Defense Mechanisms Quotes

“Deep down behind those hostile eyes was a very little girl who had already learned that life really isn't much fun for anybody; and the best way to avoid further rejection was to made herself as objectionable as possible. Then it would never come as a surprise to find herself unloved. Only a simple fact.”
― Torey Hayden, One Child

“Attending a funeral would leave the average person insane, if they truly believed that sooner or later they are also going to die.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Deep down behind those hostile eyes was a very little girl who had already learned that life really isn't much fun for anybody; and the best way to avoid further rejection was to make herself as objectionable as possible. Then it would never come as a surprise to find herself unloved. Only a simple fact.”
― Torey Hayden, One Child

“The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe.”
― Stephen King, The Mist

“Under the heading of "defense mechanisms,” psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These "mechanisms" are often described in psychoanalytic terms as themselves "unconscious,” that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself. Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that "splitting", for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, an impersonal process, so to speak, which has taken over and which he can observe but cannot control or stop. There is thus some phenomenological validity in referring to such "defenses" by the term "mechanism.” But we must not stop there. They have this mechanical quality because the person as he experiences himself is dissociated from them. He appears to himself and to others to suffer from them. They seem to be processes he undergoes, and as such he experiences himself as a patient, with a particular psychopathology. But this is so only from the perspective of his own alienated experience. As he becomes de-alienated he is able first of all to become aware of them, if he has not already done so, and then to take the second, even more crucial, step of progressively realizing that these are things he does or has done to himself. Process becomes converted back to praxis, the patient becomes an agent.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“Suddenly finding myself imprisoned in the ruins of the fortresses I created, I realize that that which I built to protect me has now become a labyrinth that is set to destroy me. And laying spent in the rubble, I finally realize that there is only one fortress and I cannot create it because there is only one God.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“A person whom fails to conquer oneself will always live in fear, and experiences life filled with conflict and emotional storms. Fearfulness prevents a person from perceiving reality and ever knowing oneself. Unable to cope with fear and uncertainty, a person resorts to denial, repression, compromise, and hides behind the mask of a false self.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“How in the world are we supposed to engage life when we spend all of our life building walls to protect ourselves from the very thing that we say we want to engage? The answer is, I think, understanding that God doesn’t need walls but we need Him.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Soft hearts provide poor harbor; tin hearts can better stand against time and bad weather, thin and hollow as they are. So you pray to change from flesh to metal, and the dying Author of the world hears your plea and performs his final miracle. He lays His hand on you and then He vanishes. And what mortal man can undo that? What human on this earth has the power to change a tin man back to flesh?”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“Circumstances can manufacture the materials, but it’s my attitude that builds the wall.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Some of the facts we are denying we were told by our very own eyes.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Thinking is a defense mechanism. Not all the time, of course, but when in situations where strong emotions are involved, throwing yourself into your head is a way to keep yourself out of your feelings and out of your body. Your feelings need to pass through your body, you need to feel them run through your body in order to let go of anything. But that's an excruciating experience and we keep on trying to protect ourselves from it by running into our heads, being analytical, being logical, and doing everything to stay in our brains. This has been my own number one defense mechanism, the wall that I know I need to tear down a little more each day.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“The ad-hominem of reducing people with an inclination to help as having a “savior complex” is merely a display of their own defense-mechanisms acting as a resistance to action or responsibility. No thank you.”
― L. Spurlo

“I can feel lost. I can work absurdly hard to stay lost. And I can tediously construct my life so as to never be found. And as a result of all these rigorous efforts I can certainly lose a sense of God, but I can never lose God.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough