Devaluation: How Psychological Defenses Turn Against Us And Make Our Lives Worthless And Us Unhappy

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Psychological defense is one of the oldest concepts of psychoanalysis, discovered by Sigmund Freud and developed by his followers. It is still used by most psychotherapists. However, in different directions, this phenomenon is described slightly differently, depending on the basic ideas about the structure of the human psyche. Some scholars, such as Wilhelm Reich, believed that a person's character is his main defensive structure, and the set of preferred defenses constitutes a psychological profile or type of character.

Psychological protections are mechanisms that allow a person to worry less and feel less unpleasant or too strong emotions caused by a situation or psychological conflict (fear, anxiety, anger, sexual desire, guilt, shame, and so on).

They allow us to survive, effectively adapt to the environment, regulate our boundaries with it and with other people, and protect ourselves - including from our own mental world, which can pose a threat.

Defense and attack

The very essence of this psychological phenomenon of defenses implies the variability of the possibilities of their use: methods of defense can also be methods of attack, it all depends on the idea of a person's defensive-offensive weapons. If you have claws, they can be used for hunting, and for defense, and for digging the ground if you are desperate, for example.

I love military metaphors in describing the psyche and its mechanisms. The art of war is in many ways a psychological art, and since people throughout their history have accumulated incomparable experience in this area, it would be foolish to neglect such an interesting and valuable information resource. Therefore, I would suggest calling these phenomena a psychological weapon with which a person can both defend and attack.

Perhaps the most "fashionable", extremely dangerous psychological weapon that has serious combat characteristics and requires very careful handling is depreciation.

Why depreciation is so popular

Most researchers believe that narcissistic character and culture are now dominant. Yet narcissistic culture lives on value determination and depreciation.

The ideas of the value of human life, acceptance of one's own and someone else's individuality, the policy of tolerance assert the equal value (value) of very different things. For many people, this ambiguity and ambiguity is unbearable - it creates a lot of unpleasant emotions to defend against, and depreciation helps to cope with this anxiety.

Devaluation turns out to be extremely effective in situations of uncertainty.

If everything is the same and equal, then how to compete? How to get better, faster, higher, stronger? In other words, how can a narcissist navigate in the modern world, how to idealize and know exactly what for how much? The answer is simple - devalue more often.

Of course, there is also a normal depreciation (it would be more correct to call it overestimation or overestimation of values). This is when what was important loses its former meaning. Normally, however, this is an internal long and often complex process, which just involves contact with unpleasant and difficult emotions, and not protection from them.

Devaluation for emotional self-regulation

In a situation of loss and grief. For example, a child is very worried about the loss of a toy or the death of a pet. I once saw a little boy worrying about the death of a rat so much that he even wanted to die himself. He said: "The rat has died, and I will die too, because I cannot live without my beloved rat." It took a fairly strong depreciation of the value of the rat and the feeling of love for it for his experiences to even out. The death of the rat was compared to the death of his grandmother and other loved ones in order to explain to the boy that his feelings were excessive.

In a situation of fear. Devaluation helps to get rid of unnecessary fear. For example, a child may be very afraid of a classmate until a high school student appears who is stronger and beats the first.

Devaluation for offense and competition

In a rough version, depreciation is like a big club with iron spikes: a person, attacking, takes away the joy from another. This is how people cope with envy and unstable self-esteem: they have taken away joy, and they can move on. In this case, depreciation is an extremely aggressive action, but it is perfectly acceptable in our culture! I think this is the big secret of his popularity. You can beat very hard, and nothing will happen for it.

- Passed the exam for the top five?

- Yes.

- Did you put fives for everyone?

People use these weapons very often. "You are worse than me, you are not that smart", "You are beautiful, but you still have to work and work on your booty." There are endless options for depreciation in married life, where it is very important to reduce the price of the partner's merits, so as not to enter into a large loan yourself:

“What are you doing? Do you make money? Who doesn't earn them! You are a man? All men earn money."

"You're a woman? All women give birth and sit with children and clean up and cook! Why are you so tired?"

"You defended your thesis - but who is not defending a thesis now?"

Devaluing someone relieves us both of the fear of being dependent on that object - and of the fear of losing it.

And it increases the chances in the competition. If you value the success of other people too much, then independent achievement is questioned; if they are devalued, they become more real.

It is this option that is most often used by the modern client of the psychotherapist, who too intensively gets rid of the fear of dependence, loss or abandonment by means of depreciation.

Thus, depreciation is an important emotional regulator of one's own behavior and the behavior of other people. What is the problem with the modern client, especially the narcissist, who is slightly out of balance?

Devaluation can deprive ourselves of value

They devalue more dramatically, ultimately inevitably devaluing themselves greatly.

Why does this happen?

When a person “knocks down” the value of the people around him, things and activities, he finds himself in a world where there is nothing “best”, “ideal”. The ideal, as a rule, is quite stable and can feed a person with energy and hope for a long time. If it often and dramatically depreciates, staggers, then the very bearer of ideals is questioned.

This is especially evident in love relationships and professional life and constitutes the main sadness of such a client. Romantic relationships are greatly depreciated in the process or after their end, and professional life in general does not seem valuable enough. Subjectively, this is expressed in a sense of the absence of "my own business", "vocation": I never found what I want to do, there was no real love, I live half-heartedly, as if I am not investing to the end.

Victories are fleeting, and dissatisfaction is long lasting. The devaluation of one's efforts and / or professional goals is used as a defense against failure. If it didn’t work out, then I didn’t want to and didn’t try, and in general it’s all for fun. The result is terrible dissatisfaction and meaninglessness.

The main problem of the modern client of the psychotherapist is the inflation of relations, not only with people, but with the whole world. Every second visit to a psychotherapist is associated with the devaluation of love stories: they all fall short of the "ideal". Except, of course, those that could not have happened (you can fantasize about their ideality forever).

A person comes to the conclusion: the inflation of relations is so high that he no longer needs them, although the need is exactly the opposite - close, trusting and exclusive relations.

Dating sites make a dramatic contribution to this process. The large selection and ease of dating reduces their value to an absurdly low, when people do not even remember the names of those with whom they spent the night, or set themselves the statistical task of choosing the ideal candidate out of a hundred. As a result, people generally cease to believe in the possibility of any significant relationship for themselves, they lose sensitivity.

Such a person comes to therapy when he begins to guess: he is doing something wrong. At the initial stage, he seeks to devalue all the therapist's assumptions and comments that relate to his feelings. When the client realizes that most of the therapy is devoted to the exploration of his emotional life, he agrees to this, in the process depriving his emotions of value.

"Yes, I am angry, but not very much."

"Yes, I liked her, but she had many flaws."

"Yes, I can feel it, but I want you to understand that it is not very important to me."

"I love him, but he is a goat and we can't have anything."

If all this is reduced to a meta-message, it would sound something like this: yes, I feel certain things, but I do not allow these feelings to be made important and too significant. I control their influence and at any time I can reduce their importance.

Why is it important for the narcissist not to feel deeply?

Because it is dangerous: the process can take over, control will be lost, other uncontrollable emotions will appear.

The person himself does not really understand what will happen, but he knows for sure that this must be avoided by all means. Devaluation is on guard, taking its bribe - boredom, meaninglessness, and a vague sense of a "failed" life. The psychological weapon turns against its owner.

Clients quickly begin to notice that they are devaluing a lot in their lives.

Then the question arises: what to do if I have to admit that feelings are important to me? This notorious rat appears again, the death of which may not be survived. At this stage of psychotherapy, a person begins to remember situations in childhood (and not only), when control over feelings was lost and this brought a lot of suffering. Often these memories are painful and do not want to relive them, so the client begins to resist.

This manifests itself in the devaluation of the therapy, the therapist and oneself in this process: "The therapy did not help me very much," "This is a bad specialist, and I did not try and did not follow his recommendations." Many people leave therapy during this period.

However, most clients go further, because besides the fear of losing control over their feelings, they have a great need to be real people and to love someone, including themselves. It becomes obvious that the depreciation pattern is no longer needed to this extent.

What happened to that boy when he stopped dying with the rat? He seemed to have received his sight and saw that there are different things with different values. That he does not have psychic powers to die with every living creature on Earth, but he can love them and grieve for them. The rat's "shares" had fallen sharply, but he did not throw them away, but kept them. Was this epiphany his deliberate choice? It is hard to say. I tend to think of this as a process of learning to use my own mental apparatus.

An adult, surveying his psychic realm and putting things in order in it, can make this reassessment in order to choose (or learn to choose) what he is ready to invest in and consider as a value. Of course, this is more difficult than in childhood. But in childhood, the risk is higher.

Returning to the art of war (and the war among people prone to devaluation goes on constantly and mainly with themselves): what is considered a victory for a devaluating person?

I think that the preservation of some "gold reserve" of individual experiences, feelings, situations and relationships will be a success. Treasure boxes that will never lose value because they are carefully kept. And they get into this box only thanks to experience, the power of the influence of these events and feelings, and not because of successful consequences, long preservation or something else.

The famous treatise Sun Tzu "The Art of War" states that the goal of any war is the prosperity of the population and its loyalty to the ruler. So, if your "population" is not prosperous and you are not loyal to yourself, perhaps it is time for you to learn how to experience feelings without devaluing them or being afraid. Of course, this is best done with the help of experienced military consultants.