Common Defense Mechanisms and a Reflection of Ones I Use

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In our everyday life, we meet and interact with different types of people that has diverse cultural view, behavior, and approach to similar situations. When Sigmund Freud coined the term “Defense Mechanism”, he gave it a simple definition to the term— “The ego’s protective method of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.” With this simple definition, these are some of the mechanism that my brother and I used unconsciously.
Regression
This type of defense mechanism is used when people are anxious and want to calm themselves down by performing a comforting act. In my brother’s case, whenever he feel anxious or worried, he reverts to eating his nails. By returning to his childhood stage of oral pleasure, he is able to forget or reduce the magnitude of the unpleasant situation. When my brother and I had an interview at American Embassy, we both was anxious whether the interview would go well and get our visa or not. At this moment, my brother was eating all his fingers nails one-by-one until the interviewer started asking questions.

Reaction Formation
Reaction formation can be defined as a mechanism that changes bad thoughts and feelings into their opposite. For example, sadness/anger into happiness and hating thoughts into affection. As it is a little hard to understand this defense mechanism, reaction formation is all about admitting. If a person does not want to admit that he/she has some kind of feeling or emotion on something or someone, they tend to show the opposite side of it. My brother has a strong feeling towards living on his own by the year he is eighteen, unfortunately this feeling at the same time made him anxious and he does not want to admit it. To reduce this stress, whenever there is a conversatio...

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...hone. The Next morning my family has received a phone call from America that said my uncle has passed away. He was living in America at the time. After I heard the sad news, I was totally confused, “this cannot be happing”, I had a talk with him yesterday evening, it was a painful time, I could accept the reality at the time. How could this happen over a night? We were so close to each other, and that makes it hard to believe and accept the fact. As a matter of fact I still could not believe that happened, and it will always be a mystery for me.
Overall, by using regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, displacement, and denial as a defense mechanism to alter the reality, gave the human kind a little time to think and reduced their stress. As all defense mechanism work involuntarily without our conscious, it is hard to control and avoid it.

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