1/22/11 Defense Mechanisms It has been said that with age comes wisdom. In my case this is true, but with the passing of the years (I am the ripe old age of fifty-eight) have also come hundreds of hours of therapy. In the course of my lifetime I have risen from the depths of near insanity to achieve and maintain a reasonable level of emotional equilibrium. I am in no way stating that I have come anywhere near the level of true enlightenment and most likely never will. My quest has however enabled me to effectively utilize the healthier defense mechanisms in my daily life and not fall back into the negative consequences of the use of the more primitive. The mechanism that I utilize the most and is the most effective for me is intellectualization. The book totally missed the mark on this one. I believe that Margaret Sanger’s reaction to the loss of her home was a very healthy emotional response to what most people would mistakenly believe to be a tragedy worthy of unnecessary and lengthy grieving. “I was neither disappointed nor regretful…. In that instant I learned the lesson of the futility of material substances. Of what great importance were they spiritually if they could go so quickly?... I could… be happy without them. This defense mechanism is adaptive, although defensive in that it distorts the grief of the tragedy” (text p. 44). I would suggest that calling losses, or as I prefer to call them transitions, tragedies worthy of unnecessary amounts of grief is a distortion of reality. The events in our lives are neither good nor bad. They are simply events and it is our perception of them that makes them good or bad. If we are able to interpret loss as a transition rather than a tragedy than it loses the power that we allow it to wield over us. Two years ago, my wife and I suffered a complete financial collapse due to a business decision combined with the recession. As a result, we lost our entire life savings, the equity in our home, most of our IRA, and were forced into bankruptcy which resulted in the loss of our once stellar credit rating. The state of North Carolina also deemed it necessary to revoke my contractor’s license for the crime of poverty resulting in the inability to pursue my chosen trade. We are also currently engaged in an ongoing battle to keep our home out of foreclosure. When all of this happened, I fell into a deep depression and grieved my losses to the point of adversely affecting every aspect of my daily life. I also became very angry at the injustice of it all. I am fully aware that suppressing these emotions would likely do more damage than feeling them, but neither is a healthy way to deal with them. I went back into therapy and as a result of a conversation with my therapist discovered Stoic philosophy. The Stoics deal with emotion on an intellectual, logical, and rational level. A popular misconception is that to be stoic is to be without emotion. This is not true. To be stoic is to engage in appropriate and healthy ways to express and personally deal with emotion. On the subject of loss and grieving, the Stoics believe that one’s eyes should be neither too dry nor too wet. Everything, including our lives, is on temporary loan to us and because of that we should not attach an inappropriate amount of importance to these things that we have no real control over. We are but temporary caretakers of what has been given us and should not complain when it is time to return it. I believe that true intellectualization is to put more emphasis on ‘rational’ thinking and less on feeling. This for me has been a result of several years of philosophical study and practical application and is still and will always be a work in progress. I am bi-polar and have issues with ADD, OCD, and PTSD. Here again, I am able to utilize intellectualization to my benefit. I’m not entirely certain that the symptoms related to these disorders (anxiety, panic, depression, mania, etc.) could be classified as true emotion, but nonetheless I have found that I can effectively deal with them for the most part through the process of intellectualization. This situation is completely different from let’s say standard emotion because they are almost impossible to suppress. I have no choice but to feel them. There are days that my symptoms are so bad (mainly anxiety) that I just want to jump out of my skin. Fortunately I have come to the point where I can tell myself that this will pass and tomorrow will be a better day. More often than not, logic and reason rule the day and I am able to ride it out. Sublimation has been beneficial to me in the past and continues to be useful to me today. When I was young, I played guitar in rock bands and found it to be useful as a way to vent frustration and let off steam. I had aggressive tendencies and venting them through performing and playing music allowed me to act out without doing any damage. The pursuit of athletic endeavors such as cycling, working out, and hiking, has also been beneficial to me as a way to relieve pressure. I have also taken up woodworking as a hobby. When I am in my shop the outside world ceases to exist. All of my woes and troubles vanish and I transcend into an almost Zen like state. Both mechanisms help me in all of my relationships. I use to act out on virtually every feeling or emotion that came into my mind. Both business and personal relationships suffered as a result. Being able to think about and rationalize a possible negative impulse before acting on it, and having creative and physical processes to sublimate possibly harmful emotions before they can reach the surface and damage my relationships has helped to make my once very difficult life manageable.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 18:34:21 +0000
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