The Armor of Identity: Overcoming Defense Mechanisms to Find Your Authentic Self

Many times in therapy clients talk about how they grew up learning to function in a particular way but that this way no longer seems to work. They might be experiencing relationships involving work, love, or family that seem to have gone stale, gotten stuck, or become stressful and unhappy (or all of the above). This is often a result of the conflict between how we learned to act growing up versus how we would like to act as an adult.

We are born as blank slates. From the moment we pop out of that warm, cozy womb and cry in shock at the rudeness of this cold world we start to adapt. We deal with anger, fear, unhappiness, and trauma by learning how to protect ourselves. In a perfect world our parents would give us just the right amount of nurturing, support, and space to grow up and develop into perfect adults. But the world is far from perfect (as are our parents!), and it is the scars of our childhood that shape our present selves. If we have inattentive parents we might learn to think we don’t need that much nurturing. If we have abusive parents we might learn to blame ourselves as the cause of other peoples’ anger. If our parents have unrealistic expectations for us we might learn that no matter how hard we try we’ll never be good enough. If we experience mental or physical trauma that hurts too much to deal with consciously we might learn to deny or repress bad feelings. There are myriad ways we learn to protect ourselves over the course of our childhood development. These ways are called defense mechanisms, and they are all different variations on the same thing: defending ourselves from feeling we don’t want to feel.

How Psychological Defense Mechanisms Form Our Armor

We protect ourselves by building a suit of armor. Each piece of this suit is an adaptation, a defense mechanism. Denial, repression, avoidance, rationalization, humor, the list of defense mechanisms is long. Each experience with trauma leads us to fashion a piece of this suit of armor to help protect ourselves from the pain. Some of us might fashion our suit out of only one type of armor. Some of us build a suit that is a collection of different types of armor. We don’t do this on purpose. We don’t plan on it. We don’t even recognize that we’re doing it. It’s just something we are programmed to do.

And it works! Our psychological development is a fascinating process, the result of millions of years of evolution. When people say things about how the human body is a wonderful, complex machine, remember that it’s not just the body, it’s the mind as well. If we didn’t have this built in process of emotional protection we’d be miserable! We’d constantly be thinking about the unhappiness and disappointment and trauma we have endured in the past, and anticipating that next set of equally negative circumstances sure to come in the future. These defense mechanisms allow us to proceed through life without being overwhelmed by traumas large and small. But there’s a downside to this.

As we get older we continue to wear this suit of armor. We grow up, make friends, experience relationships, live our lives. We go through a range of experiences and emotions that we might not necessarily need to protect ourselves from in the same way we did in our childhood. We still wear that same suit of armor that we first started fashioning from the day we were born, all through our childhoods, and we still react to the outside stimulus regarding things that pain us in the same way they did in our childhood. We’re wearing a suit of armor that used to be so helpful in protecting ourselves, but now it’s part of the problem. It now protects us from things we might not want to be protected against.

The Armor of Identity and Emotional Isolation

The suit of armor that we built to protect us now isolates us, prevents us from acting in ways that might be more appropriate to the situation or relationship. You might reach a point in your life where you feel like you’re not yourself. You find yourself in a job, or a relationship, or a life situation that you don’t identify with, where you don’t recognize the person you’ve become. That’s because as we grow and age we eventually start to identify ourselves less as the true person we are and more as the suit of armor we have built to protect us. After learning to appreciate this metaphor we can take a look in the metaphorical mirror, and instead of our normal self we might see a person hidden behind a complicated suit of armor. Over the years the suit of armor has been assembled so slowly we didn’t even recognize we were changing, but now, with this newfound sense of awareness, we see we’re wearing a full on suit of armor and we don’t recognize ourselves anymore. Somewhere deep down inside that suit of armor is our true self. Over the years our identities have become the accumulations of defenses we have built to protect ourselves, only the problem is we’ve done it too well.

Removing the Armor to Reclaim Your Authentic Self

We are still our authentic selves, of course, but that nugget of personality is deep down in the safe confines of the suit of armor. Now that we are aware of this suit of armor we can start to examine it, to appreciate what we’re protecting ourselves from, and if it’s still worth protecting. Have we been protecting ourselves from disappointment, but now find ourselves protecting against vulnerability? Have we been defending ourselves from anger, but now find ourselves defending against commitment? Is it time to let down the defenses and let in what we thought were our enemies but now see are really our allies?

Starting with this awareness, and continuing with an examination of our armor, we can begin to remove the pieces one by one and start to feel comfortable as our true selves, ready to experience aspects of life that we once protected ourselves against. So recognize your suit of armor and start to appreciate when you need it and when you don’t. You will appreciate relationships much more as you start to realize the armor has been preventing you from being as close and intimate as you imagine a relationship should be. Learn to remove the armor and reveal your true self to the people around you. In this way you will find your authentic self, and begin to live a happier life.