Responding To Stress I - Defending

Responding to stress generally takes one of two forms: defending or coping. Defending behaviours reduce the stress or anxiety without eliminating the source. Coping responses restore balance and remove the threat. Because coping requires resources like strength and time, most early responses to stress are defensive rather than effective in coping.

Defensive reactions to stress, conflict and anxiety can involve either palliative treatments or defense mechanisms.

A. Palliative Measures
Palliative measures are treatments that alleviate the pain or distress without effecting a cure. Some palliatives are medicinal, such as taking a pain-relieving drug for a tension headache(instead of identifying and removing the source of tension). Others are distracting or numbing, such as drinking alcohol or taking psychoactive drugs to forget about problems or reduce anxiety.

Obviously, palliative measures can solve an immediate problem(symptomatic distress) but increase the risk of a greater problem in the long term. Like other defensive measures, palliatives may ultimately make the effects of stress even worse than before they were applied.

B. Defense Mechanisms
According to psychoanalytic theories of personality, a product of unconscious conflicts is anxiety, a feeling of dread or fear. Because the conflicts are unconscious, they cannot be recognized or addressed in a directly conscious behavioural strategy. As a result, behaviour is likely to become defensive rather than to effectively cope.

The behavioural strategies or responses made to alleviate or reduce anxiety are termed defense mechanisms. Freud and other psychoanalytic theories identified a number of patterns in defense mechanisms. Here, nine of them: repression, denial, displacement, projection, regression, reaction formation, rationalization, intellectualization and sublimation, will be examined.

1. Repression
Repression is the most common defense mechanism and underlies all the others. In repression, painful thoughts are excluded from conscious awareness. A student ill-prepared for work in a college course 'forgets' that the examination is scheduled for today. A victim of child abuse cannot remember exactly how he was bruised.

2. Denial
Denial involves behaviours that reduce the severity or importance of unpleasant information. In denial one refuses to acknowledge a painful reality. A woman whose husband has left her tells her friends they have agreed to a trial separation. A man who has chest pains decides it must be indigestion (rather than a heart problem) and chooses to buy an antacid rather than consult a physician.

3. Displacement
In displacement one redirects emotions and motives from their original targets to substituted objects. After being criticized unfairly by her boss, a woman returns home and starts an argument with her husband, displacing her aggression form her employer to her spouse. Positive feelings can also be displaced. A shy young man who loves an attractive, popular woman may redirect his attentions to her less intimidating, more approachable best friend.

4. Projection
In projection one attributes one's own motives or feelings to someone else. A man who has cheated on his wife may feel guilty at first, and then angry, accusing his wife of having cheated on him. Participants in failed ventures may later accuse each other with 'it was all your idea'. Projection allows one the opportunity to relocate the problem outside of oneself.

5. Regression
One regresses when one's behaviour takes an immature form, like whining, throwing a tantrum, or bullying. It is a common reaction to frustration. An older child who is jealous of her parents' attentions to a new baby may resurrect her own 'cute' infantile behaviours in an effort to win their attentions again. A man who is angry at his wife's insistence on visiting her family may pout and complain until they leave.

6. Reaction Formation
Sometimes a person is motivated in ways that he or she knows are unacceptable to cultural or religious values. If the unacceptable goal is attractive, he or she may develop a reaction formation by excessively attacking or eliminating it. Reaction formation expresses the opposite of the individual's true feelings. A worker who is jealous of a colleague's success may exaggeratedly praise his work. A woman who feels guilty about disliking her own child may become inordinately protective and affectionate. A community leader with a secret interest in pornography may become a hostile anti-pornography, pro-censorship crusader. Exaggeration and fanaticism are the hallmarks of reaction formation.

7. Rationalization
Rationalization involves inventing acceptable reasons for one's behaviour. An alcoholic will justify 'one more drink' by arguing that it will relax him and help him again the strength to abstain. A consumer who has paid too much for a vehicle because it is attractive justifies the purchase as a good investment with high resale value. Rationalization is also a process involved in self-justification in the wake of cognitive dissonance.

8. Intellectualization
Sometimes emotional conflicts can be made bearable by analyzing them in an intellectual, unemotional way, a process called intellectualization. Surgeons and nurses who face life-and-death crises may discuss them in cold, clinical terms, or even make macabre jokes. A leader who advocates war may talk of 'deploying a weapons system targeted at guerrilla headquarters' instead of bombing a town full of men, women and children.

9. Sublimation
For Freud, all defense mechanisms involved the dangers of maladjustment and increased anxiety -- except sublimation. Sublimation is a process of transforming unconscious conflict into a more socially acceptable form. An aggressive child works to become a star athlete instead of a violent criminal. A person suffering from unrequited love devotes effort to loving and caring for unwanted children. Freud believed that sublimation might be a necessary strategy for reconciling one's selfish urges to the constraints of civilized society.



The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty:
not knowing what comes next. ~ Ursula LeGuin

The world around us changes constantly. Trees turn from green to beautiful shades of yellow, orange, and brown in the fall.

Yet, even if we watched the trees carefully, every minute of the day, we could not actually see the colors change.

Change requires time, preparation, and patience.

To make the changes we want, we need to let go of unhealthy but comfortable patterns that we're stuck in, the way the trees let their colors change and finally let go of their leaves altogether.

We can't have total change right now, no matter how much we want it.

It's important to accept both who we are now and who we are becoming.

Just as the tree trusts without question that its leaves will grow and let go of them when the time comes, we can believe in our own power to grow and let go of our accomplishments when the time is right.

When we do, we can be assured that our lives will blossom again, like trees in the spring coming to life after a cold winter.