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Butterfly_Faerie
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Default Jul 08, 2004 at 11:34 AM
  #1
<font color=blue>Defense Mechanisms</font color=blue>

We go through many, many changes as we move from infancy through childhood to adulthood. The one that came to mind for me the other day as I was holding a friend's new born baby in my arms and thinking about the psychological distance between his infant mind and my own, was a consciousness of all the personality defenses and coping strategies we learn while growing up; how important these things are for keeping us safe from the more predatory elements of our world, but also the openness we can lose as these defenses get built.



Personality defenses (coping techniques, defense mechanisms) are important things in that they strongly influence the ease with which people are able to form and maintain healthy relationships and reject unhealthy relationships. Developing organically in response to frustrating, difficult and painful situations and experiences, they function as the human equivalent of a computer firewall, helping to defend against hurtful and abusive relationships, while hopefully also allowing healthy and nurturing relationships to pass. Discriminating when to be defensive and when not to be defensive is key for health. You need defense to keep you safe from those who would mess with you, but you also need to know when to relax and let your defenses down so as to retain the capability for innocence, openness and healthy relationships. Defenses are important, an immune system unto themselves. They're worth spending an essay talking about.

<font color=red>Mapping the world and the self </font color=red>

Becoming defensive is all about learning to identify and avoid painful and dangerous situations. We are born mostly open and undefended. We learn to avoid painful and dangerous situations by learning to map or represent (in our heads, not on paper) the world and where the dangerous, painful things exist in the world. We start doing this even as very young children and continue it with ever increasing sophistication as we mature. As our representation of the world becomes more sophisticated, our ability to control, tolerate or avoid pain also becomes similarly sophisticated.



The first pains we become aware of are internal - having to do with instinctual drives such as hunger, elimination and emotion. These drives create tensions in our infant bodies that over time we learn to represent and react to. For example, we instinctually cry when we are hungry but probably can't initially distinguish the pain of hunger from other pains. Over time we learn to recognize and represent hunger pains as a distinct sort of painful signal that can be avoided by eating. More time goes by and we learn to request food, thereby cutting hunger pains off before they become compelling. This sort of self-knowledge and control is easy for adults, but it is a major learning project for infants and toddlers.



In addition to mapping our internal environment, we also start mapping our external social environment. We learn, for instance, that our initial infant-centric map of the world (“It's all about me”) doesn't predict what other people will do with great accuracy. In response, we develop a social map of the people we are in relationships with and what they are likely to do for us. Our social map helps us to avoid people who are likely to hurt us and approach people who are likely to help us. As before, most adults can make this discrimination more or less easily, but children take years to properly master such discrimination.



The degree to which representation or mapping of the self and the social world takes place is always in relationship with a person's developmental level. Infants and young children (who are not very developed, physically or mentally) have representations of the self and of others that are more primitive, while older children and adults tend to have more sophisticated self and other representations. A person's developmental level is influenced both by biology and by experience. Children act in childlike ways both because they are inexperienced, and because their brains are literally immature and not fully physically developed. The biological aspects of children's brain development work themselves out by the teen years, and thereafter (assuming everything else has gone well), further development and maturity is mostly a function of experience and personality. Not everyone is able to benefit from experience, however. Most everyone has probably met someone chronologically adult who functions to one degree or another in an immature, child-like and primitive way.



I've spent some time talking about children's representation of danger because that is where personality defenses start. All people are motivated to avoid (or at least control) pain (physical and psychological both), and they do this by developing representations of themselves and their world that help them to predict when pain will occur. People use these personal representations of self and world to come up with a stable of strategies for avoiding pain. Such strategies (like the representations they are based on) start out primitive and flawed and tend to become more sophisticated, functional and adaptive as maturity occurs. At each stage of development people use their representations of self and other to cope as best they can. As people age and mature more sophisticated means of coping tend to be developed and older, less sophisticated and less effective means of coping tend to be discarded. At least, this is what happens in theory. In reality, many people get stuck, fail to move past particular developmental milestones in particular areas of their lives, and to not develop more effective means of coping in those certain areas. While they will have aged chronologically and may even function as adults in most aspects of their lives (holding down a job, being responsible, etc.), they may also show surprisingly child-like and primitive means of coping when stressed.



Mental health professionals differ on what to call these personality defenses. Psychoanalyst types (followers of Freud & company) have tended to call them 'defense mechanisms', emphasizing the more primitive and less functional means of coping people have come up with. Other writers refer to 'coping methods' and tend to emphasize the more functional, sophisticated and effective means of coping that people use. I and many other mental health professional types just know that there is a spectrum of coping strategies/defense mechanisms varying from the primitive to the sophisticated. I'm here calling them 'personality defenses', to emphasize their defensive (pain avoiding) nature and to also call attention to the fact that people often tend to use their favorite defenses habitually, incorporating them to a very great extent into their personalities.



I've arranged the following descriptions of personality defenses so that more primitive strategies for defense (based on more primitive representations of self and other) are featured first, and more sophisticated strategies are featured last. It's not a complete or perfect list and the placements I've chosen are not necessarily definitive. The list is close enough for the purposes of this essay, however. As you read through these descriptions, think of them as strategies that make sense in the context of particular stages of development. Also, think about how use of each defense strategy would influence people's ability to maintain healthy adult relationships and reject bad ones. An adult's use of a primitive-seeming defense offers an archaeological window into that adult's self/world representation, perhaps suggesting that something happened to interrupt or delay their development (abuse, trauma, loss, addiction, etc.), or alternatively that there is something else exceptional about them which has led them to act in primitive ways.

<font color=purple>To read the rest of this article on Defense Mechanisms click the link below.</font color=purple>

<A target="_blank" HREF=http://link>Mental Help Net: http://mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=4054</A>



<font color=red>~Sundance~</font color=red>

<font color=blue>"Never react emotionally to criticism. Analyze yourself to determine whether it is justified. If it is, correct yourself. Otherwise, go on about your business."</font color=blue>

<font color=black>Norman Vincent Peale</font color=black>

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Default Jul 10, 2004 at 02:34 PM
  #2

Hi, Sundance

Thank you for posting the article, I read some of it on the screen. I printed it out to study further. Seems I am able to focus and read better sometimes when it is printed on paper.

From what I have read so far it appers that I definatly have defense meconism issues. Thanks again- Chris

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Default Jul 17, 2004 at 01:25 AM
  #3
your welcome Kris

<font color=red>~</font color=red><font color=blue>S</font color=blue><font color=green>u</font color=green><font color=blue>n</font color=blue><font color=green>d</font color=green><font color=blue>a</font color=blue><font color=green>n</font color=green><font color=blue>c</font color=blue><font color=green>e</font color=green><font color=red>~</font color=red>

<font color=blue>"Never react emotionally to criticism. Analyze yourself to determine whether it is justified. If it is, correct yourself. Otherwise, go on about your business."</font color=blue>

<font color=black>Norman Vincent Peale</font color=black>

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Default Jul 17, 2004 at 02:55 PM
  #4
why are you naked in your picture?


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Default Jul 17, 2004 at 06:01 PM
  #5
That isn't me.

<font color=red>~</font color=red><font color=blue>S</font color=blue><font color=green>u</font color=green><font color=blue>n</font color=blue><font color=green>d</font color=green><font color=blue>a</font color=blue><font color=green>n</font color=green><font color=blue>c</font color=blue><font color=green>e</font color=green><font color=red>~</font color=red>

<font color=blue>"Never react emotionally to criticism. Analyze yourself to determine whether it is justified. If it is, correct yourself. Otherwise, go on about your business."</font color=blue>

<font color=black>Norman Vincent Peale</font color=black>

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Default Jul 19, 2004 at 02:15 PM
  #6
and if you look closer fgh there is a strap on her shoulder, my avatar is not naked.. Article: Defense Mechanisms

<font color=red>~</font color=red><font color=blue>S</font color=blue><font color=green>u</font color=green><font color=blue>n</font color=blue><font color=green>d</font color=green><font color=blue>a</font color=blue><font color=green>n</font color=green><font color=blue>c</font color=blue><font color=green>e</font color=green><font color=red>~</font color=red>

<font color=blue>"Never react emotionally to criticism. Analyze yourself to determine whether it is justified. If it is, correct yourself. Otherwise, go on about your business."</font color=blue>

<font color=black>Norman Vincent Peale</font color=black>

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