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Are You Thinking Your Feelings Away?

Life brings many forms and degrees of pain and suffering. Not all of them interrupt our lives, create significant distress, or affect our relationships or work. But certain events, experiences, triggers, relationships, or people can evoke a level of distress that we cannot always manage in the way we would like. Especially when we encounter traumatic, or catastrophic events, the result can be deeply painful and emotionally and physically taxing, either in the moment or in the aftermath.

These experiences may bring shame, guilt, deep anxiety, or fear. Because such emotions can be painful to remain with, we do not always allow ourselves to fully experience them. This can be because these feelings feel too overwhelming to contain internally and become difficult to tolerate because of the thoughts, behaviors, and bodily sensations they evoke, and often also because they interfere with our actions and relationships, disrupt our plans and goals, and create social consequences for us, including rejection and loss. As a result, our minds find other ways of coping, often in the ways of subtly changing or reframing the reality in a way that makes us tolerate or adapt, at least in the moment, until they become rigid and unhelpful.

Defense mechanisms

From a psychodynamic theory perspective, the ways we cope, particularly our ways of protecting ourselves against uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, impulses, and internal sensations, are often called defense mechanisms. Defenses are not inherently pathological or dysfunctional. We all have them, and we rely on them as needed. Often, they protect us and help us adapt. Eventhough there seems to be at least a number of defense mechanisms that we all tend to share, the way they show up for us can be quite individual, which makes it imperative that we look at them with care and gentleness to recognize and work with them.

Some defenses work by making us detached from our emotions

Defense mechanisms have many forms and functions. They can appear in quite different ways across our lives. To tolerate unbearable feelings and events, our minds might distort, interpret, or engage with reality in many ways, and some of these seem particularly focused on detaching from emotions. Some key defense mechanisms that do this are isolation of affect and intellectualization. These are not necessarily defenses that exist alone or develop in a particular sequence. They can overlap, contribute to one another, or occur simultaneously in the same person for different reasons.

Isolation of affect describes our mind’s way of working where it separates emotion from our conscious knowledge of that same experience. Every event in our lives contains facts, information, and descriptions that we can put into words. But experiences also carry feelings. When we experience isolation of affect around something, we may appear to have little or no emotion about it. There is a kind of numbing, although it does not have to extend across our entire emotional life. It may be specific to certain experiences or events. With isolation of affect, we know what happened. We can remember it, describe it, and talk about it with others. But as we do so, we may not feel much of anything about it.

Imagine a traumatic experience from childhood. We may be able to describe it clearly, yet remain disconnected from the pain, grief, betrayal, or shame that accompanied it. We know that it happened, and we may even know intellectually what emotions would ordinarily accompany such an experience, but somehow those emotions are not felt in our body or fully alive in our mind. It can be as though our autobiographical memory has become an encyclopedic entry rather than an emotional and immersive experience.

Another way we can distance ourselves from emotion is through intellectualization. Intellectualization involves turning emotional experience into something that can be analyzed, explained, theorized, categorized, or understood as knowledge.

When we do this, it can feel as though we are processing our emotions because we understand them so well. But when intellectual understanding isn’t accompanied by emotional experience, it can distract us and detach us from what we feel, which may delay its processing and integration.

For example, living with chronic health issues and pain can be profoundly difficult, and it is understandable that the emotions may at times feel unbearable. In that context, we might be resorting to intellectualization to provide us with a measure of protection, for example, by focusing on understanding, analyzing, or finding explanations for our condition and pain, rather than allowing ourselves to fully experience the fear, grief, anger, helplessness, or sadness that may accompany it. In this way, thinking about the experience can create a sense of distance from the experience itself, making it feel more manageable while temporarily protecting us from emotions that may feel overwhelming. Often, the theorizing and analysis that we engage in as a form of intellectualization defense do not necessarily support our decision-making or insight and therefore differentiate themselves from typical reasoning and decision-making based on intellectual knowledge.

If we think about it, detaching from our emotions in this way is an amazing adaptive mechanism our brains have evolved, and it helps us in numerous ways in real life. For example, people who work in highly stressful situations might be relying on an isolation of affect to protect themselves while carrying out difficult tasks. First responders, surgeons, and firefighters, for example, may need to separate themselves from emotions they might otherwise naturally feel toward the people they are helping. For example, a first responder may feel considerable empathy for a patient’s pain and vulnerability when they arrive at a scene. Yet during the operation, they need to remain focused on the task rather than becoming overwhelmed by those emotions. Our brain’s capacity to isolate affect can therefore protect them from emotions becoming overwhelming, disruptive, or even harmful to the task at hand. When adaptive, these defenses can help a person stay connected to their competence, skills, judgment, and capacity for problem-solving. But that same protection can also become limiting.

When our defenses become rigid and limiting

According to psychodynamic theories, one important argument about defenses is that they are not usually conscious choices. We are often unaware that we are using them. This is part of what makes them a bit of a mystery. Our minds alter or organize our experience in ways that can feel natural and automatic. 

Although a defense may be traceable to an earlier event that helped establish it, the patterns through which we use defenses, such as when we use them, with whom, and in what situations, are often outside our awareness. We may notice some of their consequences without recognizing the defensive process itself, and it may not become recognizable or malleable until we put effort and reflection into it.

Similarly, defenses can generalize and globalize across experiences, relationships, and situations. This means that we may not only disconnect from painful emotions but we may also become disconnected from experiences that are more desirable, such as those that make us feel alive, excited, motivated, connected, or purposeful.

These are some of the reasons defenses can become rigid and limiting instead of helpful. When this happens, we may find it empowering and supportive to notice them, reflect on them, and explore other ways of coping, what psychodynamic theory might describe as more mature defenses or coping capacities, for example. 

Working with our defenses and reconnecting with our emotions

Defenses are ways our minds have learned to organize experience to survive and adapt. They appear to have important functions, and they are often remarkably useful. From a psychodynamic therapy perspective (the perspective which uses the terminology of defenses to describe the mental processes we explained above) the goal is not necessarily to eliminate defenses. What we can do instead could be to become conscious of them, or recognize and become more aware of them. Through meaningful reflection and observation, self and collaborative, we can begin to recognize when a defense is operating and what it may be protecting us from. Therapy can be especially helpful here because our therapist can provide a kind of mirror that allows patterns we cannot easily see ourselves to become more visible and support us in expanding our capacity for more flexible and empowering ways of coping with our otherwise overwhelming emotions. Therapy can also help us understand where defenses might have emerged as a result of not feeling safe enough to experience certain emotions. Perhaps those feelings once felt dangerous, overwhelming, or unacceptable. Therapy can then support us by acting as such a safe container for these emotions to finally emerge, as well as by supporting us in creating safety in our individual lives in ways that work for us.

Takeaways:

  • According to psychodynamic theories, defense mechanisms are ways we protect ourselves from uncomfortable thoughts, impulses, and emotions, and they can be adaptive rather than inherently pathological.
  • Some defenses help us tolerate unbearable experiences by distancing us from our emotions, including isolation of affect and intellectualization.
  • Isolation of affect separates our emotional experience from our conscious knowledge of an event, allowing us to remember and describe what happened without fully feeling it.
  • Intellectualization turns emotional experiences into something to analyze, explain, or theorize about, which can create distance from feelings and delay their processing and integration.
  • Defenses can become rigid when they operate automatically and generalize across situations, disconnecting us not only from painful emotions but also from experiences that make us feel alive, connected, motivated, or purposeful.
  • Therapy can help us recognize when defenses are operating, understand what they may be protecting us from, create a safe space to experience difficult emotions, and develop more flexible and empowering ways of coping.

References & further reading

  • Cramer, P. (2015). Defense mechanisms: 40 years of empirical research. Journal of Personality Assessment, 97(2), 114–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2014.947997
  • Cramer, P. (2008). Seven pillars of defense mechanism theory. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(5), 1963–1981. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00135.x
  • McWilliams, N. (2011). Psychoanalytic diagnosis: Understanding personality structure in the clinical process (2nd ed.). The Guilford Press.
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