Defense Mechanisms Flashcards
Painful feelings that are forgotten, but return occasionally. Example: forgetting the details of a really bad car accident or event.
Repression
Unpleasant reality is ignored, and a realistic interpretation of potentially threatening events are replaced by benign but inaccurate ones.
Denial
Unpleasant feelings are kept through a conscious effort to ignore them.
Suppression
The undesirable feelings are attributed to another person or persons. Example: an angry person believes others are angry at him; a person who is critical of others believes they are critical or him.
Projection
Taking frustrations and negative feelings out on other things. When emotions are taken out on unrelated things/ people.
Displacement
Treating someone you dislike in an excessively friendly manner in order to home your true feelings. Reduces anxiety by taking up the opposite feeling or emotion.
Reaction formation
When confronted by stressful events, people sometimes abandon coping strategies and revert to patters of behavior used earlier in development. Example: a 5the grader sucking their thumb.
Regression
People with an oral ________ have problems with drinking, smoking, and nail biting when they experience stressful events.
Fixations
Taking on the characteristics of someone else. Example: taking on the characterictics of someone important- parent, athlete, celebrity, ect.
Identification
An attempt to deny one’s true motives by using a reason that is more logical or socially acceptable than one’s own reasons. Example: if a person says they didn’t care anyways that they didn’t make a team.
Rationalization
Compartmentalizing ones experience so that an event becomes separated ffrom the feelings that associated with it, allowing it to be part of your conscious mind without the threat of painful feelings. Example: grieving after a parents death.
Isolation
involves rechanneling the energy connected with an unacceptable impulse into one that is more socially acceptable. Example: channeling aggressive tendecies into playing contact sports.
Sublimation
devoting unusual efforts to achievements in order to overcome feelings of inferiority. Example: a young person becomes physically disabled and compensated by working hard academically and becomes a doctor.
Compensation
