On Finding Out How We Don't Know Ourselves in Therapy and Counselling. (On Defences, Part One.)

The concept of defence mechanisms is one of the oldest psychoanalytic concepts. LIke other psychological concepts, defence mechanisms have to an extent reached into popular consciousness and understanding. For instance, we have an understanding that denial is a way of warding off knowledge that seems unbearable. 

Like many psychoanalytic concepts, defence mechanisms are provocative. Defence mechanisms are not the tamer idea of coping strategies. Defences are a matter of life and death. The client sits securely (or insecurely) behind their defences, their only safeguard against a therapist who is waging an offensive war aimed to bring reality crashing in on them (all for their own good, of course!). It may be evocative, and may capture the imagination, but that that's not the way therapy is. Or perhaps ever was.

My recent study of intensive short term dynamic psychotherapy (ISTDP) has made me look again at the currently neglected (even amongst psychoanalytic psychotherapists) idea of defence mechanisms. Beginning to incorporate ISTDP into my practice has made me much more ready to point out my client's defence mechanisms to them, and to help them understand the cost of using those defences. This series of posts will try to capture the lived experience of using some of the more common defence mechanisms, as well as the costs that this can have. We'll start with the defence of withdrawal.

Touch a sea anemone, and you'll notice the tentacles instantly shoot backwards... And then over time watch as the anemone cautiously begins to unfurl it's tentacles back out into the world. Some people act like this. Dreading overstimulating emotional contact, they withdraw either emotionally or physically to preserve their sensitive inner world from the perceived threat of devastation. This may be a conscious choice, or it may still be a choice but one that is made at quite an unconscious level. Withdrawal may be slight, such as taking a moment to look away during a difficult conversation, in order to marshal one's thoughts, or it may be extreme and prolonged such as the case of someone who lives mainly in their own fantasy world rather than through real interactions with other human beings. 

One of the advantages of using withdrawal as a defence mechanism is that unlike many other defences, it may leave our view of reality relatively undistorted (compared to, for instance, a defence such as projection.) On the down side, by overusing the defence of withdrawal we may lose opportunities to learn better how to overcome difficult interpersonal challenges, and we may help create dynamics in which others such as our partner, may have to chase us in our withdrawal in order to maintain a relationship.

Counselling and therapy isn't about dismantling our capacity to withdraw (or use any other defence mechanisms), but to help us to know what we are doing by using them, and to at times make choice to not defend ourselves, or to use different defences when that would help us to live happier lives.