Why Do I Do That?: Psychological Defense Mechanisms and the Hidden Ways They Shape Our Lives

According to the many psychodynamic theorists who have written about this, from Freud onward, the unconscious carries all the thoughts and feelings we either find too painful to bear, or which conflict with our morality and values and undermine our self-image. In other words, we don’t want to know about the contents of our unconscious.

Beginning at birth, babies have powerful feelings and fears about the world in which they live. A big part of their parents’ job is to help them manage those feelings – to calm and make them feel safe, for example, or to soothe them when they hurt. If we grow up with caretakers who let us down, who don’t provide the emotional support we need, we wi

Shame is the crippling legacy of an impoverished childhood, one of the most powerful and least understood emotions that drive us to rely excessively on our defense mechanisms.

If you block out the awareness of your own needs, you’re unable to develop true intimacy.

Our defense mechanisms are invisible methods by which we exclude unacceptable thoughts and feelings from awareness. In the process, they subtly distort our perceptions of reality – in both our personal relationships and the emotional terrain within

If our needs aren’t met during infancy when we’re utterly vulnerable and helpless, if our parents make us feel unsafe in the world from early on, it will shape our ability to trust and depend upon other people for the rest of our lives.

he hath ever but slenderly known himself. – King Lear, Act I, Scene i

Babies who come from such families never develop that fundamental sense of trust and safety in their world; they may be plagued by anxiety about what might happen. And instead of developing the self-confidence that goes along with trust, they may instead feel a deep sense of shame.

3. Each of us needs to feel that we matter and have a place in the world; we need a sense of internal worth and to feel that the other people in our lives (our “pack”) value and respect us. When our early environment doesn’t instill us with this sense of individual worth and value, we’ll struggle with issues of shame and low self-esteem throughout our

Your habitual ways of interacting with the important people in your life tell us a great deal about the defense mechanisms you typically use.