Do you find yourself shutting down when emotions get intense?
Perhaps you intellectualise your feelings, deflect with humour, or blame others when things go wrong.
These reactions aren't character flaws—they're defence mechanisms, your mind's sophisticated system for managing overwhelming feelings and protecting your emotional wellbeing.
Behind the Walls: How Psychodynamic Therapy Helps Reveal & Transform Defence Mechanisms
Unlike approaches that focus primarily on symptoms or behaviours, psychodynamic therapy specialises in understanding the complex relationship between your defences and the feelings beneath them. By creating a safe therapeutic space, defences that once operated automatically can gradually be recognised, understood, and ultimately transformed.
In therapy we discover that what began as necessary protection in childhood has become an obstacle to authentic connection and emotional freedom in adulthood. Through our work together, you'll develop not just insight into these patterns, but new capabilities for managing emotions directly.
Why Therapy Excels at Working with Defences
Understanding the Protectors Within
What many don't realise is that our defence mechanisms are fundamentally about how we handle our feelings. These psychological shields develop early in life when we lack other ways to cope with difficult emotions. Through therapy, we'll work together to:
Identify your unique defence patterns and how they've served to protect you
Connect these defences to the feelings they're designed to manage
Recognise when protective strategies from childhood now limit your adult life
Develop awareness of defenses as they activate in real-time
Build capacity for experiencing emotions without needing to defend against them
From Protection to Integration: Your Path Forward
Whether you tend toward denial, projection, rationalisation, or other defensive patterns, therapy offers a path toward greater emotional flexibility. The journey involves both honouring how these defences have helped you survive and developing more adaptive ways of handling life's challenges.
As our work progresses, you'll find yourself less constrained by rigid defensive patterns and more able to choose how you respond to difficult feelings—creating space for deeper relationships, and more satisfying life choices.
Ready to move beyond outdated protections toward emotional freedom?
Find some answers…
-
From a psychodynamic perspective, defence mechanisms are unconscious psychological operations that protect the ego from anxiety, uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, or impulses. Here's a comprehensive list of defence mechanisms:
Primary (Primitive) Defence Mechanisms:
Denial: Refusing to acknowledge painful realities, feelings, or experiences
Projection: Attributing one's unacceptable thoughts or feelings to others
Splitting: Viewing people or situations as all good or all bad with no integration
Primitive idealisation: Seeing others as perfect or omnipotent to protect from disappointment
Projective identification: Projecting unwanted aspects of self onto another, then interacting with them as if they possess those qualities
Dissociation: Temporarily detaching from reality or identity to avoid emotional pain
Devaluation: Attributing exaggerated negative qualities to self or others
Acting out: Expressing unconscious emotional conflicts through behaviour rather than words
Somatisation: Converting psychological distress into physical symptoms
Fantasy: Escaping into imagination to avoid dealing with reality
Omnipotence: Feeling or acting as if one possesses special powers or abilities
Intermediate Defence Mechanisms:
Repression: Unconsciously removing distressing thoughts from conscious awareness
Displacement: Redirecting emotions from their original source to a less threatening target
Reaction formation: Transforming an unacceptable impulse into its opposite
Intellectualisation: Using abstract thinking to reduce anxiety about stressful situations
Rationalisation: Creating acceptable but incorrect explanations for unacceptable behaviour
Isolation of affect: Separating emotional reactions from the ideas that triggered them
Undoing: Symbolically negating or counteracting a previous experience or feeling
Turning against self: Directing hostile feelings inward instead of toward others
Passive aggression: Indirectly expressing aggression toward others
Regression: Reverting to an earlier stage of development
Identification: Unconsciously modelilng oneself after another person
Mature Defence Mechanisms:
Sublimation: Transforming unacceptable impulses into socially valued activities
Altruism: Fulfilling emotional needs through service to others
Humour: Using comedy to express feelings without discomfort or anxiety
Suppression: Consciously setting aside disturbing thoughts or feelings
Anticipation: Realistically planning for future discomfort
Self-observation: Reflecting on one's own thoughts, feelings, and behaviours
Affiliation: Turning to others for help or support
Self-assertion: Directly expressing one's thoughts or feelings
Additional Defence Mechanisms:
Compensation: Overachieving in one area to offset real or perceived deficiencies in another
Symbolisation: Representing conflict through symbols
Substitution: Replacing an unattainable goal with an attainable one
Externalisation: Attributing internal psychological phenomena to external causes
Introjection: Incorporating others' attitudes or values into one's self-concept
Magical thinking: Believing thoughts can directly affect events
Conversion: Transforming psychological conflict into physical symptoms
Compartmentalisation: Separating conflicting thoughts into different compartments
Neutralisation: Defusing the emotional energy attached to certain thoughts
Abstraction: Focusing on a general concept while avoiding specifics
Minimisation: Downplaying the significance of events, needs, or feelings
Sexualization: Imbuing non-sexual experiences with sexual significance
This list encompasses defence mechanisms as conceptualised across various psychodynamic traditions, including classical psychoanalysis, ego psychology, object relations theory, and self psychology.
-
While defence mechanisms and coping mechanisms both help manage stress and difficult emotions, they differ in several important ways:
Defence Mechanisms:
Operate unconsciously (person is typically unaware of using them)
Develop automatically rather than being deliberately chosen
Often distort reality to protect the ego from anxiety
Primarily aimed at reducing internal psychological discomfort
Usually rigid and inflexible in their application
Originally identified in psychodynamic theory
May be adaptive or maladaptive depending on context and degree
Examples: denial, projection, rationalisation, repression
Coping Mechanisms:
Can be either conscious or unconscious processes
Often deliberately implemented strategies
Generally maintain more accurate perception of reality
Address both internal distress and external problems
Can be flexibly adjusted based on their effectiveness
Conceptualised across multiple psychological frameworks
More explicitly evaluated as adaptive or maladaptive
Examples: seeking social support, problem-solving, meditation, exercise
The boundaries between these concepts sometimes blur. For instance, humour can function as both a mature defence mechanism and an adaptive coping strategy. Similarly, avoidance might be seen as either a defence or coping mechanism depending on whether it's unconscious or conscious.
In contemporary psychology, clinicians often focus more on whether these mechanisms are adaptive (promoting health and functioning) or maladaptive (creating additional problems) rather than strictly categorising them as defences or coping strategies.
-
Coping mechanisms and avoidance are related but distinct concepts, with avoidance actually being one specific type of coping mechanism.
Coping Mechanisms encompass all strategies people use to manage stress, difficult emotions, or challenging situations. These can be:
Problem-focused: Directly addressing the source of stress (like solving a problem, seeking information, or making plans)
Emotion-focused: Managing emotional reactions to stress (like seeking support, reframing situations, or practicing self-care)
Meaning-focused: Finding purpose or growth in difficult circumstances
Avoidant: Temporarily escaping or distancing from stressors
Coping mechanisms can be healthy or unhealthy, depending on context, duration, and impact.
Avoidance, specifically, is a subset of coping mechanisms characterised by:
Attempting to escape, ignore, or prevent contact with stressors
Temporarily reducing anxiety by not confronting the anxiety-provoking situation
Often providing short-term relief but potentially creating long-term problems
Taking various forms (behavioural avoidance, cognitive avoidance, emotional avoidance)
The key differences:
Scope: All avoidance is a form of coping, but not all coping is avoidance
Approach vs. retreat: Many coping mechanisms involve engaging with problems, while avoidance specifically involves disengaging
Long-term effectiveness: While some forms of temporary avoidance can be adaptive (like taking a brief mental break), persistent avoidance typically prevents resolution and learning
Function: Healthy coping mechanisms generally help process and integrate difficult experiences, while avoidance often prevents processing
In therapy, the goal is typically not to eliminate all avoidance (which can sometimes be appropriate), but to develop a flexible range of coping strategies so that avoidance isn't the only or primary response to difficulties.
-
Yes, everyone has defence mechanisms. They are a universal part of human psychological functioning, not just something present in people with psychological disorders. Defence mechanisms develop naturally as part of our psychological growth and serve important protective functions.
From early childhood onward, we all encounter situations that create anxiety, conflict, or emotional discomfort. Defence mechanisms evolve as ways to manage these experiences and protect our psychological equilibrium. They help us:
Regulate emotional distress
Maintain self-esteem and a coherent sense of self
Navigate conflicts between desires and reality
Manage relationships and social interactions
Cope with threats, losses, and traumatic experiences
What varies among individuals is:
Which particular defence mechanisms we tend to rely on
How flexible or rigid our use of defences is
Whether our defences are primarily mature or immature
How aware we might become of our own defensive patterns
People with healthy psychological functioning typically develop more mature defence mechanisms (like humour, sublimation, and anticipation) while maintaining flexibility in their use. They can adapt their defences to changing circumstances rather than rigidly applying the same patterns regardless of context.
In psychodynamic therapy, increasing awareness of one's defence mechanisms isn't about eliminating them entirely—as they serve necessary functions—but about understanding them, developing more mature alternatives, and gaining greater flexibility in their use.
“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and come out later in uglier ways”