How Your Mind Denies Reality By Using Its Defense Mechanisms

If you've ever wondered why sometimes other people don't see things the way you see them, you will be surprised to learn that your brain distorts reality to help you survive or cope with complicated situations around you. However, at a certain point, these well-intentioned defensive mechanisms can become harmful by preventing you from evolving.

Defense mechanisms are an area of ​​interest for both neuroscience and psychotherapy, and they can be described as a substitute for real suffering. By using them, your mind is trying to keep you away from unpleasant emotions in an unconscious way by distorting the objective reality. 

When you fail to manage a situation emotionally you need to continue to be functional, which is the reason why you develop defense mechanisms, also known as creative adjustments. They may be extremely useful at the time they appear, but it's essential to realize when they are starting to work to your detriment.

People can develop as many defense mechanisms as needed, some can be very simple and recurring such as psychological projection or denial, while others can be specific and customized to your needs. The particular ones are much more complex and suited for your life experiences, and can vary from tens to hundreds, from very minor and benign to very intense and destructive.

Let's explore some of the most popular defense mechanisms and understand how they can be overcome. 

Psychological Projection

What is it and how does it work?

Psychological projection is an adaptive mechanism that involves projecting undesirable feelings or emotions onto someone else, rather than admitting to or dealing with the unwanted feelings.

A very interesting aspect of projection is that it makes it difficult for you to differentiate between your own inner universe and others', filled with beliefs, values, or experience by misinterpreting what is "inside" as coming from "outside".

The wonderful book called Why Therapy Works, written by an author named Louis Cozolino, who has several volumes illustrating the intersection between neuroscience and psychotherapy, states that defensive mechanisms have emerged to help you distort reality in a way that is favorable to your survival.

Particularly, projection is an automatic process that relaxes you, decreases your anxiety because you can get rid of unpleasant thoughts. On the other hand, self-awareness can create a lot of stress and requires the effort of introspection, a lot of work from your conscious mind to realize that your belief might be false.

Projection in practice

For example, if someone at the office constantly annoys you and you don't notice that this feeling is directly related to that person, projection might lead you to believe that that person has something against you. 

The same mechanism applies if you are a suspicious person who doesn't easily trust others. When you interact with new acquaintances you make a lot of effort to prove to them that you are trustworthy, because you are convinced that they might be suspicious, even though you know nothing about them.

Another example is when you think that someone else might not like you back, which doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they don't like you but with the fact that you might have low self-esteem which makes you think that someone like that doesn't want to have a relationship with you. 

Projection makes you avoid even applying for a job because you think they're definitely not interested in what you have to offer. If it's a company with very high standards, projection makes you not see your low professional self-esteem, so you project refusals from potential companies you could work with to avoid the pain of being aware of your own shortcomings.

Social anxiety

Social anxiety, a common condition, is based on the mechanism of projection because having a certain poor image of yourself makes you project it on others as well. If you think you're not good-looking or lack enough knowledge you tend to think that others expect you to look or speak in a certain way so you prefer to be isolated.

Denial

What is it and how does it work?

A very common mechanism is denial, which is often discussed in therapy, especially when it comes to certain types of addictions. 

This mechanism is one of the most primitive and specific to the early development of children, and it makes you refuse to accept certain painful events or ignore the reality of a situation because you can't manage to deal with them emotionally.

Denial makes your conscious mind blind to every concrete sign that might show you you're in a nasty situation, even though it's obvious from the outside. When awareness arises, it can be much more painful to accept the truth and lose something precious to your emotions than staying in the current situation that's harming you.

Common examples of denial

For example, a very common case is being in painful and toxic relationships but still trying to distort reality in order to justify remaining in that relationship. That usually happens because the suffering of losing the relationship is too great to face the fact that there is nothing left of it that still brings you joy and fulfillment in your life.

Accepting that it's usually your fault in a toxic relationship, that your current personality is not capable of adjusting is much more threatening than accepting that the other person is abusive. 

By using the defensive mechanisms, the unconscious mind always wins something, because otherwise, it would not set them in motion.

Confirmation Bias

The What and the Why

Confirmation bias is your rational mind's inclination to look for evidence and facts that prove a hypothesis that you are attached to, something your emotional brain has decided to consider as being true. 

Also known as myside bias, it is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports your prior beliefs or values.

Your emotional mind makes your rational mind make the effort to look for arguments that confirm your new hypothesis, even if it is very different from the first one, which is another proof of the fact that humans are not rational.

Common confirmation biases 

For example, you decide to buy a house after having a pleasant emotional experience visiting it, you liked the position, the space, the surroundings, so you only think of arguments that are in favor of buying it. Interestingly, if due to certain circumstances you ended up not buying that house, you only focus on reasons why it wouldn't make sense to be a house owner or get a huge loan for it as if that's the explanation for not buying it. 

Confirmation bias can also apply to the case when you are convinced that a colleague does not appreciate you, or consider you competent enough, and only notice unpleasant experiences with that person. Your low self-esteem makes you interpret any interaction with that person as proof for your theory and you specifically focus on the evidence that strengthens your conclusion, instead of seeing the bigger picture where there are also positive examples.

The ups and downs

Defense mechanisms can keep you stuck at a lower stage of development instead of allowing you to grow up and see new interpretations of reality that must be faced even though they might be painful. Basically, defense mechanisms keep you stuck at the age you were when you started to develop them.

It's essential to emphasize that not every confirmation bias is also a defensive mechanism because your emotional mind learned them as mental shortcuts in a world with frequent physical threats in order to make some instant intuitive decisions that could save your life. 

A confirmation bias is a mental shortcut that is sometimes useful because makes you selectively choose rational arguments from reality or evidence that supports your hypothesis in order to quickly prove to yourself that what you believe is true.

Anchoring bias

Anchoring bias is another cognitive bias that makes you rely too heavily on the first piece of information you are given about a topic. When setting plans or making estimates about something, you interpret newer information from the reference point of your anchor, instead of seeing it objectively.

For example, when you think about how much a thing might cost, the first price you hear related to that product category serves as an anchor for you to judge whether or not other products you discover in that category are cheap or expensive. 

If the first reference you hear about the price of cars is the price of a luxury car that's around 100k, you might think anything else lower than that is cheap or worry that you will never afford a car. This is not necessarily a defense mechanism, but a mental shortcut that gets you out of the unknown.

Rationalization

What is it and how does it work?

A more advanced defensive mechanism that might be familiar to you is called rationalization, especially if you are the kind of person who perceives the world in data, factual information, and objective reality. 

Rationalization is an unconscious attempt to avoid addressing the underlying reasons for your behavior. Your controversial actions or feelings are justified and explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner in the absence of a true explanation, and are made consciously tolerable, or even admirable and superior, by plausible means.

Rationalization in practice

A common example is going through a difficult breakup and being asked how you are feeling by close ones. Rationalization makes you start to analyze very rationally why the relationship couldn't have worked - personality differences, conflicting aspirations, better now than later - instead of sharing what you actually feel - it's been hard, I'm lonely, I'm hurt.

There are always purely rational arguments for something extremely emotional, which may sometimes sound ridiculous because they are not connected at all. 

Rationalization also helps you avoid unpleasant emotions by taking everything to a pure neocortical realm.

Displacement

What is it?

Another relevant example is displacement, which is the inclination to redirect a negative emotion from its original source to a less threatening recipient.

When does it occur?

For example, your boss might annoy you at the office but you try to suppress your emotion in order to avoid the potential consequences. However, when you get home, you are no longer in the office situation where your boss has power over you so you pour all your anger on your loved ones because you need to release the nervous tension elsewhere. 

Displacement occurs especially in professional situations where you may live with the belief that you can't talk about your emotions or needs, you can't show your vulnerability so you gather frustrations and unsaid thoughts that bother you. Unfortunately, all these things do not disappear, they accumulate inside you and when you are full you may make other innocent people suffer.

Letting Go Of Harmful Defense Mechanisms

Therapy or close ones may help you discover your defensive mechanisms because they have the ability to see things from the outside, there is an emotional detachment that allows them to see other perspectives and present them to you. 

Dealing with defense mechanisms may be associated with tidying up your home and getting rid of all the things you collected that are not useful anymore.

These mechanisms are not negative characters. On the contrary, they have played a critical role in helping you overcome very difficult moments. However, you may need help to realize when they no longer have a place in your inner home so that you can eventually try to find more mature and effective coping strategies that are not harmful to your development.

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The content of this article was adapted and translated with permission from the  Mind Architect Podcast by Paul Olteanu, Season 2, Special Episode 1 - Defense mechanisms or how your mind fights reality