On defense mechanisms – or – don’t drop the plate!

Recall the first memory you have of driving and operating a vehicle. Compare that experience with your most recent one behind the wheel. Those experiences must feel different in some way. However, how exactly are they different? The answer to this question gives us an intuition about the difference between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. If you do not drive, or you have not driven for a significant duration of time, you could consider any other skill as a surrogate, such as playing a sport, and you should arrive at the same intuition.

At any given second, you are bombarded with roughly two million bits of information. There is no way you would remain sane if you had to be aware of all that information all the time. For that reason, your mind sifts through it, and psychological experiments have demonstrated that we handle approximately five to nine bits of information at any given moment in time. That is the information of which our minds are conscious.

In other words, a conscious mind is that which is aware of its existence and its environment. When you first begin to drive, you must make a conscious effort to become competent at this skill. It takes roughly one thousand hours to become that competent. Make a list of your personal skills, those that can take someone else a lifetime to reach your level:

At length, after you become consciously competent at driving, it takes approximately five thousand more hours to reach a stage known as unconscious competency.

At that stage, you usually no longer have to think about driving. Unless something happens on the road to bring your attention back to it, your mind has deemed that you no longer need to be persistently aware that you are operating an automobile. This frees up a bit of information in your mind so you can focus on other things.

Some people use that extra bit of information innocuously and maybe listen more to the radio. Unfortunately, some people use it to focus on texting while driving, which is, of course, not ideal. In that sense, the conscious mind should play a role in regulating the unconscious mind, but the unconscious mind is not something to be feared.

What do you believe is stored in your unconscious mind?

By contrast, Sigmund Freud popularized the unconscious mind and loaded it with many negative connotations in the public consciousness. The Oedipus complex is probably one of the more memorable subjects you learned in high school. The unconscious mind, or the id, is presented as this primitive drive that is to be feared and is uncontrollable.

NLP takes a different approach. It implies that the unconscious mind must balance the conscious mind. For that reason, the unconscious mind must at least in some ways be malleable to the conscious mind for that balance to occur. Ask yourself: Is it better to live in fear of a part of yourself or to face fear with that part in hand?

The unconscious mind contains everything that you’re not aware of. Some of these things are easy to become aware of. Stop and listen to the surrounding sounds that you weren’t aware of until now! What are they?

Some of these things you can directly influence, like if you’re fidgeting without knowing it and someone asks you to stop. Give an example of a couple of things you can directly influence:

You can even influence some of them indirectly, like when you learn relaxation or stress management techniques and lower your heart rate or brain activity. Give an example of a couple of things you can indirectly influence:

Where, in your opinion, should you draw the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind and the mechanics of the body, such as the electric impulses and chemical reactions that regulate the heartbeat?

Since NLP has evolved into a holistic approach, it thinks of the body and mind as an interplay or an entity, not as two things with a definite line between them. In fact, one of the foundational presuppositions in NLP states that mind-and-body affect each other. How does your mind affect your body at this moment?

All aspects of you are connected. There’s no reason to feel guilty if you get sick, as if you have total control over every aspect of your body.

Among its many jobs, the unconscious mind decides what needs to become conscious, what you can do unconsciously, and what your mental filters can dispose of. Neuropsychologists have even found a physical area of the brain that serves to filter your sensory impressions. It allows you to focus on what you need to do, but if it detects possible danger, it directs your attention to it. The unconscious mind performs many such tasks, so a lot of our behavior is shaped by things we don’t think about. This can happen in unwanted ways as well. Just as animal trainers shape the behaviors of tigers, dogs, and dolphins in complicated ways, our own behavior has been shaped without our knowledge. Our patterns of experience, our temperament, and even the programming by commercial advertisers influence us.

One major characteristic of the unconscious mind is that it only recognizes the present. We call it the “Absence of Chronology”. Your memories are “remembered,” and in fact, acted out in your mind’s eye in the present time. Thinking is a verb—you cannot perform an action in the past. Thinking about a certain event that happened even 10 seconds ago is separated from the original experience that is the subject of that memory. That’s common sense, you may say, but how many people do you know who claim they are victims and are “stuck in the past” and can’t get over something that happened 30 years ago? The unconscious mind keeps ruminating and floating these memories because the neurological link between the experience and the emotions is not resolved. Either you deal with it like a grown up, in a sense, or it will hunt your consciousness forever and ever.

Another major characteristic of the unconscious mind is the absence of contradictions. Negatives do not exist. When you tell your child, “don’t drop the plate.. do NOT drop the plate!”, their unconscious mind digests it without the negative… “Drop the plate! Do drop the plate! “, floods the consciousness with bright images of dropping that plate, and as you’ve experienced earlier with the visual sub-modalities, your mind is motivated when presented with bright and big images. Which results in what?

The unconscious mind works whether you’re awake or asleep. Your consciousness needs rest, just like your physical body needs rest, but your unconscious mind does not stop at any point in time. In your sleep, the unconscious mind roams free and brings up associations and images from your dreams. That’s the symbolic language of the unconscious, explored thoroughly by Carl Jung. Everything in a dream can be a symbol of a hidden desire, unresolved process, or some other misalignment.

You can compare the unconscious mind to a child. A child would do anything to avoid displeasure, even carelessly and without any concern at all about the consequences. That’s the pleasure principle predominance, and it’s not a flaw in the system; it’s a survival mechanism.

While our physical senses are limited, and the external stimuli processing power of our brain is also limited, the unconscious mind’s capabilities are not. Another major characteristic of the unconscious mind is that its internal reality perception is much more intense and feels even more real than the external. The theater inside your mind is more critical in determining your experience of life than external conditions. You can see countless examples of this in history.

What happens to a child when you neglect him or her for a lengthy period of time?

The same happens with the unconscious mind. If you do not take care of its warning signs, such as vivid dreams, strong emotional memories, obsessive thoughts, etc., you end up with habitual defense mechanisms. It’s not a personality defect, it’s a survival instinct. Your unconscious mind has to manage everything about you, all at the same time. It cannot resolve contradictions, such as a traumatic memory or shame and guilt. It cannot logically “figure it out” without your conscious effort. As we said before, it acts as if you are a child who knows nothing about the world around you.

There are plenty of defense mechanisms that originate in the unconscious mind. Take repression, for example. It means avoiding reality. The unconscious mind seeks pleasure, not pain. If reality is painful, for whatever reason, your mind will look for a way out of reality—repress negative emotions and pretend to “forget”.

Nothing is really forgotten, because a strong emotion creates an anchor—a link between a stimulus and the response—in your nervous system.

Another defense mechanism is projection. That’s when your mind dumps the responsibility on something or someone else. It’s a way of alleviating guilt. How can it be your fault when they didn’t act the way they should have?

Dissociation is another popular defense mechanism. It disconnects the “self” from the action. It’s usually evident if you get caught in something and you feel deeply ashamed. You feel as if it’s “you but not you” who’s done that.

Isolation is yet another popular defense mechanism. Avoiding contact with irritants, such as people who ask you how your job search is going, Or friends who challenge you to do things you’re not capable of and you want to avoid risking failure and looking like a…?

Another big one is substitution. When you’re mistreated at work, but take it out on your spouse, for example. If you can’t keep on repressing and dissociating, and you can’t isolate yourself from the irritant, then it’s less harmful to lash out at someone other than your boss if you want to keep your job.

Sublimation is a relative to substitution. That’s when you substitute a more suitable and socially acceptable object for your aggression impulse. Sport is a healthy one. Drinking until you pass out every night might not be the healthiest strategy to deal with emotional pain.

Rationalization is another popular defense mechanism. You justify your errors in order to end the self-talk loop.

Another one is negation, or denial; the pain is pushed aside and you pretend it never happened. You “suck it in” and act your age, even though you’re truly hurt. Your unconscious mind does not forget it, though, and it will keep flooding your consciousness until it is resolved.

Fantasy is yet another popular defense mechanism. You create a world of your own and make it realistic by sharing elements with real life. Kids do that all the time, but adults are extremely obsessed with their fantasies. Adults, in a sense, had a lot more practice time fantasizing than their children.

Displacement is when you transfer a negative impulse to other people or even objects. When you become a codependent, for example, or if a child begins to suck his thumb only after his brother is born,

Regression is another defense mechanism when a person reverts back to childish reactions in order to end a conflict. Couples in therapy exhibit this quite often, with blaming games and who did what, who said what to whom, and what their true intentions were.

Another prominent defense mechanism is compensation, when limits are compensated with other actions. Criminal behavior is often the result of a lack of boundaries and over-compensation tendencies.

The last one we’ll mention here is identification. This is when you pretend to be someone else, real or imagined, and not because you want to model them (as done in NLP), but because you’re so fed up with your current self that you assume a different persona for awhile.