Evolving Your Ego’s Defenses

Defining the Ego and Defense Mechanisms

I find the ego to be such a fascinating phenomenon. On the one hand, it can be incredibly useful because it helps us make sense of the world and our place within it. This ultimately allows us to navigate the complexity of our lives. On the other hand, it gets us all wrapped in ourselves and involved in sticky situations in our daily lives. And it often does so in insidious ways, or at least in ways that are unconscious to us.

As a brief recap, the ego is our sense of self — it’s the story we tell ourselves and others about who we believe we are. And the ego is an elaborate system. It has all sorts of filtering and processing techniques. These techniques help us integrate our daily experiences into our current model of the world. One of the major processes the ego is responsible for is defense mechanisms.

Defense mechanisms are strategies the ego uses to deal with information that lies outside of its current model of the world. As humans, when we bump up against information that conflicts with our worldview, we tend to experience instinctual and emotional reactions. Another way of saying that, is that things that go against what we believe cause us stress and difficult feelings (sound familiar?).

From an adaptive perspective, this makes sense. Systems resist change in an effort to stay alive and avoid collapse. This is true for all living systems; and because the ego is a meaning-making system, it resists change. In the ego’s effort to help the individual make sense of a complex world, it tries to reject information that seems to threaten its integrity.

The problem with this is that if we don’t accept new information into our meaning-making systems, we don’t grow. And stagnation can also lead to system deterioration and psychological death. Thus, our task is to manage the balance between self-preservation and personal growth.

As a note, defense mechanisms are not an inherently good or bad thing. They are necessary ways we cope with our lives. However, some defense mechanisms are going to lead to harsher consequences for ourselves and others. Other defense mechanisms are going to be more conducive to our evolution and constructive for our society.

The bright side of this is that the ego matures throughout life, and so do its defense mechanisms. According to George Vaillant’s hierarchal theory of ego defenses, there are 4 levels of defenses, ranging from least mature to most mature. Each level contains a set of specific defenses, which I’ll go on to explain in this piece.

The Defense Mechanisms

Level 1 — Psychotic

Denial: This defense mechanism is about refusing to acknowledge certain things about reality, normally because owning it would cause us immense discomfort. We basically deny the existence of stuff that feels like it challenges our ego’s integrity.

Distortion: Through distortion, we shape and bend our understanding of our external circumstances to make ourselves feel more comfortable on the inside. So, if you got a bad grade on a test, you convince yourself that the test-makers designed it poorly, or intentionally put trick questions on it.

Delusional Projection: This is ultimately about developing a false picture of our external circumstances. The grand picture we’re seeing is not truly there. We believe in a version of the world that we imagined and that is not actually grounded in reality.

Level 2 — Immature

Acting Out: This one, to me, seems to be one of the most common ones in society. When we act out, we take all those uncomfortable inner feelings and impulses, and behave in an automatic way that releases them. This often leads to negative consequences in the real world. Examples of this could be temper tantrums, public social media rants, destroying property, hypersexual behavior, and so on.

Fantasy: Using our imagination defensively to deal with internal needs, impulses, and emotions. Examples of this are frequent daydreams about other people when we’re with our partners, or frequent daydreams about being on vacation while at work. Fantasy is a normal part of the human experience. It becomes a problem when we are often leaning on it as a way to avoid or escape our reality, and then not doing the work in the real world to make our reality less miserable.

Projection: The core expression of this defense is judgement. When we project, we see in others what we aren’t owning within ourselves. We do this because, in one way or another, we think whatever impulses or feelings we have are unacceptable. For example, a dad who calls his son a wimp is likely disowning his own inner view of himself as a wimp, or disowning the fear that he might be seen as a wimp by other people.

Passive Aggression: This one is about dealing with our inner conflicts and negative emotions in a passive way. Instead of asserting ourselves to those around us and clearly expressing how we feel, we do so indirectly. Examples of this are sarcasm with an underlying tone of aggression, backhanded compliments, or the silent treatment.

Somatization: When we internalize negative feelings, it can end up showing up as physical symptoms and negatively affecting the body. For example, we may develop stomach ulcers or a heart condition due to prolonged stress that’s not dealt with in a constructive way.

Level 3 — Neurotic

Displacement: Shifting our unacceptable impulses to less threatening targets or redirecting them to safer outlets. For example, if we’re angry at our boss, we may come home and yell at our kids, because our kids can’t fire us.

Dissociation: When we dissociate, we basically disengage or detach from our physical and emotional experiences. We do this in an effort to protect ourselves from feeling emotional discomfort. In a sense, we shut a part of ourselves down, which may leave us feeling spaced out, foggy-minded, and disconnected from reality. We may also find later on, that we have no memory or recollection of the experience.

Intellectualization: Ultimately, using thinking to protect from feeling. This is not a bad strategy, per se. It’s useful under certain circumstances. However, if we’re always leaning on it and using it defensively (i.e. to protect ourselves from feeling difficult things), it can keep us from fully processing and integrating our experiences. Consequently, it can inhibit our growth, and it can also keep us from being able to emotionally connect with others.

Reaction Formation: When we act out the opposite of what we’re really feeling as compensation for what we deem is unacceptable to feel. For example, we’re cheating on our spouse so we’re more loving and affectionate to them than we’ve ever been, or we act extra nice to someone we actually hate.

Repression: Disowning our feelings and impulses and pushing them so far out of our conscious awareness that we don’t even know they’re there anymore. This does not, however, mean they’re no longer there. They still are there, lurking in our unconscious, and influencing our lives in insidious ways. For example, a man who was shamed and beaten for crying when he was sad in early life may have learned to disown feelings of sadness. This does not mean that he does not experience sadness, but he is not at all aware of the fact that he does. If asked, he would likely say to you, “I never feel sad and I never cry.”

Level 4 — Mature

Anticipation: The ability to anticipate and prepare to deal with future situations that will bring about difficult feelings. For example, if one knows the death of a loved one is likely in the near future, one begins mourning months ahead of time, having end of life conversations, preparing a proper will, and saving vacation time at work to take a leave when it finally happens.

Suppression: The ability to “put the feelings away” temporarily in order to deal with them later. This does not mean one avoids, denies, or represses, but rather acknowledges there is a more appropriate time to deal with them. For example, you feel angry about something your spouse said to you in the middle of a work dinner, so you set it aside and deal with it later when you both are home alone.

Humor: The ability to make light of something without losing the connection to its gravity. Although humor is considered a mature defense, it can be harmful when overused or when used as a form of denial or avoidance. The key here is to be able to both acknowledge and feel the difficult feelings, while using humor to introduce some relief.

Sublimation: This one is about channeling our negative instincts and emotions into constructive behaviors or activities. We could, for example, channel our anger into exercise, our anxiety into gardening, our aggression into a martial arts practice, our jealousy into creating more connection in our relationship, or our heartbreak into writing poetry.

Altruism: I call this the Saint Teresa of Ávila defense mechanism. This one is about taking all that emotional and instinctual energy within us — anger, rage, frustration, fear, disappointment, grief, jealousy — and channeling it into giving back to others and making the world a better place for future generations. For example, a colleague of mine is channeling his rage over racial discrimination and injustice into a non-profit that teaches writing skills for free to underserved populations. This is some other-worldly type of maturity. We use the energy to serve others, and this brings catharsis, personal satisfaction, and personal growth.

How This Applies in Our Personal Lives

So having laid out all of the above, I believe this framework applies to us in our personal lives in three main ways:

1. Deepening Our Self-Knowledge

We can use this framework as a reference to look ourselves in the mirror, moment-to-moment. Which defenses do we most commonly resort to? Does that change based on the environment we’re in? Do I tend to use certain defenses with certain people more often than others? Have my defenses evolved over time? Can I catch myself in action the next time I’m interacting with someone and a defense is coming up?

2. Doing Our Own Inner Work

Using the self-knowledge we garner through our inner exploration and inner questioning, we can begin to practice catching ourselves in the moment of a defense and potentially choosing another one. For example, if we catch ourselves about to act out, maybe we try sublimation instead. If we catch ourselves intellectualizing, maybe we allow ourselves to feel the emotions instead and use humor to make it more tolerable.

This is the brick-by-brick process of evolving our defense mechanisms to more mature ones; of unlearning old patterns and learning new ones. This is turning the mirror toward ourselves, taking responsibility for ourselves, and then working on ourselves. This is not easy work. Take your time, embrace the process, and be easy on yourself.

3. Deepening Empathy for Others

OK, so this one is key. The point is not to change others with this knowledge. Please don’t go around using this as a weapon against them, or as a tool to try to change them. That’s not our responsibility. Our responsibility is to work on ourselves while meeting others where they’re at and relating to them deeply.

What this knowledge can do, however, is help us have a greater understanding of others and how they are making sense of their world. Through that, we deepen our empathy for them, our acceptance of them, and possibly deepen our sense of connection to them.

This empathy and connection alone can be transformative for them, but that should not be our aim. Once again, our aim should be to work on ourselves while meeting others with deep empathy and presence.

A Final Note

This article is based on the research of Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, who furthered Freud’s work on defense mechanisms and categorized them into a hierarchy of maturity. Vaillant has been a pioneer in the study of adult development and has actually advocated for the ego (checkout his book, The Wisdom of the Ego). He sees the ego as the mind’s way of giving some semblance of order to an otherwise chaotic, complex, and uncertain world.

That is to say, having an ego and expressing ego defense mechanisms are just a normal part of being human. I truly believe that the goal for us as humans, when it comes to the ego and its defenses, is not to try to get rid of them altogether. That’s not even possible. Instead, we can evolve our relationship to our own ego and work on cultivating mature defense mechanisms throughout our lives.

This allows us to both maintain a stable way of making sense of the world in our daily lives, while continuing to allow new information in that challenges us and catalyzes our personal evolution.

If you enjoyed this piece and would like to learn more about the ego and personal evolution, I share exclusive content on these topics just for those who are subscribed to my newsletter.