Anxiety and Defense Mechanisms

People often experience situations that bring uncertainties and trigger unconscious protective measures that allow them to cope with unpleasant emotions. According to Cramer, these measures are termed as defense mechanisms and are useful in enabling people’s mind to reach compromise solutions to conflicts that they are unable to resolve. Additionally, defense mechanisms help people protect themselves from the feelings of guilt or anxiety, which arise because they feel threatened. When it comes to using defense mechanisms, I am not exceptional because like many other people, I often experience various problems and conflicts in my everyday life. Two defense mechanisms I use in response to various situations are repression and sublimation.

The first defense mechanism is repression. I applied it when I encountered the lowest and darkest moment of my life when I lost my best childhood friend Alisha in an accident. One Friday afternoon when walking home from school along a busy highway, a drunk speeding driver veered off the road and headed towards us on the pedestrian lane. While I was lucky to escape with only a few minor injuries, Alisha was severely injured. We were both rushed to the hospital. I was treated and discharged, but my friend was admitted to the ICU, where she died one week later. Six years have passed since that traumatizing incident. The repression defense mechanism helped me to cope with the situation, enabling me to avoid the disturbing thoughts of having lost a close friend.

The second defense mechanism is sublimation. As a teenager, I had friends whose peer influence made me develop some undesirable behaviors such as alcohol and drug abuse. Many of these behaviors adversely affected my academic performance and relationship with my parents and siblings. The more I tried to avoid my friends, the more tempted I became. In a bid to avoid this temptation, I engaged in positive activities such as writing music, attending dance classes, participating in sports, and helping with household chores. This defense mechanism helped me cope with the situation, enabling me to apply my emotions in constructive rather than destructive activities.

In addition, I severally witnessed other people feeling anxious, threatened, and overwhelmed. To deal with such situations, a range of defense mechanisms come into play. For instance, my neighbor, who got married not long ago, used the defense mechanism to abandon her husband after a quarrel. A few months after the couple got married, they engaged in an argument, and the young wife returned to her parents’ home because she felt insecure and not taken care of by her husband. She reported that her husband was a verbally abusive and irresponsible drunkard who regularly engaged in unnecessary fights. She also said that her husband was sloppy, careless, and messy. She lamented having been married to an irresponsible man and vowed to not return to him. In my point of view, the young wife used regression as a defense mechanism. By regressing, she was trying to retreat to the time when she felt safe and protected by her parents before she got married. As Cramer notes, whenever people are distressed, anxious, afraid, or have memories, thoughts, and feelings that are challenging to deal with, they regress to the patterns of behaviors used earlier in development, often childish or primitive ones. In other words, they generally move back in psychological time. In this case, the young wife was faced with the stress of adult life and associated anxiety, which subsequently made her seek comfort in things which she associated with more security and happiness.

The discussed situations that defense mechanisms both in my case and in case of my neighbor were effective. Thus, repression and sublimation defense mechanisms were useful in dealing with the loss of a close friend and peer pressure respectively. As for the person known to me, regression defense mechanism helped the young woman escape from her abusive husband. Hence, it is common for people to use defense mechanisms whenever they feel guilty, anxious, or threatened.

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