HEALTH WEEK
Tuesday, October 27, 2015 25
ê Photo credit: Strategylab.ca
the body move into an alarm state, but it also occurs
through a kind of psychological osmosis, as we absorb
false messages through life experiences – messages
we begin to pay more attention to than reality itself.
Examples include falsehoods such as conditional selfacceptance or performance based esteem, conditional
self-love or conventional success, and conditional
happiness or materialism. Other implicit messages
are that self-care isn’t necessary for law students and
that knowing ourselves isn’t necessary to know what
our clients need.
On Defense Mechanisms
In place of healthy coping skills we’ve not yet learned,
we also begin to use what Freud labeled defense
mechanisms. Freud defined defense mechanisms as
strategies we use to reduce the anxiety associated
with having an awareness of thoughts that make
us uncomfortable. Carl Jung expanded on this
work, arguing that increasing our capacity for selfexamination by acknowledging uncomfortable truths
in lieu of masking them was the means by which we
could become masters of our own fate.
Common defense mechanisms include denial
(about the extent of our mental health challenges),
rationalization (that everything in our lives is fine
but for one area that is out of control), blaming (the
legal system for our conduct within it), projecting
(insecurities onto the motivations of others),
internalizing (negative or traumatic experiences),
regression (to less mature ways of being), repression
(of troubling information), and emotional insulation
(so that we grow numb to our pain). Not only do these
strategies produce poor mental health in individuals,
when multiplied, they function the same way at the
level of societies.
The Psychology of Bad Laws
An instructive example comes from eco-feminist Val
Plumwood, who delineated the ‘logic of colonization’.
This logic sets out the me