Defenses

Defenses are the necessary protections we developed against overwhelm. At their core, defenses are a version of emotional/psychological self preservation. Usually we develop a set of defensive strategies in childhood and it tends to be one that is specific to our childhood environment and the kinds of overwhelm that occurred there.

As theory goes, we encountered certain overwhelming events in childhood—meaning something we could not tolerate or process with the resources we had available to us—and in order to cope with this overwhelm, we found a way of having protection against it. If the patterns of overwhelm were chronic in our childhood environment—for example, what was overwhelming to us was a personality trait or defensive strategy of our parents—we re-used the strategies that worked and stopped thinking about the origin of them. In this way, both our defenses and the events that incited them become unconscious or out of our awareness to us.

As adults, these defensive strategies can rear their head in ways that are difficult for us to notice because they’ve become automatic. The process of working with defenses to become less defensive in individual or group therapy starts with awareness of what is going on and a depth of understanding . Mental health professionals are well-suited partners for working with defenses, as they are equipped both with an understanding early childhood development and the ability to effectively navigate the barriers surrounding defensive strategies—oftentimes there is a great barrier of shame or intolerable emotion keeping us from addressing our defenses.