Defense Mechanisms

It’s one of the ways by which our brain tricks us into feeling less sad or more happy about something than we actually would if our mind or to be precise our unconscious mind would not use them. The normal definition of defense mechanism would go like; it’s a way by which our unconscious mind tries to distort the harsh reality which would make us very anxious or would divert from the value we have for ourselves.

But is it a bad thing? The answer to that is highly dependent on the intensity and frequency of the acts. We all use some defense mechanisms in our daily lives, like when we have a bad work day and we take out that anger on our kids (unconsciously of course), this type of act would generally fall under the defense mechanism called ‘Displacement’, or when we are very angry and we try to take all that anger out on the weights at the gym or we go for a long run; this is a very socially desirable way of dealing with anger yet this too falls under defense mechanism and to be specific it’s called ‘Sublimation’

Not all defense mechanisms were created equal that’s why some of them are more socially acceptable than the others. One more defense mechanism which people tend to use a lot is ‘Projection’, in this the person actually projects his feelings and intentions onto the other person and tries to play the victim, for example if he finds himself in a situation where he is very angry (without any sound cause) and has behaved in a bad way too, the unconscious mind would now tell him that this kind of behaviors and such aggression is not right and in order to save him from the guilt of such a thing, it would trick him into thinking that people are aggressive towards him and that they leave him with no choice than to behave in a manner like that, hence taking away his anxiousness and guilt.

I would not say that they are bad for your mental health if you don’t overindulge they would provide the slight mental relief that we all need every now and then, but if you overdo it would totally distort your sense of reality. For example there’s this defense mechanism called ‘Denial’ which involves total refusal of a certain event (stressful) and blocking it totally from the consciousness but as we know no one can escape from reality for long, like when a student actually denies his/her lack of preparation for the exams he/she eventually faces the reality and the outcome is way more anxiety provoking that the pervious situation in which they denied their lack of there preparedness.