The ways we survive pt. 1

Content Advisory: While there are no explicit examples of abuse or trauma, this piece is focused on things that are experienced in early development and coping strategies that can emerge from those experiences — this might bring up memories or reflections that could be distressing. Please proceed with caution and meet your needs.

While I’m still working on the series about my mother’s bibles (next post coming 12/11/25), as I wrestle with my own content, relationships, and experiences, I’ve been finding myself turning to other sources of empathy and understanding. I’ve been leaning on and exploring more about my therapist-side, specifically my studies in Jungian analysis. I want to feel what’s happening and I also deeply need to understand it. So I’ve needed to zoom out a bit, I’ve needed to intellectualize a little, not from a place of avoidance (which I know very well in myself) but a need to come up for air. This parallel series is what’s emerged from those breaths

I believe that Jungian theory and Jungian analysis have the power to heal and change lives. I know it did so for me. It’s also what I practice as a therapist. But I’ve been wanting to find more accessible and practical ways for this lens to be shared with others, especially since many people can’t afford therapy, let alone the specialties of analysis. Most people also don’t have the time or energy to read the thousands and thousands of pages from Jung himself or the many, many, many others that came after (or before, really) him with all their differing opinions and perspectives.

I haven’t nearly read them all either, but I’ve read more than some because it’s my job, and I want to share what I’ve gleaned.

In the next few weeks I’m going to start publishing a series of psychoanalytic case studies of fictional characters, starting with Rick Sanchez from “Rick and Morty.” While I’m going to do my best to avoid as much clinical jargon as possible, there are some shorthand terms that I’ll be referencing when I’m discussing personality features and psychological “defenses.” So I figured I should put out some definitions to avoid repeating myself excessively.

It might also be helpful for identifying and organizing your own experiences in the world. I know I see myself in these and it helps me further my self-understanding and self-compassion.

In these two pieces on “defenses,” I’m heavily influenced by and referencing the book Psychoanalytic Diagnosis by Nancy McWilliams. I’ll put in specific page numbers where I quote her directly, but my goal is to simplify and concretize the language as much as possible. This is inherently fraught — I’m inevitably going to leave out important context and nuance, and some professionals might bristle at the oversimplifications. This is not meant to teach anyone everything about these topics — it’s just an introduction. It’s also not to be used to diagnose or treat anything.

If you find yourself resonating with this and wanting to learn more, I strongly suggest seeking out a psychodynamic therapist or analyst.

That said, the word “defenses” is both unfortunate and misleading; what they really are are strategies for survival. In fact, they’re healthy and necessary at earlier stages of human development. When we’re infants and children, almost all survival is tied to our relationships with others. We need the adults around us to teach us, communicate with us, protect us, care for us, and gently challenge us while we learn to do those things for ourselves, ideally at our own unique developmental pace. But we actually never “lose” these strategies; every adult, at one time or another, uses them depending on the circumstances. They never “go away” because they have a time and place.

In fact, maybe an even better word is “protections.” In order to survive in this world, in our relationships, and inside of ourselves, we need ways to stay alive, both externally and internally — it can often be scarier inside than out.

Everyone has their preferred protections. We lean toward these things based on our innate temperaments/personalities, what our caregivers modeled or explicitly taught us, what we go through/survive as kids, which ones were rewarded or punished, and what are our “go to’s” when we’re stressed.

The problems show up when we, as adults, overly or entirely rely on these strategies.

In my opinion, everything, when taken to an extreme, can cause distress or problems. Rather than refer to any aspects of these defenses as “positive” or “negative,” I want to share what’s limiting about them on both ends of the spectrum.

In McWilliams’ work, she classifies defenses as either primary or secondary. I’ll be addressing primary defenses in this piece. For a preview, primary and secondary generally refer to the stage of development where these strategies tend to emerge. Primary happens earlier in development and secondary happens later. The primary defenses also don’t “turn into” the secondary (necessarily — we’ll get there); they often have unique and distinct aspects based on where children are in their growth.

Primary Defenses

As I just mentioned, in this case, primary means “first,” the ones we learn really early in our existence, before we even learn to communicate with words. These are the ones that we tend to fear the most in ourselves, the ones we most easily consider “irrational” or “crazy.” These are also the ones that can cause some of the most trouble in our relationships and other aspects of life because other people can struggle to understand them and might judge them. But all of these defenses (primary or secondary) serve a purpose and meet a need in the moment, we just may not always understand how or why because the other shared component is that these defenses are unconscious. We do them automatically, sometimes even against our conscious will. Because these defenses are only concerned with defending our survival, they don’t easily want to give us a moment to assess and consciously choose the best course of action. It takes a lot of inner work to identify these unconscious patterns and bring them to the surface. 

Extreme Withdrawal — “Inner world is better than outer world.” 

When things are too scary or overwhelming, we retreat within; we prefer our own company to the challenges of relationships with others. The implication in the naming here is that being too withdrawn basically takes us entirely out of outer life. Taken to the extreme it can present as catatonia - the person is awake but not present in any way.  Our inner worlds are incredibly important sources of our emotions, dreams, imaginations, creativity, and sense of self. If you have a rich inner world, it can be a lovely place to be, perhaps actually better than your current outer world circumstances. When kids are bored, lonely, or scared, particularly if the expectation is that they also “be still” and “be quiet”, they go into their imaginations. Kids who don’t have their needs met, perhaps living in poverty or in an unsafe situation, often survive via fantasy. They often dream of the future or of a different life that helps keep them going. It’s a powerful tool. In comparison, on the other side of the spectrum, imagine someone who has no relationship with their inner world, someone who never wants to look within. That’s a person who might just go about their day in a pretty rote fashion, maybe they’re very outwardly engaged and “functional”, but they might struggle knowing what they really want from life or what things make them feel fulfilled, perhaps leading an “unexamined life”. 

Denial — “If I don’t acknowledge it, it’s not happening.” 

Denial can be easily confused with “repression” (that’s in part two) but today we might associate this more as a kind of “dissociation.” When infants and children experience something that they can’t handle, they often pretend it’s not real. Words like “pretend” or “acknowledge” imply a conscious choice, which is incorrect. Again, like all of these defenses, this happens automatically and unconsciously.

If we only survive by denial, we have an unlived and unremembered life — everything we’ve been through is locked behind doors in our unconscious — and tends to come out in other ways that we’ll explore below. It can also harm directly, by being in denial about symptoms that may indicate illness or disease that would benefit from treatment, or not opening distressing bill notices until we get evicted or our car gets repoed. We might also be in denial about situations showing up in our relationships. I’ve worked with a lot of teens over the years, and I’ve encountered many parents and grandparents who will genuinely say “I thought you were fine,” when the teen has been (sometimes literally) screaming at the top of their lungs that they’re suffering. In these cases, the caregiver feels so overwhelmed by their child’s pain (and usually what to “do” about it) that they actually don’t register it. This kind of denial, while unconscious, can lead to physical or mental health neglect. That said, it has its necessary place in life, for example anyone who says they’re “great in a crisis” has denial as one of their defenses. Being able to temporarily “shut off” one’s fear/anger/worry and only focus on the tasks at hand, is a form of denial. And it’s a form of denial that regularly saves lives; every emergency department is full of professionals who are practicing denial on each shift. The tricky part is having the time, space, and support to process those denied feelings once things have calmed down. On the other end of the spectrum, imagine living with no capacity for denial, someone who is always acutely and intensely aware of every bad thing that’s ever happened and the bad things happening currently. Maybe you don’t need to imagine it; anyone who’s ever dealt with intrusive memories or flashbacks knows what it's like to desire at least a little denial.

Omnipotent Control — “a god complex.” 

If we’re remotely well cared for as babies, we start to have feelings of omnipotence: being all-powerful. We cry and someone comes to us, we’re hungry and get fed, we’re sleepy and someone puts us in a cozy spot and lets us be. Especially attuned caregivers may even pick up on our needs before we do.

As an incredibly vulnerable and dependent creature, it’s really adaptive to have the fantasy that you’re god of the universe. It gives us confidence that we actually have no business having but that supports our development into autonomous individuals.

This magical thinking is critical for growing up: we need to believe we can do things before we can do them so that we’ll try.

If we hold to this too tightly, we might feel in control of everything, and anything or anyone who gets in our way is a problem to eliminate. We might also rely on manipulating people or situations to ensure we get what we want. This could translate into other abusive behavior. I've heard many abusive parents describe their role in the house in godlike terms — they can do whatever they want to their kids just because they want to, might makes right. 

On the flipside, if we have zero sense of autonomy, life just happens to us. We might feel like perpetual victims, that there’s nothing we can do to influence our futures or make our dreams come true. We might also completely defer our power to other people, communities, religions; making us more vulnerable for manipulative or abusive relationships.

As we age, we’re constantly asked to develop a relationship with two truths that are always dancing with each other: we have autonomy/personal power, and also many things in life are completely out of our control. We’re both powerful and powerless, it’s actually really fucking scary. 

It makes sense that we either bounce back and forth along the polarities, or we have a preferred way of surviving and stick to it. 

Splitting — “people are either all good or all bad — including myself.” 

As we mature past our initial understanding of omnipotence, we start to see ourselves as separate from our caregivers — and we actually attribute all the power to them. Essentially, we feel like our caregivers are the gods of our world (and they, functionally, kind of are): all love, care, and attention comes from them (or doesn’t). They give us our worth and determine our value. It’s especially challenging if we have inconsistent caregivers: they might feel like a benevolent deity one moment and a terrifying monster the next. We only learn to feel and perform the extremes.

Ideally, we move from being entirely dependent on others to interdependence — a different fluid dance of needing and giving support to those we love. We learn who we are as an individual — strengths and flaws — and that everyone else is also an individual with their own traits. We learn that relationships are not “all or nothing” not “all good or all bad” — failure and mistakes are inevitable and we learn ways to heal and move on.

If that gets interrupted or harmed, we might feel stuck that love equals total dependence, that we only have value if we’re in a relationship with someone we idolize. That in order to feel safe and cared for, we need to fuse or merge with someone we see as being capable of completely meeting those needs at all times.

And of course, no one is perfect. So the person we idealize is doomed to let us down, and if we’re really attached to “all good or all bad,” we move to devaluing that person entirely. They go from the deity to the monster, just like our caregivers did.

We also do this to ourselves; every success or accomplishment fills us with a sense of value and every mistake makes us feel like we’re completely worthless.

The “ping-ponging” or “whiplash” feeling between extremes can be exhausting, but each has their place. It’s important to be able to uplift and see the best in people (and ourselves), but it's equally important to recognize when someone is unsafe, harmful, or crosses our boundaries. There are times when we need to “split” from someone or something. We also need to be able to acknowledge our own harmful behavior and be willing to “split” from it (e.g., make changes so that we stop). 

Projective and Introjective Identification — “404 not found — broken link.” 

Projection and introjection are major jargon words. We’ll delineate them shortly, but for initial context, another major aspect of childhood development is continuing to refine what is “me” and what is “not me.” For example, babies/toddlers (who are well cared for) start to learn that just because they are upset doesn’t mean their caregiver is. Their emotional experience doesn’t determine the experience of someone else. But what if it does? What if our caregivers struggle or actively resist that emotional differentiation?

In this case, projection means that we unconsciously export/transfer something we’re feeling to someone else and, as McWilliams notes, this is actually a foundation for empathy (p. 111). I can imagine that what I’m feeling, someone else might also feel. But if I don’t have those clear “me” v “not me” boundaries, I might not be consciously aware of how I really feel and it spills out onto someone else. 

An example is the exchange of:
I’m unconsciously mad at someone: “You’re mad at me aren’t you?”
Other: “No, I’m not.”
Me: “Yes, you are, I can tell.”
Other: “NO, I’m not.”
Me: “Well you sound mad.”
This exchange continues until the Other actually becomes angry with me because I’m frustrating them. Then I feel validated in my projection; I was “right”. I was able to successfully export my uncomfortable feelings onto someone else.

Rather than “spilling out”, introjection is when we “take on” what is being expressed toward/at us by someone else. McWilliams shares that one of the forms of introjection is “identification with the aggressor” (p. 112), and indeed this is one of the extreme (though not as common) strategies. We can be so empathetic (as children) to someone harming us that we “take on” or embody their qualities, feelings, and behaviors. We can become like the person who hurt us, and hurt others. 

On the other side of the coin, we can internalize an idealized Other; this can be a source of inspiration or guidance in trying times. Maybe a grandparent, parent, neighbor, or spiritual leader was so kind to us that, rather than check in with ourselves first and make a more connected choice, we prefer to defer our decisions to a version of “WWJD” (What Would Jesus [insert preferred Other here] Do). 

In the first case, (unconsciously) I’m unable to acknowledge and express my emotions, so I house them in someone else. Or (unconsciously) rather than feel my own feelings, I take on someone else’s feelings. All the while, I — or self — is lost in the sauce. I still haven’t reckoned with how I really feel; it's always determined by my relationships with someone else. And the reason I can’t reckon with that is no one showed me how, so my unconscious is doing the best it can.

Somatization — “there are no words.” 

I won’t go too deeply into this topic, as it’s highly contextual and cultural and I don’t want to risk oversimplifying or diminishing it. But, simply put for my purposes here: somatization is experiencing or expressing emotions via bodily sensations/functions without conscious awareness of how the sensation and emotions are connected. We actually feel everything in our bodies (our brains are fully integrated parts of our bodies and control everything), and there are clear physical correlates for many emotions (e.g., excitement = an increased heart rate).

For children, we feel our bodies long before we have words to describe the experiences. One of a caregiver’s jobs is to help their child develop these connections. For example, when a child is crying it could mean many things; they could be sad, frustrated, tired, etc. Adults help kids learn inner distinctions and differentiation: What do these tears mean to me right now? We can imagine if someone doesn’t get that support — tears may stay mysterious and might be reduced to the dominant cultural narrative that tears equal “sadness.”

On the one hand, extreme disconnection from how emotions can influence our bodies could lead someone to feeling trapped in symptoms or an illness that’s undiagnosable to providers because nothing is “wrong” in the medical sense. We might call those people “hypochondriacs”; they might feel like no one believes them or takes them seriously. But at its core, it could produce a person who finds emotional discomfort so intolerable that they unconsciously deal with chronic physical discomfort instead — while feeling dismissed and misunderstood by those around them.

On the other extreme, a person who overly intellectualizes and is completely disconnected from their body is also missing a critical part of human experience. Some things can truly only be felt. They may also completely ignore bodily signals and sensations or diminish them. Which could mean they also miss out on important physical information like hunger, thirst, illness or injury — they’re also cut off from a source of emotional information. As a therapist, I can’t tell you how many times a client is describing something and tears just start falling. The client notices the tears and, after checking in, says something like, “Wow, I had no idea how sad [or insert variety of emotions here] I was about [x].”

The in-between is, like almost everything else, fluid. If we have a more integrated sense of the many different ways our bodies and emotions express themselves, we can have more space for meeting and attending to our needs. For another reductive, but clear example: If we “know” that when we’re anxious our stomach gets upset, we have the inner connection between our emotional, bodily, and cognitive experiences. We can potentially anticipate this presentation and care for ourselves or proactively self-soothe. Or, conversely, we may feel that our stomach is upset and check in with ourselves, and notice that we’re anxious and bring that to consciousness so we can identify what support we need.

Most of the time somatization is far more mysterious, complex, and not as easily connected as the examples I’ve given. Our bodies are powerful and can produce incredible (in every sense of the word) responses that can defy all typical “logic.” But we all somatize to some extent; it’s the natural interplay of complex systems. 

Acting Out — [this one doesn’t have a tagline; its name captures it well]

Before we dive into this, let me be extremely clear, some acting out behaviors are harmful to others (and/or to the person themselves). Not that the previous defenses couldn’t also have harmful presentations, but acting out typically comes with the most charged associations, and understandably so.

Impact is always more important than intent in terms of harm caused to others. Here, in this context, I’ll continue to distinguish conscious versus unconscious behaviors. In the outer world, with real consequences, this distinction does not matter.

It matters here because we’re looking at how, for some people, unconscious harmful behaviors can have roots and develop in early childhood. This does not make harmful behavior less harmful.

Understanding something is not the same as exonerating it.
It’s not the same as condoning it.
It’s not the same as forgiving it.
Understanding it doesn’t even mean you have compassion for it. 

You might, but I also don’t believe compassion inherently equals exonerating, condoning, or forgiving.

Whether you did something consciously or unconsciously, you’re responsible for the consequences of your actions. Your consciousness and unconsciousness are both you.

Like every other defense, I’ll be illustrating with simpler examples. This is not intended to minimize or diminish what people have experienced or survived. My aim here is to make it understandable and memorable.

Okay, phew, that was a lot. This is also a good check-in point for you as a reader. Given what’s been said so far, do you feel ready to proceed? Please honor what comes up for you. 

Here we go:

Children learn to understand the world through play. This is where they integrate their experiences, make sense of their feelings and the feelings of others, and practice developing skills. Sources of play topics can come from the imagination or from stories, but they also mimic adult behavior and reenact things they witness or experience. Play is especially important for processing scary, anxiety-inducing, or overwhelming experiences that a child doesn’t have words for. 

For example; children are often taught (rightfully) to fear/respect kitchens. There are sources of fire/burning, sharp objects, heavy items, maybe slippery surfaces - it's the place where most household accidents happen. But children also know that kitchens are a part of life, they watch caregivers move around the space and prepare meals or treats, mostly uninjured, using the dangerous things. There’s a reason why kitchen play sets are so popular, and why children often play ‘house’ or ‘restaurant’ whether or not they have a playset – they know it’s a part of life they’ll eventually join more and more. Playing about it helps them prepare. It’s a form of rehearsal. 

Play that has unconsciously deepened beyond these developmental stages and/or moved into harmful behavior is called “acting out”. Some “acting out” behaviors are harmful to others (or to self), but many are beyond designations of “good” or “bad” and just are.

In McWilliams’ words, “acting out” is “driven by unconscious needs to master the anxiety associated with internally forbidden feelings and wishes, with powerfully upsetting fears or fantasies, and with traumatic memories” (p. 120).

An example that’s well known in our culture would be “rejecting before getting rejected” or other forms of what we call “self-sabotage.”

A person who grew up feeling abandoned or not worthy of their parents’ attention/affection might meet a partner who is loving, attentive, and interested in a commitment — suddenly (unconsciously) they might start finding flaws in the person or relationship. They might start (unconsciously) doing things that damage the relationship or push that person away. It might go to the extreme where their partner does end the relationship, thus producing the outcome the person has always known or expected from relationships. They “acted out” what they expected to happen.To me, the outcome of “acting out” is often a repetition or sameness of what’s familiar. We often recreate (unconsciously) circumstances where we feel the same or similar to how we felt as children. Same and similar are not the same as “safe”, but sometimes it's the closest thing we had to it.

The amount of times I’ve heard (and even said to myself), “No matter what I do, things always turn out the same,” is often an indication of some unconscious process that’s operating deep under the surface. We’re “playing” or “acting” something out over and over again, but not finding the resolution we need or getting the true need met.

Another somewhat common (and, again, simplified) example: a child is generally ignored by his caregivers unless he breaks a rule or does something “bad.” As all children need attention, he’ll almost inevitably break more and more rules to get that need met. He might even start doing it at school, even if he has teachers who give him lots of positive attention. He’s not consciously aware that “At home I only get attention this way; I don’t have to do that here.”

Over time this could get internalized — that he is a “bad” or maybe even “violent” person by nature, that no one actually likes or loves him, and that healthy relationships aren’t worth pursuing because he’ll never attain them. He might believe that if he wants to connect with someone, he should do something drastic or aggressive to get their attention. And what’s truly sad is that these things will all just “feel” true, “feel” like facts, because there’s no connection or consciousness to what’s underneath.

There are many more examples of acting out, one of the most sensitive and damaging types of acting out includes sexualized behaviors. That, and examples of defenses that include other kinds of specific violence, I’ll save for their own pieces. I’ve used enough broad brushstrokes for now, layering, shading and detailing are called for. 

In conclusion, this very cursory view of primary defense mechanisms (the ones we develop primarily in infancy and toddlerhood) is meant to serve as an introduction to the themes I’ll be exploring as I apply human tendencies and personality/character development to fictional beings. I hope it felt useful. If it did, we’ll meet again in part two: secondary defenses.