The concept of defense mechanisms originated with Freud to describe how people cope with anxiety. Compass Therapy explains defense mechanisms with the use of the Self Compass. Here are some examples:
Projection is a defense mechanism whereby one is so uncomfortable with
personal deficiencies that they are disowned by projecting them onto other
people, who are then seen as possessing these negative traits. Here is how Compass Therapy predicts projection
works in terms of personality patterns found around the Self Compass:
- Pleasers and Storytellers project onto others their hope for approval instead of learning to approve of themselves, projecting self-assurance onto others, creating a compelling inner need for external reassurance.
- Arguers and Rule-breakers project their cynicism and spite onto others, assume the worst in people, and feel justified in their contempt for others. They even project their hostility onto groups or society as a whole, feeling as a consequence that others have malevolent intentions and are out to get them.
- Worriers and Loners project their withdrawal onto others and therefore see people as withdrawing from them; they even project their rejection of others onto humanity as a whole, feeling like outcasts from the human race.
- Boasters and Controllers project their hidden inferiority feelings and fear of being judged onto others, so that other people are viewed as flawed and deserving of their judgment.
Displacement means taking an emotion that occurs in one situation
where it seems too threatening to express and displacing it onto a subsequent
situation that seems less threatening. Here is how Compass Therapy interprets displacement:
- Pleasers and Storytellers displace onto others the depression that lurks under their social facades, and then reframe themselves as the caregivers who cheer up those who seem unhappy. This spares them from facing the lack of identity that secretly depresses them.
- Arguers and Rule-breakers frequently become irritated and angry, displacing this agitation from one situation or relationship to the next, and then ventilating with acerbic explosiveness on an unsuspecting person.
- Loners and Worriers displace energy for living into a fantasy life that requires no risks or social contact.
- Boasters and Controllers displace and convert the anxiety hidden beneath the mask of cool composure into steely resolve to impress others with their command of a situation.
Isolation is a defense mechanism where some aspect of the self
is dissociated from consciousness and exiled to the unconscious.
- Pleasers and Storytellers isolate anger and resentment from conscious awareness, and create a compensatory niceness.
- Arguers and Rule-breakers isolate love and forgiveness from consciousness, and bristle with contrariness.
- Loners and Worriers isolate risk-taking and involvement from consciousness, and stagnate in apathy.
While psychoanalytic theory offers the hypothesis of repression and
acting out of unconscious impulses to account for why people behave
destructively, Compass Therapy offers a biblical view that misguided self-will
holds human beings captive to rigid personality trends and patterns, thereby
estranging them from God’s healing love, and that all people stand in need of
the reconciling grace of Christ that makes loving self, others, and God
possible, transforming destructive tendencies into actualizing growth.
And while the psychoanalytic methods of free association, the
interpretation of ego defense mechanisms, and the effective resolution of
transference offer valuable means for making the unconscious conscious, Compass Therapy adds that people can move directly into growth and health by applying
the Self Compass, taking appropriate growth stretches into unused compass
points, and developing more flexible, balanced behavior.
