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We are complex animals living complex lives in which we have to develop ways to cope and defend ourselves / our feelings and manage relationships.   We have to manage feelings of tension and stress somehow; for example the cognitive dissonance (internal conflict) and potential shame of doing something outside our values.  To handle this discomfort we use various coping methods.  Defense mechanisms are also coping mechanisms.

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Below are a list of some coping mechanisms / Defenses:

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• Acting out: not coping - giving in to the pressure from within to misbehave. In children or teenagers this can be a sign of trauma, distress or unmet needs. In adults this can be signs of under-developed emotional maturity if the acting out is extreme or too often or inappropriate. Affairs can be an example of adult acting out, sometimes because of unmet relationship needs or passive aggression.
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• Altruism: Helping others too much but really, it benefits themselves in some way. It may sometimes lead people to neglect their own health, social, or financial needs in order to care for others. While acts of altruism may be done with good intentions, they don't always lead to positive outcomes. It may lead people to focus their efforts on one cause while neglecting others. Some might do it so they can remain ‘holier than thou’ because they do so much and the other person doesn’t do enough.
   

• Attack mechanisms: That push discomfort onto others. To ‘have a go’ at someone else because of personal discomfort that is about something else, EG Road rage or raging at a child because of own frustration.
   

• Avoidance: That avoid the issue by doing something else or nothing. Mentally or physically avoiding something that causes distress.
   

• Compartmentalization: separating conflicting thoughts into separated compartments. A healthy example could be to separate a sexual problem in a relationship from the relationship itself which might be fine or unhealthily, to compartmentalise the argument you had yesterday and pretend nothing has happened today.
   

• Conversion: subconscious conversion of stress into physical symptoms. Basically meaning stress can manifest physically IE long term anger has been shown to cause physical illness.
   

• Fantasy: escaping reality into a world of possibility. Reading books, watching movies, but if its too much then someone can live in a fantasy world EG where everything is lovely and everyone is kind and nothing bad happens.
   

• Help-rejecting complaining: Ask for help then reject it. Common, but not limited to personality disorders and people who are negative by nature.
   

• Introjection: Bringing things from the outer world into the inner world. For example, Taking on board bad feeling from the negative classroom experience one day and dwelling on it too long and making oneself miserable.
   

• Provocation: Get others to act so you can retaliate. (shit stirring, starting fights or sqabbles)
   

• Rationalization: To verbally or mentally give ‘good reason’ or logical explinations for bad behaviour or experiences.
   

• Projection: seeing your own unwanted feelings in other people. EG A person feeling angry, comes across teenagers on the street and mis-interprets their mood as angry and therefore dangerous. Telling an employee that they’re too loud and outspoken when the person saying it, is actually too loud and unspoken.
   

• Dissociation: separating oneself from parts of your life. Can be done in extreme cases such as because of trauma or abuse or on a smaller level so as to cope with difficult experiences going on.
   

• Trivializing: Making something smaller, this can be healthy coping such as emergency services making jokes about their work to harmful trivializing such as telling an abused person that it wasn’t so bad- uncle Tom didn’t mean to hit you that hard. Not taking sexual abuse seriously.
   

• Intellectualisation: avoiding emotion by focusing on facts and logic.
   

• Performing rituals:   Patterns that delay or calm us.
   

• Passive aggression: avoiding behaving angrily to protect yourself from possible harm. EG making passive comments instead of saying things directly, not doing the washing up because husband doesn’t do enough around the house, instead of discussing things or because discussions do no go well. Can be manipulative.

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