freud’s development of understanding human psychology. His daughter, Anna Freud, would later help classify and identify specific defensive strategies in 1936, and psychologists have been refining the list ever since.

Sometimes when I hear people talk about defenses, I get the sense that psychological defenses can be perceived as pathology. To be clear, this isn’t always the case. Psychological defenses are not the same as lies, manipulation, or evidence of a damaged person. A defense is your mind doing a job: keeping you on your feet when a feeling threatens to knock you down.

Why your mind builds defenses

As a therapist, I’d like to offer a frame to carry through this series on psychological defenses: every defense was once a solution.

A child who learns that her anger gets her punished finds a way to stop noticing her anger. That is not pathology. In fact, that may be a way to navigate times where anger was intolerable. The defense can be seen as a solution to a real problem in a real environment. The trouble starts later, when the environment changes and the defense does not. She is forty now, and nobody punishes her for being angry, but the anger still goes underground before she can feel it, and it comes out sideways: in headaches, in sarcasm, in a marriage where she somehow never gets to say what she wants.

This is why you will not find “how to get rid of your defenses” advice here. The question that actually helps is different: what was this defense built to protect, and does it still need to do this job?

Primitive, neurotic, mature: a rough ladder

Psychologists sort defenses by how much they distort reality. In psychodynamic terms, defenses can be classified into three categories, primitive, neurotic, and mature.

Primitive defenses bend reality the most. You may have heard of things like splitting, denial, projection, acting out; these would all be considered more primitive defenses. They develop earliest in life, and they surface fastest under extreme stress. They change or distort your perception of reality in attempts to make things feel less overwhelming or threatening.

Neurotic defenses (a clinical word, not an insult) acknowledge reality but reroute the feeling. Examples might include repression, displacement, rationalization, intellectualization. These kinds of defenses acknowledge reality more than primitive defenses, but also serve to partially avoid emotions that feel unpleasant.

Mature defenses let reality in and help make it bearable. With them, a person can better face reality while also managing emotions in a constructive manner. Humor, sublimation, altruism, and suppression are examples of these kinds of defenses. For example, a person who loses a parent and pours the grief into building something does not pretend the loss away; they put it to work. Whether any particular version is healthy is a question for another post, but the mechanism, called sublimation, is one of the most adaptive things a mind can do.

This framing of range and function of defenses matters more than it might seem. George Vaillant, the psychiatrist behind the decades-long Grant Study at Harvard, found that the maturity of a person’s habitual defenses predicted health, marriage, and work life better than childhood circumstances did. Defenses are not merely trivia or a list to memorize in an AP Psych class. Vailliant’s work suggests that the defenses we rely on often shape our relationships and well-being more than many people realize.

Six defenses, in plain terms

There are more defenses than I can fit here, and several get their own post later in this series. I picked these six on purpose. They span the full range, from the primitive defenses that distort reality most to the mature ones that work with it, and they tend to be the ones people recognize fastest in their own lives.

Splitting is seeing people, yourself included, as all good or all bad, with no middle. A new partner is perfect, then after one disappointment becomes worthless. You are excellent at your job on Tuesday and a fraud by Thursday. The middle, where someone you love can also hurt you, is exactly what splitting cannot hold.

Projection is taking a feeling you cannot accept in yourself and locating it in someone else. You are irritable all morning, and by noon you are convinced your partner is the one who is angry. The feeling is real; the address is wrong.

Repression is the mind pushing threatening material out of awareness automatically, without a decision. It differs from suppression, which is deliberate. Suppression says “I will deal with this after the meeting.” Repression never files the memo that there was anything to deal with. Either way, the material does not evaporate. It waits.

Displacement reroutes a feeling from the person who caused it to someone safer. A bad day under a boss you cannot confront becomes snapping at your kids over something small that evening. The anger is real. The target is wrong because the real target felt too dangerous.

Intellectualization handles a threatening feeling by turning it into a topic. Faced with a frightening diagnosis, a person becomes a sudden expert in the research and statistics, which is genuinely useful and also a way to stand a safe distance from the fear.

Humor, when it is working, names the painful thing and creates just enough distance to keep going. It counts as a mature defense because it does not deny reality. The cost shows up only at the edges, when a reflexive joke keeps the people who love you one step back from a moment that needed to be felt straight.

So are defense mechanisms bad?

No. They are sometimes costly, but they are not bad, and you could not live without them. A mind with no defenses would be flooded by everything, all the time.

Defenses become a problem under two conditions. The first is when they distort reality so heavily that you cannot see what is actually happening, which is the signature of primitive defenses under chronic use. The second is when a defense that at one time solved an old problem keeps running long after the problem is gone. The forty-year-old who cannot feel anger. The person who jokes through every conversation that matters. The new manager who sorts her team into loyalists and enemies within a month. None of these people are broken. Each is running an old protection in a situation where it now costs more than it saves.

How therapy works with defenses

A common assumption about therapy is that the therapist’s job is to strip your defenses away. A good psychodynamic therapist does nearly the opposite. Defenses get respect first, because each one is guarding something, and the guard does not stand down until what is behind it is safe.

In practice, that looks like noticing together, with curiosity instead of judgment, the moments a defense shows up in the room. The joke that arrives right when the grief gets close. The subject that changes every time your father comes up. Over time, inside a relationship sturdy enough to hold what the defense was protecting, the feeling underneath finally gets to be felt, often for the first time. The defense does not have to be torn down. It retires, because the job is done.

That is slow work, and it is the work our practice was built for. Coastal Therapy Group is a relational psychodynamic practice with offices in Encinitas, Carlsbad, and Vista, where every clinician holds a doctorate in psychology. If you are recognizing your own patterns in this series and want to understand them rather than just manage them, individual therapy is where that happens. If you are not sure yet, an Insight Session is a single consultation with no commitment.

Sources and further reading

• Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936)
• George Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (1977) and The Wisdom of the Ego (1993)
• Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, 2nd ed. (2011)
• Phebe Cramer, Protecting the Self: Defense Mechanisms in Action (2006)