Chasing ducks
Psychological defense. Do you know what that is? Are you sure? Are you sure sure? All right. Let's scroll through a list of common defense mechanisms together and see what's in there.
Denial is a structural part of reactive patterns of behavior (9) and (14) suitable for prey. Repression is a result of a memory dissociation. Rationalization is a step in decision-making, commonly misjudged due to relative irrationality. Projection is a side effect of filling gaps in communications. Regression is that deep fall when your reality checker discards too many programs at once...
The list continues, but it's already obvious that "defenses" as a category include special cases of fundamentally different processes. They don't necessarily depend on stress, can happen naturally or as a result of a severe malfunction, and for the most part don't even come from a self-preservation mechanism!
As far as I understand, the idea of a defence was established prematurely, using a duck test, and nobody double-checked the results. It's compromised in the same way as hallucinations.
Today, we design information processing machines from scratch and know what has to be inside, but Freud didn't have the same knowledge a hundred years ago. He accurately described certain phenomena and then wrongly classified them as the same thing.
Our field was poisoned, but nobody noticed that at the time, and now various professionals develop universal anti-defense techniques to free their clients from shackles, fail to cover a bunch of unrelated technical problems, and usually end up with yet another unfalsifiable version of mindfulness, also known as "just help yourself by yourself".
It's time to change the way we think about defenses.
Instead of seeing faces and meaningful reactions to stress in every donut, eyeballing their healthiness, and trying to avoid the bad ones, we should turn everything upside down and start to think like proper mechanics.
We're supposed to study a system's design first, learn what should be happening, and only then diagnose and fix it if needed. We don't interpret your soul. We make it work.
You can mix our table of 16 patterns, bait-therapy, demystified Jungian archetypes, statistical mind games, and many other tricks in the same session if the job requires that. It's fine. Every tool has a purpose. What's not fine is projecting your intuitive feelings onto the bleeding machine.
Not all "defenses" are defenses. Don't trust the duck!