6 Defense Mechanisms People Use To Avoid Facing Their Real Emotions, According To Psychology
You will end up controlled by your emotions if you don't allow yourself to feel them.
Juanmonino | Canva If you keep using defense mechanisms to avoid your feelings, they might end up wreaking havoc on your psyche. The one most crucial element which makes us who we are — humans — is our ability to experience and express a plethora of emotions.
Can you imagine yourself without the ability to feel and respond to those feelings? You would rather not, because, sans emotions, we lose a major part of our identity. Life is beautiful solely because we are gifted with the superpower to feel.
What do we usually do when we feel overwhelmed with emotions? Instead of letting the emotions flow, we do the worst by using all of the defense mechanisms at our disposal to ward off the feeling; anything we can get hold of — avoidance, denial, ignorance, or suppression — to take control over our emotions.
What we get oblivious to is that this only leads us to be psychologically more conflicted and devastated. Research showed that alienating our emotions as a temporary solution only brings forth graver consequences in the future.
As said by Sabaa Tahir in A Torch Against The Night, “Your emotions make you human. Even the unpleasant ones have a purpose. Don’t lock them away. If you ignore them, they just get louder and angrier.”
Here are the defense mechanisms people use to avoid facing their real emotions:
1. Denial
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Have you ever been faced with a situation so triggering that you simply choose to believe it never happened? Or that nothing is wrong and you are okay? If you answer in the affirmative, you have already been there.
When we experience something uncomfortable, embarrassing, or traumatizing, we simply choose to deny it because denying seems easier than confronting the difficult feelings.
But it’s necessary to know that denial helps, but only in limited quantities and periods. Denial keeps us away from reality and, hence, makes it harder to get access to our true internal world.
So, the faster you acknowledge your emotions, however unpleasant they are, the faster you get in touch with reality and the quicker you get over the painful emotion.
2. Withdrawal
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Withdrawal is when a person does not want to interact with or participate in activities with other people, even the ones they initially liked interacting with. It is a total cut-off from human contact and is different from occasional withdrawal from socializing.
Some people withdraw because they feel overwhelmed around other people or when they fail to control their intimidating negative emotions like anger, jealousy, envy, guilt, shame, frustration, etc., which places them in a humiliating situation.
Others might also withdraw from situations and people because they do not want to feel the negative emotions evoked by the stimuli. Of course, this is a maladaptive way to deal with conflicting and undesirable emotions, because one cannot withdraw permanently for life just to avoid feeling negative emotions. Withdrawing also results in the person slipping into loneliness.
While sometimes a temporary coping mechanism, persistent withdrawal can have negative consequences on relationships and overall well-being. A 2021 study explained that overcoming emotional withdrawal requires addressing the underlying emotional issues and developing healthier coping mechanisms. This may involve therapy to help individuals understand their triggers and develop strategies for managing difficult emotions.
3. Avoidance
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Avoidance is the first step to ultimately withdrawing. A person avoids as long as possible, but withdraws when all other means to ward off the feelings go in vain.
If you are at a party and someone is trying to flirt with you and you don't like it, then maybe your first thought will be to avoid him/her.
When we are faced with an unwanted situation, our primal instincts are to either face or avoid it, something we know as “fight or flight.” This makes avoidance a defense mechanism to protect ourselves from undesirable situations.
Often, when we experience negative emotions, we try to forcibly push them aside by dictating to ourselves that the triggering stimuli are not potent enough.
When someone says something bad about us, if we feel hurt and still tell ourselves to “Just forget about it,” “Leave it,” or “It’s not a huge matter,” we are actually not validating our true feelings. We rather, are avoiding it.
4. Humor
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It is always easier to laugh away your pains than to explain to oneself and others how you feel. It’s surprising to note that people who have experienced emotional neglect, lack of love, and understanding in childhood use more jokes and humor as a defense to lighten others and themselves.
Making jokes and laughing at them is easier than facing our discomfort. But over time, if you always laugh away your disturbing feelings, you gradually deprive yourself of the empathy, understanding, and support that you deserve. People start believing that your jokes are a cause of your genuine happiness and contentment in life, and not a shield to protect your unacceptable emotions.
5. Emotional eating
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Imagine a person eating as much as possible to stuff down whatever he/she is feeling and to push the feelings back to where they came from. Our main reason to eat is to satisfy our physiological need for hunger, but many people end up eating to relieve stress and cope with feelings like loneliness, boredom, self-hatred, and sadness.
Every time you feel sad, you end up ordering yourself a pizza to “make yourself feel good” or just sit with a pint of ice cream because you are feeling lonely or don’t feel productive.
When eating becomes your basic coping strategy for daily problems, you never really get a chance to address the feelings underlying it. This type of emotional eating gets you stuck in an unhealthy cycle. Eating might be temporarily rewarding, but the feelings that triggered it are left unresolved, which will recurrently come back.
One study concluded that food can temporarily dampen stressful feelings. Foods high in fat, sugar, and salt can become more appealing when you are under stress, in a bad mood, or feeling bad about yourself. Because of this, emotional eating often becomes a habit.
6. Distraction
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Every single day, we consciously force ourselves to distract ourselves from unacceptable things to regain our focus on things we feel are comparatively easier to handle. Avoiding our feelings by distracting ourselves is something that we do on a daily basis to keep freeing ourselves from the emotional trauma we will have to otherwise go through.
Suppose you are upset over how your boss criticized you at work, and now you are completely engrossed in ruminating over the conversation and the feelings of worthlessness, shame, guilt, and self-loathing that the incident triggered in you.
You would likely keep yourself busy by watching TV, reading books, or playing games over the phone, just to distract yourself from all the unhealthy thoughts plaguing your mind.
Instead of trying to find out the ‘whys’ and ‘whats’ of the incident, you end up trying to distract yourself from the emotion, which again is a useless way of coping.
Distraction can be temporarily beneficial, but over time, it will come out in sneaky ways, like through displacement, in which you will ultimately end up unconsciously displacing these suppressed emotions on people and things other than the actual trigger.
Distraction is distinct from avoidance; it involves a temporary shift in attention, while avoidance involves altogether avoiding the situation or emotion. However, a 2016 study suggested that engaging in physical activity, spending time with loved ones, or pursuing hobbies can be healthy ways to manage emotions, providing a temporary break and promoting positive emotions.
When we hinder our natural flow of emotions, we are not being genuine to ourselves. Unexpressed emotions are badly regulated emotions.
Research builds on the venerable idea that people who chronically inhibit the expression of their true emotions may be more prone to a wide range of diseases than those who are emotionally expressive.
There have been empirical studies of an association between the inhibition of anger and hostility on the one hand and essential hypertension and coronary heart disease on the other.
Studies by Pennebaker and his colleagues in 1997 demonstrated that individuals who repress their emotions also suppress their body’s immunity, making them more vulnerable to a variety of illnesses ranging from common colds to cancer.
Cancer onset and progression are also highly dependent on how emotionally expressive you are. Looking at the entire picture, it is conclusive that emotions, however unacceptable they might be if left unexpressed or unregulated, will lead to consequences that are far more fatal than imagined.
Shreyasi Debnath is a writer and a psychologist who focuses on mental health, self-care, and self-love.
