Psychological protection

Psychological defense — situational actions and techniques that reduce mental stress that protect from mental pain or other unpleasant experiences. Often this includes internal actions, actions that protect a person not in a specific situation, but from the most difficult and painful process of life, protecting the personality core, although here it would be more accurate to talk not about psychological, but personal protection.

Psychological defense should not be confused with the so-called psychic self-defense, where people try to close themselves off from the psychic attacks they feel from others. This is, apparently, the area of ​​minor psychiatry.

Psychological defenses are very diverse. They can be interpersonal and intrapersonal, conscious and unconscious, operational and habitual, controlled and mechanical, healthy and neurotic. They can be carried out as internal actions (for example, in the form of distorted perception), and in external actions, protective behavior (for example, raising the voice in warning or discharging aggressive impulses on others). It can be either an instant way of thinking (for example, denying what is happening), or a way of life that lasts for years (for example, Adler’s overcompensation).

The three main varieties of psychological defenses are reasonable, problematic and neurotic defenses. Reasonable defenses are used by healthy people for reasonable purposes, they can be recommended and they are worth learning. They are so natural and understandable that they are not usually referred to as defenses either.

If you understand that this person is gu.e.yang or a little mentally ill, you, rather, in order not to strain your psyche, stop communicating with him. This is a psychological defense and, at the same time, just a reasonable behavior.

Problematic defenses are much more interesting. These are the methods that are used by both adults and children, and adult people-children, when they make life easier for themselves at the expense of others, and even then, as a rule, only for a while and with a subsequent increase in their own troubles. The most elementary defenses, which almost all children quickly learn, are worthy of being named by us. First of all, this is playing the Unfortunate Victim, playing Durik, playing the Little Child and practicing the role of Trickster.

However, in the psychological (more precisely, psychotherapeutic) environment, the focus is on neurotic defenses. The list of such defenses includes many dozens of names, and each researcher is different: here you can see the most common types of psychological defenses in a single list. It seems that making detailed lists of psychological defenses can be as endless and pointless as making a list of all the ways a child lies.

You see, children and neurotics are creative beings, and every day they can invent new ways…

Unfortunately, there are no clear boundaries separating psychological protection from simply bad manners and bad habits. Those who see bad manners in not quite adequate behavior are looking for opportunities for a person to teach more adequate behavior. Those who see psychological protection in the same behavior are looking for an opportunity to treat it. It seems that both approaches are right, but the first action should be teaching, educational influences — they are usually simpler, more effective and do not put a person on psychotherapy.