Defense Mechanism: Displacement

Have you ever gotten home from work and found yourself angry and irritable with your family for no apparent reason? But when you reflect over your day you feel immense anger towards your boss.

Have you found yourself with heightened sensitivity to what are usually normal interactions with friends? And when you reflect on your day you realize something an acquaintance said to you hurt your feelings.

If you said yes to either of these, or situations similar to these, you may be engaging in the defense mechanism of displacement. This is when you take negative emotions from one situation and redirect them to an unrelated source. This occurs when it is more threatening to address these emotions with the original source than with the unrelated source. For example, it’s less threatening to be angry with your kids than with your boss. Or it is safer to be emotional in front of your friends than with your acquaintances.

Think through your past week or so and identify times when you have had heightened emotional reactions, like when you were angry or sad. Think about the situation where this occurred and the people you were with. Was this situation or were these people the cause of these emotions? Or can you identify another source that caused them? Why do you think you were unable to show these emotions with the source that caused them?