5 Psychological Defense Mechanisms You Probably Use Without Realizing It
Your behavior is influenced by information that surges through three different channels — your conscious mind, your subconscious mind, and your instincts.
Your conscious mind is easy to explain. Think about how you use your conscious mind and, congratulations, you’re using your conscious mind. Now, think about what that means — and again, you’re using your conscious mind and you know you’re doing it.
Your instincts are a little trickier and many people would even categorize them as part of your subconscious mind. However, because they’re more instantaneous and easier to read, i.e. “This just doesn’t feel right” or “Something tells me that guy is lying to me,” they deserve to be treated as distinct from our conscious and unconscious mind.
That brings us to the subconscious, which is the most fascinating of the three because it so often steers us without our being able to feel its misty hand on the reins. It’s like The Matrix Revolutions except with mediocre special effects and no Keanu Reeves. One day you’re a computer programmer and the next thing you know, you’re engaged in a seemingly endless stream of philosophy class banter while you wait for your ten-minute fight scene at the end of the movie with Agent Smith, which is the only cool thing left in the atrocity you call a movie…ehr, a life.
The message: Your life doesn’t have to be as crummy as The Matrix Revolutions. You can be better than that by spotting and correcting these psychological defense mechanisms.
1) Denial
In C.S. Lewis’s classic The Screwtape Letters, a devil instructs his nephew to try to corrupt a man by
(aggravating) that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.
Actually, it doesn’t take a devil to pull this off. Unless you have honest friends, a good psychologist, or are unusually introspective, that’s probably a good description of you as well. Taking a tough, unsparing look at yourself is painful and even scary because when you find problems, you feel compelled to change to fix them. Denial may be easy, but ultimately it’s those who know themselves best who go the farthest in life.
Projection is the natural state of the leftist. Think of a Bill Clinton voter who accuses a generic Republican of sexism or someone who supported Robert Byrd as Senate Majority leader accuses a conservative of racism.
Or the Obama voter who thinks Mitt Romney is arrogant and untrustworthy, or the anthropogenic global warming advocate who thinks global warming skeptics are anti-science, or the left’s endless blaming of Bush.
I heard this a few days ago.
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: It’s Bush’s fault AND you’re a racist!!
It sure makes it easier if you don’t have to actually think about anything.
The people who most need to read this article, probably won’t read it at all; owing to defense mechanism 1, denial, the whole idea that they might need to improve is foreign to them. Alternatively, they will read it and immediately rub somebody else’s nose in the article, thereby implementing defense mechanism 2, projection.
The people who will take it the most to heart are those who already have made much progress in overcoming their personal failings.
John, First, I don’t really care for lists. I usually shy away from articles that use them – don’t really know why.
Having said that, I’ve been enjoying your lists lately and am finding some great stuff to apply to my life.
As for this last list, I’m going to make sure my wife reads it, she really needs some of the stuff you mentioned…
There’re no such things as “instincts”. That’s just a fancy word used in place of the phrase “they just do it”. It tells us nothing about behavior – human or animal – and stops further investigation by giving the illusion of knowledge.
Indeed, biologically speaking, “instinct” refers to behaviors that ANY organism manifests that were not “learned” from interaction with other organisms of the same species. The list of such behaviors(including MANY in humans) is grand. Intelligence in nature is a self evident Truth, the fact that it often can not be “understood” by humans does not detract from it’s reality. Appreciating that organisms behave largely instinctually does not deter “further investigation” of anything.
A “no such thing as instincts,” argument….really?
I guess you never woke up from a nightmare then? Were never scared of the dark as a child? Never jumped when a sudden loud noise was introduced into your existence? The concept of the brain being reflexively protective of the body without predisposition is precisely the concept (if not a precise definition) of an instinctive response.
Newsflash, Cochise: all of these things are instinctual, and all serve to provide the human creature with the longest possible lifespan.
Incredible: give somebody access to a computer and suddenly they’re Yoda, Jesus, and every other icon of wisdom rolled into one package….
A handy quide to left/liberal rhetorical strategies (no, seriously, this is how they argue aside from calling you or something else “racist”).
That’s how the left operates: compensation (changing the subject; “oh, but we’re soooo compassionate), denial (the economy is doing just fine; our social programs work), projection (often in the form of simple name-calling as well as outright libel, slander, and perjury), idealization (of their leaders and of their protected victim classes), and displacement (less obvious as a rhetorical tactic, but you can see government bureaucrats as well as teachers taking out their frustrations on the public and on their charges).
I figure most of them will use this as a how-to guide rather than as an avenue to self-improvement.
I’ve perfected #4…(but the house is clean!!!)
P.S. – I don’t drive a Porsche.
The irony of some of these posts is…rich.
Me? Thirty years ago. I was the most ignorant and biggest fool who ever came down the road…and I didn’t know it. Everyone else, however, knew that I was an ignorant fool, except for myself. I was also as impatient a man as you’ve ever seen. I ued to hang around with people who were just like I Was. Always reinforcing one another’s ignorance, arrogance and foolishness, never learning anything new.
These days, I know that I’m the biggest fool who ever came down the road. …and after reading a lot of books, and attending a lot of classes and seminars in a variety of fiels and disciplines, I’m fairly sure that I’m as ignorant as they come. The more I learn, the more I learn that there is more to be learned than any man can learn in a thousand, thousand lifetimes. That, my friends, is a humbling thought. otoh, my friends now think that I’m one of the wisest and most intelligent people they’ve ever known. They also accuse me of being the most patient man they’ve ever known. That’s what they say, anyway.
That sort of thing happens when you stop blaming everyone and everything else for your own problems and start examining your own motivations, emotions and reactions…and start learning how to deal with them. It will change your world-view. No. It isn’t easy, especially at first. It’s damned uncomfortable, actually.
I’m still the biggest fool I’ve ever known…and I know that I’m as impatient as anyone I’ve ever met.
Examine yourselves, first. Mote. Log. Eye. That sort of thing. Which is what young Mr. Hawkins is really saying, here. (He seems to be very wise for such a young man.)
It’s not a matter of beating yourself up. It’s a matter of learning the true extent of your own weaknesses and the limitations of your many and varied strengths. ‘Know thyself and you’ll know others better,’ as the old saw goes.
Yeah, the lefties are a mess, causing all sorts of problems. The question at hand isn’t about where the lefties are screwing up. The question is: What are you righties doing wrong – where, when and why – as individuals and as a group?
Not reading this article could, OTOH, be a sign that the non-reader has found John Hawkins articles to be excruciatingly boring.
Hey – I’m not saying his articles are boring – I’m just unable to resist pointing out this logical alternative (there are many others … insufficient time, computer crashes, etc.)
I think that contrary to the image of the average man as un-self-aware, most people of average intelligence are well aware that they are flawed beings. That they lose sight of the defense mechanisms mentioned in this article from time to time in the heat of battle so to speak doesn’t mean they’re dim bulbs that have to be managed by puffed up experts. All it means is that they know their weaknesses but momentarily forget them or can’t overcome them. With the exception of psycopaths, a distinct minority, most people muddle through flaws and all and are a lot better off without the supervisor class.
The puffed-up experts are arguably the worst of the lot. They don’t even consider the rest of us to be human.
sez you.
I liked it. Good food for thought. Promotes self awareness — something often in short supply.
My personal favorite is denial and its two sides: When denial leads you to ignore some unpleasant reality, you may regret the existence of such a terrible handicap to reason. But when you exercise your power of abstraction, which may be seen as a precious asset in your intellectual arsenal, you are also shutting whatever reality might derail the present creative train of thought.
So, is denial a bad thing or a good thing? Both? Neither? It’s one of these things we have to deal with, whether we recognize it or not. Adam and Eve originally did not recognize it, and they wound up showing what happens after you do! Arrrrgh…
Legarto, would you list some of those many behaviors that you say are instincts in human beings? I can’t think of any that could be proven to be unlearned. The fact that “instinct” is loosely used, or used connotatively, to describe some human behaviors, doesn’t prove a thing. By definition an instinct is “an inborn pattern of behavior common to a biological species.
Fear of falling.
There are others.