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Altruism
- • Decreasing one’s own anxiety or fears about a problem(s) by helping or caring for others
- • E.g., A man who has negative feelings about being abandoned by his parents as a child works in an orphanage
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• Making light of one’s own situation in an effort to decrease anxiety
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Sublimation
Replacing a socially unacceptable desire with an action that is similar, but socially acceptable
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Suppression
Trying to forget something that causes you anxiety
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Repression
- • An idea or feeling is eliminated from consciousness
- • The content may have once been known but has now become inaccessible
• Differentiated from suppression as in suppression the individual is aware of situation but chooses not to focus on it
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Intellectulization
• Avoid difficult emotions by focusing on the intellectual aspects
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• Rational explanations are used to justify attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors that are unacceptable
- • Giving a logical reason for a negative situation to convince ourselves that the situation is reasonable
- • A search for reasons to allow an unacceptable action already selected
- • Used to relive shame and guilt
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• Refusing to acknowledge the reality (or some aspect of the reality) of a painful experience or situation
• It is used to avoid becoming aware of a painful aspect of reality
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• Redirecting disturbing emotions about an object, idea, or event to a less threatening substitute.
• Allows us to place our negative emotion about someone else onto another target
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Identification
• Internalizing the characteristics of another person
• E.g., A child who has been sexually abused grows to be an abuser (identification with abuser)
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• Exhibit a lack of emotion associated with a stressful situation
• E.g., A woman who witnesses a murder describes the incident with no emotion
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• Attributing one’s own personally unacceptable feeling(s) onto another person
• E.g., A man who has committed adultery becomes convinced that his wife has been having an affair even though there is no evidence of it.
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• Replacing a personally unacceptable emotion with an opposite attitude
- • Excessive overreaction can be a sign of reaction formation
- • Very common with teenagers
- • E.g., A daughter who is angry with her mother for never being around when she was growing up visits her in hospital every week with fresh flowers
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• Escaping back to an earlier developmental stage. “Acting childish” or younger than typical for that individual
• Common in people who are tired, ill and uncomfortable
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• The transference of an emotional distress into a physical manifestation
- • Extreme forms of somatization are diagnosed as somatoform disorders
- • Hypochodriasis
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Splitting
• Believing people or events are either all bad or all good. There is no middle ground.
• Common in patients with a borderline personality disorder
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• Believing that one can magically reverse the past events caused by “incorrect” behavior by now adopting correct behavior
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• Emotional or behavioral outbursts without conscious awareness of the emotion that drives the behavior.
- • Substance abuse, eating disorders, overeating, or getting into fights are common actions in adolescents that cover-up feeling of vulnerability
- • Differentiated from displacement in that the emotion is covered up, not redirected
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• Transference occurs in relationships in which someone transfers feelings about one person onto another – happens to physicians and patients
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Counter Transference
refers to the physician’s emotional reactions to the patient and is an important factor to monitor as it can interfere with the doctor’s medical judgment
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