A note from Tine: Welcome to another edition of Tim Talks! For those who are new to Beautyholics Anonymous, Tim Talks is a new series on the blog where my husband, Tim, will be sharing his knowledge to help raise mental health awareness. Tim is a psychiatrist who works in metro Melbourne. His area of interest is child, adolescent and youth psychiatry.
Today, he talks about something I find highly fascinating because it never occurred to me that there are things that I do that are considered my defence mechanism to deal with little things that stress me out in any way. The title of the post “Stuck In Our Ways” is really apt because I am stuck in my own way to protect myself against the slightest sort of stress and/or negativity. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Read on to find out.
© Joshua Earle
Before entering into the field of psychiatry, I have always been curious to find out what underlies certain behaviour that we observe in people we come into contact with. For instance, why do some sensible people get entangled in self-destructive patterns such as substance misuse, restricted eating or gambling?
Sigmund Freud was one of the earlier proponents of this term ego defences, which is our mind’s unconscious efforts to protect against unwanted anxieties, feelings or impulses when we are encountering stressful situations. The thing to emphasise here is that this is an unconscious mechanism, and it is not confined to each of us using one defence in all situations. As such, we do have a limited degree of control over the function of these defences.
Various forms of psychotherapy try to unpack and increase our awareness of our defences, so that we can make conscious attempts to modify our responses to these defences.
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