Recognizing & Dismantling Your Defenses
There are many feelings you may be accustomed to automatically burying (without your conscious awareness). It is especially common to avoid feelings associated with pain or conflict. The unconscious strategies we use to resist or avoid feelings are known as defense mechanisms (aka "defenses"). Recognizing and interfering with defenses are essential steps that must be taken to help you achieve the freedom you desire: freedom to feel, freedom to “deal” with your feelings constructively, freedom to love, and freedom to mindfully live a life of your own choosing.
Commonly used defenses include angry outbursts, intellectualizing, rationalizing, yelling, giving up, acting out, bullying, drinking, eating, shopping, and cheating, but there are many more automatic strategies people use to estrange themselves from their feelings. When people habitually ignore their true feelings, they become stuck in anxiety or dependent upon their defenses in order to handle the many powerful feelings of life, especially the uncomfortable ones. This reliance on anxiety or defense as a "feeling management strategy" can lead to unhealthy and destructive habits. Unless it is a strategic choice, automatically, mindlessly detaching from your feelings is likely to lead you to make mindless, bad choices that won't allow you to reach your full potential in love and in life.
This habit cycle showcases how an unpleasant or uncomfortable trigger (e.g., messy feelings) can spark habitual behaviors (defense mechanisms) that lead to (short-lived) relief (reward) which perpetuates the cycle. The temporary reward increases the likelihood we will repeat the behavior to achieve relief even though the behavior is ultimately destructive to us, our loved ones, and other people we engage with. Dr. Jud’s video sheds light on how our brains form habits. Mindful awareness can be an important first step toward eliminating destructive habits.
Strong or painful feelings can trigger anxiety in any of us, especially if we were raised to keep our feelings under wraps. Ignoring your anxiety, or replacing it with defense mechanisms guarantees you will be limited in your ability to adaptively deal with routine and major problems of living. When I work with clients, together we drill down to discover how and which intense unprocessed feelings trigger your anxiety. Then it becomes clearer to see how the unhealthy behaviors that follow are automatic responses (defense mechanisms) whose function is to push away both the intense feelings and the anxiety they trigger.
By addressing the feelings underneath your anxiety (instead of burying those feelings), relief from your anxiety symptoms is possible. Most importantly, dealing with your true feelings leads you to free yourself by breaking the dysfunctional patterns of behavior that have kept you stuck in your relationships and in life (e.g., feeling bad, living beneath your potential, repeating self-destructive patterns, and feeling trapped or in a rut). By learning how to identify and dismantle your destructive patterns, you can learn to live life freely…in celebration of yourself, your loved ones, and your life.