DEFENCES AGAINST CHANGE
All human beings develop ways of protecting themselves from pain, fear, shame and grief. When someone is confronted by the need to explore or face up to painful feelings, memories and situations, habitual defences come into play. This tendency is made stronger when the person is threatened with changes to self-concept and world - view.
The familiar, however unpleasant and uncomfortable, is safer than the risky unknown. It must be remembered that defences have, or had, survival value, and as such have positive characteristics as well as negative ones. If a persons defences are battered down before he is ready and able to deal with whatever is being defended, enormous damage can be done. Thus it is vital that people are given the time and space to tackle their problems at their own pace. Then, even if the defences do not fall of their own accord, recognising and acknowledging them with the counsellors help and support becomes a positive move towards growth and health. Otherwise, whatever defences are made useless by the counsellor, will be replaced by other, more desperate defences - or the client will simply stop coming for counselling.
Everyone has their own way of defending themselves, but there are some common forms of defence and resistance to change.
1) Denial
Sometimes the only way to deal with something is to deny that it exists. If certain aspects of life are associated with overwhelming pain, the mind has a way of closing off that area, allowing the person to behave as if it did not exist or had never happened. This is a largely unconscious process.
A form of denial can be used more consciously by people who have to live with the unthinkable - for example, the progressive illness and certain death of a loved one. Such people may deliberately set that knowledge aside in order to get on with their lives. This is a helpful mechanism, as long as the reality can be acknowledged and accepted at least from time to time.
True denial, the refusal to accept the reality of a situation or feeling, is fine as a temporary measure (it is a common short-term reaction to sudden death, for instance) but has harmful consequences as a long-term strategy.
Unresolved issues, which have been banished from consciousness, inevitably turn up in some disguised form, such as psychosomatic symptoms, phobias, neurosis, or simply high levels of stress. It takes energy to keep the unacceptable at bay, energy, which could be used more constructively to live a fuller and more effective life.
The counsellor builds up a picture of what is being denied from hints and clues dropped by the client during counselling. Only when a client feels sufficiently secure in the relationship, and has maybe worked through other, related issues, may the mind release its grip on the banned material and allow him to tackle it. The counsellor can help by creating a safe place for this to happen, and by offering the client opportunities for getting closer and closer to the crucial issues.
2) Withdrawal
Some people react to stress or pain by withdrawing into themselves, and cutting themselves off emotionally (and sometimes physically) from those close to them. It is the equivalent of pulling up the drawbridge and dropping the portcullis.
This may have been an effective defence in an environment where positive support was hard to find, but it prevents the person from asking for, or being able to accept, help in the present. Generally, people who come for counselling have already made a move outward, but withdrawal may be used frequently during the counselling process when the person is confronting difficult issues. It is both a warning to the counsellor to back off, and evidence of the importance of that particular issue.
3) Displacement activities
Displacement activities are patterns of behaviour which people show when they feel threatened or uncomfortable. They are recognisable because they always happen at certain kinds of moment, and they have the effect of distracting attention from the issue at hand. Smoking can be a displacement activity as well as a way of calming nerves; the actions of handling a cigarette packet or filling a pipe, finding a match or lighter, lighting up etc. give the person a breathing space and allow him to shift the spotlight away from the dangerous area.
At the right time, the clients attention can be drawn to the displacement activity, and he can be asked to sit with what is happening inside him at that point. In future sessions, the appearance of the activity then becomes a signal to the client as well as the counsellor that something important is happening inside the client.
4) Talking as a Defence
A common defence in articulate people is talking at a great rate and with few pauses. Talking is a specific form of displacement activity. It allows the person to avoid feeling the feelings associated with what he is talking about.
When such people are made to stop, and experience the feelings which go along with the subject matter, the effect can be dramatic.
The feelings are happening underneath the talk, but the person is successfully masking them from consciousness by concentrating on head stuff.
The counsellor needs at some point to stem the flow and persuade the client to risk
staying with the feelings in order to gain insight into what those feelings really are. Then the feelings can be explored and dealt with.
Talkers are notoriously difficult to counsel as they are usually experts in the avoidance of painful feelings and slide back up into their heads at the first opportunity. Just keeping track of what they are saying taxes the counsellors concentration. Firmness and confidence on the part of the counsellor are needed in order to work effectively with this defence.
5) Anger
Anger is used as a defence in many different ways. Anger is a powerful and active emotion, unlike grief, and fear, and shame, which disempower people. Anger is therefore frequently used as a mask for other, more painful or less acceptable feelings. Counsellors need to learn to distinguish between genuine anger, which is an appropriate reaction to a particular situation, and false anger, which is being used defensively. Anger can also be used as a defence against depression. Some habitually angry people are in fact suffering from masked depression. In other words, their chronic anger enables them to keep active in the face of the disempowering force of their depression. Once the source of the depression is understood and dealt with, the anger is no longer needed to keep them going.
6) Blaming
One way in which a person can deflect bad feelings about himself is to blame others, or Fate, for his troubles. Such a person may talk of being unlucky, of receiving unfair treatment from other people, of being picked on and discriminated against, of not having had a chance.
Much of what he says may have its roots in fact, but until he is able to accept responsibility for himself in the here-and-now, and look at the ways in which he himself may be contributing to the situation through his negative self-concept and / or distorted world view, he is not likely to make any progress. Before people can make positive improvements to their lives, they need to take full responsibility for themselves in the present.
Exploring and understanding how past experiences have shaped their lives then becomes a positive move towards psychological health, rather than a justification and an excuse for continuing to feel helpless and inadequate.
7) Lying
People do not always tell the truth to their counsellors. Clients who lie are indulging in severely self-defeating behaviour, but lying is, after all, one of the most obvious and successful defences against punishment.
A client who lies believes that the truth will alienate the counsellor, or that the counsellor will be disapproving and judgemental if they learn the truth.
The only way to disarm a liar is to make it clear to him that the truth will not have the negative effect he fears; to make him feel sufficiently valued and respected to risk telling the truth.
He may test the counsellors non-judgementalism by trying out a little bit of the truth. If the counsellor passes the test, more of the truth may emerge bit by bit.
Some people have become habitual liars and find it very difficult to break the habit, even when they know that it is neither necessary nor useful.
Into this category come people who have developed the habit of fantasising about themselves, spinning stories about their background, their exploits and their experiences. Extracting the facts from the fiction is a time-consuming process and not always a successful one. However, even the fiction has its uses in that it offers evidence of the persons needs and fears.
Habitual liars and fantasisers are likely (though there are other, less sympathetic reasons for people to become so) to have such low self-esteem that they do not believe their true selves to be in any way acceptable. They may also have been reared in an environment so hostile to their personal development that lying became a necessary tool for survival.
Counselling of people in this state is usually a long-term process. Counsellors need to be very alert to inconsistencies in what the client says and to the clients body-language. It is also important to be able to challenge the client firmly but acceptingly.
8) Shock Tactics
The client who sets out to shock the counsellor is most probably trying to defend the indefensible. It is an aggressive defence in that the person seeks to establish or maintain a dominant position by throwing the counsellor off-balance. There are many reasons for someone to use shock tactics. One is that he may be saying, in effect, I know how bad I am, you dont have to tell me. He is assuming that the counsellor will pass negative judgement on him. Another is that he is desperately trying to justify actions which are important to him whilst defending himself against his own secret knowledge that what he is doing is wrong. Substance abusers or sex offenders may use this type of defence for example.
A third is that he is only able to maintain a bearable level of self-esteem by pretending to be hard, and the evidence for his hardness is his ability to say and do things which other people would not dare to do.
If the counsellor falls into the trap of being shocked, or expressing a negative judgement, they may as well end the counselling then and there.
However, such tactics can make counsellors feel very uncomfortable, especially if they are women counselling men who use sexual shock tactics. Support from a colleague or supervisor may help the counsellor to deal with personal feelings.
Clients who use shock tactics need to learn, firstly that they are not going to work, and secondly that they are not necessary. It may take a great deal of perseverance, and consistent accepting behaviour, on the part of the counsellor before such a client feels able to risk showing bits of his true self.
9) Humour
People sometimes hide their hurt and their low self-esteem behind a mask of humour. This includes the jokers, who have so often been laughed at that they now deliberately set out to make people laugh (Ill do it before you can do it to me); the people who are always putting themselves down, but in a funny way to hide how much it hurts (they are also testing all the time the truth of what they are saying, so every time you laugh, you are confirming their poor view of themselves); people who make light of the impact on them of serious problems or events, because they cannot allow others to see how devastated they really are; and people who, in the counselling room, turn away any comment from the counsellor which gets a bit close to the mark, with a flip comment or a joke. The counsellor needs to challenge the joker client, to point out lack of congruence, both between what is being talked about and how it is being talked about, and between the humorous language and the not-at-all humorous body-language.
Humour is often a very courageous defence, indicating someone who has managed to find a way of protecting himself or herself without cutting off from other people or being aggressive towards them. It is usually very moving for a counsellor to deal with someone whose apparently upbeat and perky attitude hides a great deal of pain or grief.
