It’s been a doozy of a week, attempting to unravel from what I was late to realize was not a healthy relationship.
As my fiancé (who is still very much in the picture) points out, “There are three sides to every story: my side, your side, and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently.”
The quote—attributed to movie producer Robert Evans—highlights how individual defense mechanisms may color your perception of a situation. Defense mechanisms are mental processes you may unconsciously employ to displace anger, alleviate discomfort, or protect yourself from uncomfortable emotions or situations. Defense mechanisms may temporarily ease stress and protect you from feelings of anxiety, threats to self-esteem, and things that you don’t want to think about, deal with, or take accountability for.
Defense mechanisms offer coping mechanisms or strategies for defending against perceived threats to your survival and physical integrity, including potentially stressful interpersonal conflicts.
What is a Defense Mechanism?
Defense mechanisms are unconscious strategies for separating and protecting yourself from unpleasant events, actions, threats, thoughts, or unwanted feelings, such as guilt or shame.
Defense mechanisms are ways you react to situations that bring up negative emotions. When you experience a stressor, your subconscious monitors the situation to see if it might lead to emotional harm. It may react with a defense mechanism to protect you or help you distance yourself from anything you don’t want to experience or take accountability for.
Defense mechanisms may allow you to navigate painful experiences by deploying strategies of self-deception to avoid discomfort. The unacceptable thought or emotion may be denied, rationalized, or projected onto someone else.
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Some of the most common mechanisms of protecting yourself against emotional pain include:
- Projection: Attributing your feelings, traits, or motivations to others. For example, projecting anger onto someone else or blaming another person for your flaws. Projection works by allowing the expression of the desire or impulse, but in a way that the conscious mind does not directly recognize, therefore reducing anxiety.
- Denial: Pretending that negative experiences haven’t occurred or refusing to recognize or acknowledge something has occurred or is currently occurring that would lead to anxiety. If you are in denial, you may block or reject external events or circumstances from your mind so you don’t have to deal with the painful feelings or emotional impact. Denial can involve a flat-out rejection of the existence of a fact or reality or admitting that something is true, but minimizing its importance. In other words, denial helps you avoid events. Sometimes, people will accept reality and the seriousness of the fact, but they will deny their responsibility and instead blame other people or outside forces.
- Repression: Acts to keep difficult thoughts or unpleasant information from entering into conscious awareness. Instead of facing potentially upsetting thoughts and painful memories or taking accountability for your behavior or actions, you may choose to hide them in hopes of forgetting them entirely. However, these memories don’t just disappear; they continue to influence our behavior. For example, a person who has repressed memories of abuse suffered as a child may later have difficulty forming relationships.
- Rationalization: Involves justifying a mistake, unacceptable behavior, or problematic feeling with seemingly logical reasons or explanations, which may allow you to avoid the valid reasons for the behavior. You may even attempt to explain undesirable behaviors with your own “facts,” which may make you comfortable with your choice, even if you know it’s not right on another level. For example, you might rationalize a poor work review by blaming your boss rather than taking accountability for your performance. Rationalization not only prevents anxiety, but it may also protect self-esteem and self-concept. When explaining success or failure, you may use this defense mechanism to attribute achievement to your qualities and skills, while failures are blamed on other people or outside forces.
- Intellectualization: Focusing on the intellectual rather than emotional consequences of a situation. This reduces anxiety by thinking about events in a cold, clinical way. It allows you to avoid thinking about the stressful, emotional aspect of the situation and instead focus only on the intellectual component. For example, in the face of a potentially concerning medical diagnosis, you might focus on learning everything about the condition to avoid distress and remain distant from the reality of the situation and your feelings about it.
- Suppression: Consciously repressing unpleasant or unwanted information from your awareness. For example, if you were abused as a child, you may push it out of your mind or memory as a protective measure.
- Sublimation: Channeling unacceptable urges into a productive outlet, such as work or a hobby. This allows you to act out unacceptable impulses by converting these behaviors into a more acceptable form. For example, you might become a workaholic or exercise addict as a means of venting frustration to avoid experiencing extreme anger.
- Regression: Reverting to the behavior or emotions of an earlier developmental stage.
- Displacement: Taking feelings out on others or redirecting an emotional reaction from the rightful recipient to another person altogether. For example, if a manager disciplines an employee, the employee may not react at work but may take it out on their family later that night. Rather than express your anger in ways that could lead to negative consequences (like arguing with your boss), you instead express your anger toward a person or object that poses no threat (such as your spouse, children, or pets).
- Compartmentalization: Separating components of one’s life into different categories to prevent conflicting emotions.
- Acting out: Coping with stress by engaging in actions rather than acknowledging and bearing certain feelings. For example, instead of telling someone you are angry with them, you might yell at them or throw something against the wall.
- Avoidance: Refusing to deal with or encounter unpleasant objects or situations. For example, rather than discussing a problem with someone, you might start avoiding them altogether so you don’t have to deal with it.
- Dissociation: Becoming separated or removed from your experience. For example, when dealing with something stressful, you might mentally and emotionally disengage yourself from the situation.
- Passive-aggression: Indirectly expressing anger. Instead of someone telling you they are upset, they might give you the silent treatment or undermine or bad mouth you behind your back.
Essential Oils for Navigating Defense Mechanisms
Defense mechanisms allow you to avoid dealing with your thoughts or feelings. These avoidance strategies do not solve the problems but delay and prolong the issue.
To adequately address your thoughts, feelings, and actions, you must be responsible and accountable for yourself and your actions. This is not an easy task and requires the capacity for emotional regulation and the courage to take responsibility for your choices and actions, even when those choices provoke unpleasant feelings of guilt and shame.
The word “Responsibility” breaks down into “response” and “ability” or “the ability to choose your response” to external circumstances. When you can accept responsibility for your circumstances, you can better change your circumstances. I believe this is because when you can release thought patterns that make you feel disempowered, like blame and judgment, you allow yourself the mental and emotional space to change your circumstances.
This also means taking accountability and responsibility for your health and releasing your “victim stories”—stories in which you feel powerless or taken advantage of by others. Victim stories can include feeling betrayed by your bodies and powerless to change your circumstances.
READ THIS NEXT: Release Your Victim Story
Most conflict occurs in relation to others, which means in order to step into your own power, you need to:
- Take accountability for yourself (and not avoid it with defense mechanisms).
- Avoid blaming others for situations in which your actions and choices influence the outcome.
- Stop assuming responsibility for other people’s choices or feelings.
Essential oils—with their ability to travel directly and immediately to the brain—may help support the emotional regulation necessary to step into personal responsibility and help you recognize and avoid defense mechanisms, both in your behavior and that of others.
How Essential Oils Support Emotional Regulation
3 Steps for Navigating Defense Mechanisms with Essential Oils
Step 1: Support Emotional Regulation
Emotional regulation is the ability to manage and respond to emotions in a socially acceptable and flexible way. It involves identifying and understanding your feelings, which requires the ability to exert control over your emotional state and nervous system.
Defense mechanisms may be triggered by your nervous system’s fight or flight response. At their root, defense mechanisms are unconscious homeostatic mechanisms that reduce the disorganizing effects of sudden stress. Following that logic, anything you can do to regulate your nervous system and expand your capacity to navigate stress without needing to distort or deny it can help you recognize and work through your defense mechanisms and your response to them in other people.
Verbal and emotional conflicts can feel like a physical assault. They trigger the same “fight or flight” danger response as an actual physical attack and prime your body to fight back.
This might explain why we are so easily provoked and ready to rumble in response to psychological threats like news stories or social media posts that present opinions different from our own.
When you are operating from the “fight or flight” survival mode, the sympathetic branch of your nervous system prepares you for action. Your muscles tense, and your vision narrows, allowing you to narrow your focus and pay close attention to the external, physical world.
Selective attention—a process where you identify and survive threats before dedicating your attention to anything else—helps you focus on what’s essential while ignoring irrelevant, outside information. Just as the sympathetic nervous system turns off all functions not critical to survival, including your ability to digest food, it also turns off your capacity to access critical thinking and problem-solving skills by shutting down your ability to focus on anything outside of the pressing danger.
You are constantly bombarded with sensory information. If you focus on everything around you, you will go into sensory overload and be unable to maintain your focus on safety. Unfortunately, when the sympathetic state locks you into a state of constantly scanning for threats, it shuts down your ability to thoughtfully contemplate different perspectives that might threaten your safety.
This hyper-vigilance can save your life when you are under threat but also restricts your emotional regulation or receptivity to new or different viewpoints and ideas, making you more likely to engage in and amplify conflict.
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When you respond from a place of survival and fear, you are more likely to revert to defense mechanisms and regret your behavior later on.
It is critical to shift out of your nervous system’s sympathetic, survival mode branch as it is not conducive to making wise, thoughtful choices. The easiest way to do this is to force yourself to pause and activate your parasympathetic nervous system. My favorite way to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system is to apply the Parasympathetic® blend behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone.
Once you are able to calm your nervous system, you may immediately feel less triggered and far less reactive. It is far easier to practice emotional regulation in the parasympathetic state.
In her excellent book, The Art of Extreme Self-Care, Cheryl Richardson advises that emotional regulation is a wise choice when:
- You can’t think clearly
- You feel angry and triggered
- Your emotional reaction feels more significant than what the current situation warrants.
- You feel anxiety coursing through your veins and feel compelled to react
- You feel angry and know there’s a good chance you will say something mean or stupid that you will regret
If you experience any of these emotional reactions listed above, consider pausing and activating your parasympathetic nervous system. Again, the fastest and easiest way to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system is to apply the Parasympathetic® blend behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone.
Step 2: Release Blame, Shame, and Guilt
Blame, shame, and guilt are powerful manipulative emotions that may be used by you or against you as a defense mechanism. For example, you may project blame on others or be on the receiving side of such a projection.
Interestingly, research shows that projecting blame onto others is more common among individuals who cannot regulate their emotions.
This means not blaming others, not throwing a pity party, and not playing the victim role, but instead focusing on the aspects of the challenge that are within your control and letting go of the rest (including other people’s reactions). This ability to assume a sense of agency over the factors of your life within your control is also known as the “locus of control” or the degree to which you believe that you, as opposed to external forces (beyond your influence), have control over the outcome of the events that influence your life.
READ THIS NEXT: How Personal Responsibility Enhances Resilience
At its root, blame is a form of avoidance that can be internalized or externalized and typically comes in 3 different flavors:
- Blaming others = Anger
- Blaming yourself = Guilt
- Accepting others’ blame of you = Shame
Blame transfers responsibility to someone else or forces you to carry the blame of others, keeping you stuck in the victim space. Liver Support™ allows you to release anger, blame, and shame, often stored on an intense cellular level. Just place the bottle under your nose and breathe deeply, fully inhaling the oil for 3-7 breaths, then slowly exhaling while intentionally releasing the anger. It helps you breathe into and work through the emotion. You will know the essential oil for blame works when you stop smelling it. You can also topically apply 2-3 drops of Liver Support™ over your liver (right side of the body under the breast) to help you work through and release your anger and boost resilience.
Guilt turns blame inward, a concept known as self-blame, where you attribute any negative outcome to a personal shortcoming or deficiency. Guilt also has to do with control. You may like to believe that things should go your way, but when they do not, you feel guilty.
Heart™ helps amplify feelings of self-love and gratitude, helping to balance and heal feelings of guilt. In every moment of your life, you can see the glass as half empty or half full. How you envision each moment helps paint a picture of your experience, so why not choose to be happy, to think of and move toward things that bring you joy? Essential oils for blame are an excellent tool for cementing that positive frequency. Apply 2-3 drops of Heart™ directly over the heart (left side of the chest) or on the back of the neck to calm guilt and uplift the heart and the body.
Shame results in you receiving negative messages from others, leading you to believe that you are inadequate, defective, or unworthy and somehow helpless to change that deficit.
Poor boundaries are correlated with shame, especially when you believe you lack the power, skill, knowledge, or capability to manage the expectations of others and continually seek validation through serving their needs and wants. Not surprisingly, your body holds shame in your digestive system, primarily the small intestine, which is also associated with boundaries. Small Intestine Support™ may help support positive boundaries and confidence to assist in bringing a sense of peace to your life. Apply 2-3 drops of Small Intestine Support™ in a clockwise direction around the belly button or massage into your ears for emotion-related issues. You can start on the bottom of the ear at the earlobes and gently massage upward along the exterior of the ear, hitting many of the significant reflexology points. This article and chart show specific points on the ears regarding particular issues.
READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Blame
Step 3: Support Healthy Boundaries
Emotional boundaries help you protect your emotional well-being in a healthy, proactive way. Defense mechanisms are reactive responses when boundaries are threatened. So long as healthy boundaries are maintained—and not threatened—defense mechanisms are not activated.
Essential oils, like Small Intestine Support™, can help you identify and support healthy mental, physical, and emotional boundaries for yourself and others.
On the physical level, the small intestine plays a critical role in digestion, absorbing and assimilating key nutrients while preventing harmful pathogens and toxins from entering the body.
On an emotional level, the small intestine plays a similarly discerning role with emotions, helping to understand experiences and determine healthy and appropriate relationships and boundaries.
It is also an area where we can hold deep childhood scars of rejection, abandonment, or abuse. Negative thoughts fueled by feelings of low self-worth, low self‐esteem, loneliness, neglect, and anxieties about survival and success can interfere with our ability to identify and support healthy boundaries.
Vibrant Blue Oils Emotion Balance Small Intestine Support™ blend supports the healthy functioning of the small intestine as it sorts and transforms food, feelings, and ideas into valuable ingredients for the body/mind. It also helps correct imbalances where you are overly in tune with another’s criticism, emotions, or opinions at your own expense.
Small Intestine Support™ can be inhaled or applied around the ears. You can start on the bottom of the ear at the earlobes and gently massage upward along the exterior of the ear, hitting many of the significant reflexology points. This article and chart show specific points on the ears regarding particular issues.
Featured Oils:
- Parasympathetic® available here
- Liver Support™ available here
- Heart™ available here
- Small Intestine Support™ available here
