We’ve all used defenses to distance ourselves from distressing feelings and maintain a sense of emotional stability. Our defense patterns began in childhood when they prevented us from becoming overwhelmed with anxiety. However, as an adult we outgrow their usefulness. If we continue to use outgrown defenses we are more likely to create rigid constrained relationships and risk employing behaviors with negative consequences.

Part of therapy is identifying our defenses. If we can discover which defenses we use, we can replace outgrown ones with more healthy ones.

1. Denial: A method used to reduce anxiety. To ignore or simply refuse to face things as they really are.  If a situation or feeling causes pain or conflict then "it is just not so".  Nearly anything or any element in one's emotional life may be denied.  It is the most used of all defense mechanisms, refusing to admit there is a problem when the evidence is readily apparent.  There are two types of denial; Primary and Secondary.  Primary denial is simply to admit you have a problem.  Secondary denial is harder and requires one to dig through the details.
   Example:  Now that I'm in prison, I'll never commit a sexual act again.   

2. Rationalization: Making excuses for behaviors so as to make them worthy of appeal.  Involves manufacturing a false, but "good" excuse to justify unacceptable behavior and explain away failures or losses.
   Example: She asked for it because she was wearing a short skirt, or someone had to teach her about sex, it may as well be her father who cares about her.

3. Repression:  Forcing events or feelings into one's subconscious, but where they can still affect behavior.  Painful or threatening thoughts and feelings are excluded from awareness.  Repression may block out stressful experiences that could be met by realistically facing and working through a situation.
   Example: Sometimes not remembering childhood is a sign of repression.   

4. Regression:  Retreating to behaviors that were appropriate for an earlier level of development.  When discomfort becomes intense, the individual returns to patterns of behavior that were successful in earlier stages of development.  Faced with stress, some people revert to a form of immature behavior that they have outgrown.  In regression, they attempt to cope with their anxiety by clinging to such inappropriate behavior.  Many therapists feel that child molesting is a form of regression.
   Example:  Temper tantrums, a man in midlife crisis may start dressing younger and dating younger women.

5. Reaction Formation:  One defense against a threatening impulse is to actively express the opposite impulse.  This involves behaving in a manner that is contrary to one's true feelings.  A characteristic of this defense is the excessive quality of a particular attitude or behavior.
   Example:  Getting religion after getting caught, a hooker who becomes a nun.

6. Compensation:  Consists of making perceived weaknesses or developing certain traits to make-up for limitation.  The adjustive value in this mechanism lies in keeping one's self-esteem in tact be exceeding in one area to distract attention from an area in which the person feels inferior.  Rape is a compensatory act.
   Example:  The man that acts excessively macho or the woman who acts excessively feminine.

7. Sublimation:  The acceptance of socially approved goals for a drive, whose channel of expression is blocked or socially unacceptable. 
   Example:  The aggressive man that works out all the time, the jilted lover who turns to writing books about love.

8. Projection:  Another mechanism of self-deception is projection, which consists of seeing in others our own unacceptable desires and impulses.
   Example:  The daughter who wants to date, and the father is angry because he knows what boys want.

9. Displacement:  The shift of emotion from its original object or person to a more acceptable substitute.  In some instances, the individual may turn his anger inward against himself.  He may engage in exaggerated self-accusations and recrimination and feel severely guilty and self-devaluating.  Such intro-punitive actions do protect the individual from expressing dangerous hostility towards others; however, it may lead to depression and even suicide.  Redirection of emotional impulses, usually hostile, from the real source to a substitute person or object.
   Example:  The child who has been spanked, kicks his sister.  Victimization by sexual offenders is considered displacement.

10. Fantasy:  Fantasy involves gratifying frustrated desires by imaginary achievement.  When achievement in the real world seems remote, some people resort to screening out unpleasant aspects of reality and living in a fantasy world.

Thanks to the good folks at the SOAR program in Harnett County, NC for allowing us to use their material.  Taken from "Thinking Errors".