Often a person finds himself in a situation that contradicts his ideas about the place in society that this individual has chosen for himself. Sometimes, the desires of the individual do not coincide with his capabilities. Or the attitude of others does not correspond to the idea of personality with the way he thinks about himself. As a result of this, an internal conflict arises, a dispute between two "I": one of them, as it were, observes from the outside and criticizes the second "I", and the second "I" is looking for excuses for its imperfection.
This feeling of internal discomfort excites the psychological mechanisms of personal protection . It is they that allow a person not to break down in a difficult situation, often not just survive, but sometimes feel happy. The years of the Second World War can serve as an example of such protection, when in the besieged Leningrad people managed to give performances in theaters, celebrated birthdays, having a handful of dried peas, and presenting a log for a firebox as a gift.
Probably, then the most frequent methods of psychological defense took place - this is denial, suppression or repression. For all the horror of the environment, people blocked thoughts of hopelessness and the likelihood of near death and continued to live, reproducing some details from a happy past life (suppression). They not only survived on their own, but also lifted the spirit of the weaker, created the necessary psychological mood around themselves.
Trying to avoid talking about failures, no matter how difficult it may be, strong-willed people continued to carry out routine activities, washed floors and curled hair, learned poetry and read fairy tales to children (denial). Those who lacked the mental strength to defend themselves - denial, like a sponge, absorbed bad news, painted the darkest future and - broke down, in the end, having failed to cope with this pain and fear of inevitability.
In general, during any wars, it is extremely important for a person to include psychological defense mechanisms. After all, we have to not only survive in difficult situations - here we are often supported by a simple animal instinct - but also be able to kill other people. The very concept of "killing" is unnatural for normal people. But in the name of the good of the motherland, this had to be done. And then in the brain of the soldiers such psychological defense mechanisms as depersonalization and rationalization were included.
In the case of depersonalization, the soldier tried to forget that he was faced by individuals who also have families who also experience pain and fear. For his own good, the brain depersonalized the enemy, presenting it with one weighty word - “enemy”.
Rationalization let into the brain only that part of information that allowed a person to live on with the consciousness of his own rightness. This method of defense is also well seen in the excuses of thieves and robbers. They completely “forget” that the property that they acquired illegally is necessary for the owner himself. Such people put only the fact that these things or money were very necessary for them themselves.
On the examples of losers or outcasts, one can observe such psychological defense mechanisms as transference and projection. Usually weak-willed people are distinguished by such quality as blaming their troubles on other people, blaming that his fate is far from being the best, not of himself, but of bad leaders, an evil wife and even disgusting weather (projection). The same method of protection is often expressed in attributing to other people their negative qualities.
A transfer is most often found in cases where desires are satisfied on replaced objects. For example, instead of the girl he loves, a young man comes into contact with a corrupt “butterfly” or, even worse, rapes a small child. For all that, this individual does not suffer at all from the fact that his behavior, to put it mildly, is low and disgusting.
By the way, these same psychological defense mechanisms can also act as positive, and even progressive ways to defeat internal discomfort. An example of this is the transfer of parental love to someone else's child, which usually takes place in foster families where parents cannot give birth to their own child.
Today, there is a whole science that educates those who wish to do auto-training, with the help of which a person can independently extinguish any internal conflict in his soul. They even say that with the help of such exercises people can radically change not only themselves, but also their entire fate as a whole.