Self-defense (denial) behavior catalog

There are typical self-defense (denial) behaviors.
I guess some (or many) people have already studied and explained these, but I decided to make a thread and make my own catalog.

Basically, I’m going to put one behavior per post.
I don’t really ask/expect any of you to respond or add behaviors.

Motivation is a little similar to the “Evaluating maturity” thread.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=166553

By placing some perspectives, we may save energy and time in understanding/explaining how certain behaviors/tendencies can be evaluated/identified.

As I think we all have semi-automatic self-deceptive behaviors, it may serve as a reminder to myself (and to you, if you care). :slight_smile:

Maybe, it can be called “generalization”.

I noticed this while talking to another poster, recently.
When I point out something about the particular person, he would answer from the view point of many others (or a group) that might include himself.

It’s as if an effort to hide a tree in the fores.
Or it’s a if the person is trying to dodge an arrow by going behind bunch of people.

I would say, it’s a semi-automatic, mostly subconscious trick to feel less emotional pressure by diluting the attention placed on himself.

Example: When he was told that his logic is faulty, he would answer “Christians would think like this”.

Incoming perspective was clearly directed at the particular person, while he interpret and answer from the perspective of many others (including himself, a bit) but there isn’t much logical connection nor valid reasoning/explanation to change perspective.
And the answer is often nearly totally illogical.

We can notice this when someone suddenly become representative for larger group of people, out of context.
Sometime, s/he would start to talk for ALL human, ALL creature, etc, WITHOUT much reasoning.

If someone repeats this behavior, the person isn’t very aware of what s/he is doing.
S/he doesn’t have much ability in evaluating her/his own thoughts/words, critically enough.
Probably, s/he isn’t even motivated to become more aware and reduce these illogical and obvious form of self-deception.

Unless the person has other interesting qualities or utilities, talking to someone like this is usually meaningless because s/he isn’t aware of what s/he is saying and s/he can’t understand/respond in coherent manner.

Although the example and the actual case I saw in ILP were Christian, it’s not limited to religious people.

This can be classified as a subcategory of “perspective sliding”, I guess.

It happens when incoming perspective isn’t what the person likes and capable of accepting, by sliding/changing the perspective that hurts less.
The person is creating a world view in which he would see less problem, so to say.
A way to keep her/his world “rosy”, by deceiving her/himself.
It’s a pretty common delusion, self-deception, hypocrisy.
It’s so common among many adults that some children (and also some adults who don’t like lying) may feel sick and even hatred (like Aidan).

The ad hom is a self-defense denial behavior in forums like this one.
If you can rile up your ‘opponent’ the focus shifts away from the discussion, which you may be ‘losing’.

About the generalization, it may be a subconcious comfort factor, but it need not always cause a problem.

I’m sure we all reinforce our own beliefs by appealing to the authority or the group.

I’m using general terms like “we” and "us, but why should we change :slight_smile:

I noticed you were saying s/he a lot. Why not just say “they”?

Condescension.
To speak or write in a condescending way can often be a denial of anger. It is a way of expressing anger without losing one’s cool. (of course one can use condescension with full consciousness that one is pissed off which may or may not be another kettle of fish) To get upset and express anger directly can seem like acknowledging the power (effect) of the other person.

I wrote this one inspired by this thread.
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=166695

I’d say it’s more of attention diluting tactics than appealing to authority, although we can see like that, as well.

If you see things in terms of pain/suffering control tactics, you say understand what i"m saying, even better.

Because I was referring/addressing a specific person, but I wasn’t sure of the sex. :slight_smile:

I guess “ad hom” can be seen as a form of “Condescension”.

For the convenience, I’ll refer someone with the victim mentality as “Victor a.k.a. VIC” in this post. :slight_smile:

Victor sees himself (consciously or subconsciously) as a victim.
In other words, VIC takes the perspective in which someone is attacking/hurting him.

In his mind, Vic is a poor victim who got hurt by BAD/WRONG/EVIL person(s) (or entity, whatever).
So, it allows him to see himself as a good/right if/when he has negative feeling.

Basically, VIC doesn’t know what to do with his emotion and mixing emotion and (pseudo) logic so that he can keep his (often fragile) mental balance by (fake) self-esteem of being good/right and yet victimized.

VIC has the tendency to exaggerate what was said/done to him because it allows him to be a victim of greater scale and (in his mind) he can see him as good/right with greater magnitude.

VIC often becomes self-righteous person, who loves to see himself (often subconsciously) being hurt, having negative emotion.
He is almost a hero who suffers from attacks of evil enemies (in his imagination). :smiley:

Obviously, VIC doesn’t have a very good ability in rational thinking.
It means we can’t expect VIC to understand things very well.

Whenever VIC has something he doesn’t want to recognize/admit, he can simply declare (or even fake) that he was hurt.
Then, in his mind, he is automatically fully justified and perfectly good and right. :smiley:
Very convenient and thus probably addictive perspective.

And then, there is the need to be victimized.
I mean, if he doesn’t get hurt, he can’t have the emotional fuel required to feed the confused mind to stay focused in the victim perspective.
So, he may, sometime, even seek to get hurt.

An example of victim mentality is Jews (and Arabs).
It’s true that Jews suffered great deal during WWII and maybe before and after that.
However it doesn’t mean they are always right/good.
Actually, they are acting rather like Nazi in some regards, putting a group of people in the “concentration camp” and killing them.
Also, it’s true that Arabs (Palestinians) suffered and still suffering a lot.
But it doesn’t mean they are always good/right, either, especially when they believe in having 70 virgins in the heaven for suicide bombing.

Just a curiosity:

are you a psychologist, Nah?

Nah. :slight_smile:

I think this is another form of inferior complex.
To deny the self-recognition that one is inferior, some people consider themselves as “chosen people”, “elite”, or “I’m (We are) special”.
Often, this goes with some sort of “purpose” or “mission” of their life.
They become men/women of “mission”, moreover “important”, “critical”, “serious” mission. :smiley:

And they would use this to deny whatever they don’t want to face, or to cover their inabilities.

I guess “Victim mentality” and “Chosen people syndrome” form holy triad of inferiority complex taking “delusion of superiority” at the apex.

Americans are known to show this syndrome in the field of military and anything big.
French are known for cuisine et amour.
Chinese call their country “center country”.
Jewish and two other monotheistic religion are poised with this.
And probably many other groups and individual cases can be found, pretty easily.

I’m going to add Monotheism because it often function as the backbone of denial behavior.

By monotheism, I’m talking about the idea that there is only one god, and that god happen to be the god these guy worship. :slight_smile:

I think monotheism represent extreme case of narrowed vision.
I guess it was developed in the environment where many gods were competing to get more customers.
And instead of promoting one god as a better god, some people started to “deny” the existence of other gods and promoted their god as The GOD.
This is convenient because they could avoid comparison to other gods (in their mind since other gods don’t even exist).

On the earth, when we talk about monotheism, it’s mainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And it’s often used in the context of some sort of “unity” of religions and also “superiority” over other form of religious beliefs like pantheism, animism, (and maybe atheism ).

The idea of “unity” sounds nice and beautiful, but I tend to see something similar with multi-culturalism. I mean, in some countries, I think multi-culuralism has been promoted by Jewish people to reduce prejudices and hate against them.
Similarly, by promoting the idea of monotheism as something noble, Christians and Muslims may gather and get along with Jews who claim to be the inventor (and thus the leader) of monotheism.
So, the idea of “unity” can be coming from the fear of loneliness and prosecution, and the idea of “superiority” can be the result of inferiority complex caused by the victim mentality (with the recognition of victim = weak).

The idea of monotheism is somewhat similar to absolute monarchy.
All power is supposed to be owned by the all-mighty god.
But evidently, god guy is either lazy or not so all-mighty that there are angels and holy spirits and holy people doing lots of job.
And if god is omnipresent, then it may mean EVERYTHING and EVERYWHERE is god.
I mean, we are god and we are eating god, shit is god, we breath and swaet god. It can be a bit similar to the idea of pantheism, to me.

Aside from many potential logical contradictions, acting as the extreme from of “elitism (chosen people syndrome)” and “victim mentality” (because it’s Jewish … they can’t help it, I think monotheism has relatively strong contaminating power as far as mental attitude is concerned.

It’s a crystallized form of denial behaviors that causes insensitivity to others through walls of denials.

Although most of monotheists are pacific and not violent on the surface, I think there are things opposite of what they pretend, underneath.

On top of these, they are generally bad thinkers because they are so immersed in associative thinking by quoting scripture or their holly books.
Their brain work as if it’s a bible search data base.
Yeah, it can be useful IF you wanted to get bible data without googling. :slight_smile:
But it’s pretty much useless for people not interested in quoting parrot of old heavily edited potentially badly translated “holy” book which is full of killing, cheating, etc.

And they can deny anything by evoking their god, since god is everything and anything and can be/do anything. Very convenient. Too convenient that monotheist may abuse it to the point their ability in thinking would be severely limited.

If you are a monotheist reading this, are you denying these? :smiley:

Some of us use the delusion of (fake) general superiority for denial.

For example, someone may deny everything what other person is saying simply because the person is younger than him.

It’s evident that being older doesn’t guaranty superiority, in most cases, in most domain.
And even if someone is better in one domain, it wouldn’t guaranty that s/he is also better in other domains.

This illogical behavior is showing the need to deny something other person is saying, so badly, to the point s/he can’t understand absurdity of what s/he is saying.

We see “title”, “diploma”, “age”, “membership”, “race”, “sex”, “religion”, etc, to be used in this type of stupid denial.

a very common (and base) tactics indeed.

Assuming that strong emotional reactions to what one does/says are by definition wrong. IOW you are getting worked up so you must be wrong/irrational. I am not worked up so I am objective.

This may fit some situations, but certainly not all. And lack of affect should never be confused with objectivity.

This one is generic.
I mean it includes many other types of denial.
Or, I guess we can see it as a superset of many others.

When we don;t want to admit something, we may cling to any belief that would negate the information.

I’ve seen wide variety of belief used in this fashion.

And sometime, beliefs are made up on the spot. :smiley:
Really, anything goes just to turn away from certain things.

It’s like becoming a donkey. :slight_smile:
No matter what, it won’t move. The end of the story.

Although overrating is more of basic human (and awareness) tendency, it is often used for denial.

For example, a small tribe with more or less fanatic tendency (due to their head heated too much by sun) could be defeated, enslaved, and so on.
To deny their defeat or any other negative emotion, they might overrate their tribal good as if it were a super GOD, only GOD, and so on.

It’s similar to a kid beaten by other kids. He may trey to preserve his fragile self-esteem by presenting (and believing himself) his dad as a super strong /intelligent hero. By association with something great, poor boy can imagine/delude his own part of greatness.

Also, by overrating something, people can eclipse other things that they don;t want to see. Narrowed vision, pigeon-hole perspective can be handy for people who wants to hide/deny things. :slight_smile:

When someone can’t convince oneself by own mental ability, two or more of these mentally weak people can group up and start trying to convince themselves, together.

Although there are different variation, we often see it in the form of mutual (overrated) praising.

Example:
A: “We should note that his post is full of truth. blah blah …”
B: “That was a great observation. blah blah …”

We can observe this in ILP, too. :slight_smile:

By sticking to certain (often more pleasant) delusion, these people manage to deny/ignore things they can’t face.
It’s a “gang” (or herd) mentality, so to say.