DEFENSE MECHANISMS Flashcards
Denial
One of the few defenses that is often consciously employed. Refusal to admit or acknowledge reality or an obvious truth.
Displacement
Taking out frustrations, feelings, and impulses on less threatening person or object. Instead of yelling at your boss, you go home and yell at your spouse.
Dissociation
Mental Detachment from your immediate surroundings. Can range from zoning out to more severe forms such as dissociative fugue.
Fantasy
Tendency to retreat into one’s imagination in order to resolve or avoid psychic conflict.
Humor
A mature defense. Making joke about thing that would otherwise be to difficult to speak of.
Identification
Joining with another person or modeling your behavior, ideals, or beliefs based on theirs. Sometimes employed to displace feelings of envy.
Intellectualization
Using abstraction or scientific reasoning to avoid direct experience of difficult feelings.
Isolation of affect
creating a gap between an emotion and the experience of that emotion. For example, talking about a violent incident with little to no expression of fear. anxiety, or sadness.
Projection
Accusing another person of having the feeling that is difficult for you to express to yourself.
Rationalization
Using logic or rational explanation to make certain behaviors and feelings tolerable. Making excuses.
Reaction Formation
Unacceptable feelings or impulses are channeled into the exact opposite. For example showering an enemy with gifts and praise.
Regression
Moving to an earlier developmental time. Often seen in children experiencing the birth of a younger sibling or students going off to college.
Repression
The exclusion of unacceptable impulses s or experiences from conscious awareness. In its most extreme form, this can manifest as psychogenic amnesia.
Somatization
Expression of negative emotion or psychic conflict through the body via physical symptoms that have no medical cause.
Splitting
Black and white thinking. The Inability yo integrate good and bad aspects of the self or others.
Sublimation
Channeling of unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable behavior. For example aggression channeled into contact sport s or depressive feelings expressed through creative writing.
Undoing
Attempting to take back some behavior or action that is seen by the self as unacceptable.
