The Role of Defense Mechanisms in Online Relationships

The Role of Defense Mechanisms in Online Relationships
To attempt to answer some of these questions let’s have a look at some common issues in online relationships and the types of psychological behaviors and processes we use in our web based relationships with others. In particular, I want to look at psychological defense mechanisms. We all have our favorite defense mechanisms that we use both on and offline, but from my experience the following ones are the defenses that we are most likely to use online. Notice that I include myself in this! Even after studying psychology, sociology and counseling for many years I’m certainly not immune to using defense mechanisms – I may just be slightly more aware when I have used one.

Projection
Simply put, projection is placing our unacceptable emotions onto someone else. The emotions, thoughts, or beliefs we project onto others tend to be ones that we deny we possess. Projection is slippery and can be very hard to see in ourselves unless we look really hard and are willing to be very honest with ourselves!

An example of projection would be denying to ourselves that we are attracted to someone outside of our relationship and then accusing our partner of being attracted to someone else. We see others carrying out the behavior instead of ourselves. The faceless world of the web enables us to project our stuff onto others far more easily than in the real world and to “get away with it” more often, since there’s rarely any challenge or consequence.
Idealization and Devaluation (Splitting)

In simple terms idealization and devaluation means having a strong tendency to see things (and people) in black and white terms – as either all good or all bad. When idealizing someone, we are unable to see them as a whole person with both positive and negative qualities. We only see the good parts. The opposite is true for devaluation – we only see the bad qualities that someone possesses even though in reality we all possess a mixture of both good and bad qualities.

In “splitting”, we might feel that we are intrinsically bad and others are intrinsically good or the other way round. This will express itself as someone “putting you on a pedestal” while constantly depreciating themselves. In the reverse it will be expressed as having someone constantly give the impression of “looking down on you” and criticizing your every word – they feel that they are “good” and you are “bad”.

In the world of the internet it can be hard to challenge these kinds of interactions, since people often present themselves to us as “all good”. Offline we’ll soon find out if someone is as good as they present – we can see if their body language and actions match their words over time. In our online relationships we don’t have this ability, unless that person chooses to reveal their negative characteristics, they can easily hide them from our awareness from behind their computer screen.