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| negating an important aspect of reality that one may actually perceive |
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| ex) a woman with anorexia acknowledges her actual weight and dieting practices but believes she is maintaining good self care by doing so |
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| shifting negative feelings about one person or situation onto another |
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| ex)a student's anger at her professor, who is threatening as an authority figure, is transposed into anger at her boyfriend, a safer target |
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| avoiding unacceptable emotions by thinking or talking aout them rather than experiencing them directly |
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| ex) a person talks to her counselor about the fact that she is sad but shows no emotional evidence of sadness, which makes it harder for her to understand its effects on her life |
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| taking characteristics of another person into the self in order to avoid direct conflict. The emotions originally felt about the other person are now felt towards the self |
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| ex) an abused woman efels angry with herself rather than her abusing partner, becuase she hs taken in his belief that she is an inadequate care giver. believing otherwise would make her more fearful that the desired relationship might end |
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| consciously experiencing an emotion in a safe context rather than the threatening context in which it was first unconsciously experienced |
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| ex) a person does not experience sadness at the funeral of a family member, but the following week weeps uncontrollably at the death of a pet |
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| attributing unacceptable thougths and feelings to others |
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| ex) a man does not want to be angry at his girlfriend, so when he is upset with her he avoids owning the emtion by assuming that she is angry with him instead |
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| using convincing reasons to justify ideas, feelings, or actions so as to avoid recognizing their true underlying motives |
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| ex) a student copes with the guilt normally associated with cheating on an exam by reasoning that he had been too ill the previous week to prepare for it |
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| replacing an unwanted unconscious impulse with its opposite in conscious behavior |
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| ex) a person cannot bear to be angry with his boss so during a conflict, he convinces himself that the boss is worthy of loyalty and goes out of his way to be kind |
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| resuming behaviors associated with an earlier developmental stage or level of functioning in order to avoid present anxiety |
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| ex) a young man throws a temper tantrum as a means of discharging his frustration when he cannot master a task on his computer. |
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| keeping unwanted thoughts and feelings entirely out of the awareness |
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| converting intolerable impulses into somatic symptoms |
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| ex) a person who is unable to express his negative emtions develops frequent stomach aches |
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| converting an impulse from a socially unacceptable aim to a socially acceptable one |
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| ex) an angry, aggressive young man becomes a star on his school's debate team |
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| nullifying an undesired impulse with an act of reparation |
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| ex)a man who feels guilty about having lustful thougths about a co-worker tries to make amends to his wife by purchasing a special gift for her |
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| identification with the agressor |
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| mastering anxiety by identifiying with a powerful aggressor, such as an abusingp arent, to counterat feelings of helplessness and to feel powerful ones self. |
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| repressed urge is expressed disguised as a disturbance of body function, usually of the sensory, voluntary nervous system (as pain, deafness, blidnness, paralysis, convulsions, tics) |
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| enables one to make up for real or fancied deficienceies |
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| ex) a person who stutters ebcomes a very expressive writer |
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| a process which enables a person to split mental functions in a manner that allows him to express forbidden or unconscious impulses without taking responsibility for the action, either because he is unable to rememebr the disowned behavior or becuase it is not experienced as his own |
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| loss of motivation to engage in usually pleasurable activity avoided because it might stir up conflict over forbidden impulses |
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| defense to deflect hostile aggression or other unaccpetable impulses from another to self |
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| defense mechanism associated with borderline personality organization in which a person perceives self and others as "all good" or "all bad". it is a process in which introjects of oppossite quality are kept apart resulting in ego weakness taht cannot neutralize agression |
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| projective identification |
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| unconsciously perceiving other's behavior as a reflection of one's own identity |
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| deterioration of existing defenses |
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