Research Paper RD1

Research Paper Rough Draft #1

No matter how much one wishes, life is not a piece of cake. Trauma and difficulty hit from every angle and cause necessity for individuals to navigate their way through with the use of one powerful system: a conglomeration of ridges and nerve clusters encased in a thick frame of bones. The brain is a complicated system—it provides the basis for our feelings and thoughts, incites us to act and react, and most importantly, molds itself and our consciousness to deal with the problems and stimuli presented to us by our environment. This concept falls under the study of cognition, which denotes the mental processes involved with gaining and applying information in response to stimuli. The current discussion on this topic is extremely widespread and includes the broad topic of coping mechanisms, which are ways in which internal and external stress is managed, adapted to, or acted upon. The prevalence of this discussion area is clear—individuals have always had to respond to things that were emotionally painful or difficult to handle. In many instances, this mechanism is innate and occurs without conscious thought and awareness; interestingly enough, although this essentially is “normal” it seems to incite uneasiness in people. In other cases, individuals cope through deliberate means, such as through meditation and writing. Essays such as Martha Stout’s “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning It Was Friday,” Daniel Gilbert’s “Immune to Reality,” and Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” probe the complications and impact surrounding the brain’s capacity to cope. However, most of the current discussion is marked by a positive tone; therefore this paper will argue a slightly different approach, particularly a negative one. This paper will probe how individuals cope with trauma both consciously and unconsciously and the extent to which this mechanism/psychological immune system causes us to misreact to the current realities of life.

Each of us have dealt with stressful experiences in the past through the use of a common cognitive tool. A coping mechanism is a technique that enables an individual to deal with conflict, frustration, and stress—a self-protective maneuver pertaining to perception and motivation, either psychic or mental, that is meant to soften or hide what is perceived as difficult to handle or unacceptable by the self. Psychic mechanisms can be equated with innate, unconscious attempts to achieve a mental equilibrium. Freud outlined many of these non-deliberate mechanisms in his theory on psychological defenses. Repression, for example,  is the attempted exclusion from immediate awareness of stressful experiences, such as shameful or disturbing memories and motives. Isolation is when one completely cuts off stressful aspects of an entire experience; this seems to be a special kind of repression. Rationalization is described as an attempted “explanation” of an unacceptable action or turn of events which substitutes motives that may actually be acceptable. Reaction-formation is a form of “challenge-by-action” of unworthiness, in which one defends his/her esteem against an undesirable disposition or experience by over-desiring the opposite. Compensation is a method that involves offsetting the negative aspects of an experience and overvaluing the positives in order to feel better about it. Displacement describes attaching the emotional significance of a stressful or unacceptable experience to an alternative object in order to achieve at least partial release for the original situation. Projection describes when one attributes negative qualities or associations directly to others to, in a way, take the guilt off themselves. Withdrawal is the opposite of compensation, in which one mentally steps back from what is causing them stress. These coping techniques are seen as non-deliberate psychological strategies for protecting one’s esteem from self-diminishing experiences, and may be inherently self-deceptive by nature. (Katkovsky and Gorlow 273)

A slightly more powerful psychic coping technique is called divided awareness or “dissociation”, which Stout defines as a form of out-of-body experience in which there is becomes a distinction between the mental awareness and the physical presence. In “When I Woke up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday,” Stout cites a hypothetical example of a man in a movie theater. When he first walks in and sits down with his wife, he is fully oriented to his surroundings and aware of his wife sitting next to him and the popcorn in his lap. He even spends energy worrying about a problem he is facing at work. When the lights dim and the movie starts, however, he is lost in a virtual reality within twenty-five minutes. According to his new awareness, his wife has vanished and the popcorn on his lap no longer exists, although any observer could very well see that both are very much physically present in the situation. Even the fact that he owns a job slips out of his mind, let alone the problem he was worrying about earlier. And, while remaining completely idle in his seat, he is running with the movie character and dodging a runaway train, his racing heart proof that this fiction was, for a brief while, reality for him. When the movie finishes, the man’s consciousness returns to reality; he acknowledges his wife and grabs the bag of popcorn to throw out. If he sees that he spilled some popcorn, he will not remember doing so. What happened in this scenario is that for a brief while, this man separated his reality, which consisted of worries about work, from the imaginative side of him that the movie incited; in other words, he dissociated his mental consciousness from his physical consciousness, and in doing so, escaped from the stress from work that had been weighing on his mind. (Stout 427)

Conscious coping mechanisms, on the other hand, involve deliberate attempts by individuals to deal with stressful situations. The most common form of this type, as explained by Stout in “When I Woke up Tuesday Morning, It was Friday,” are daydreams, which are a conscious form of dissociation. Through this, as explained earlier, individuals have the ability to separate their awareness from their physical selves while, in this case, having conscious control throughout the entire length of time. It is a form of mild distraction from immediate stress, in which a human being can choose to “be psychologically absent from his or her own direct experience” (Stout 427). Another common mental mechanism, as defined by Gilbert in “Immune to Reality,” is the psychological immune system, which describes a defensive system which “cooks facts and shifts blame in order to offer us a more positive view” when situations cause us unhappiness or stress (Gilbert 136). In other words, individuals deliberately look for the silver lining in situations, many times creating their own truths in the process, in order to negate any stress or negativity that have been weighing on their minds. Gilbert cites several examples of this system in the works; for example in one experiment performed, volunteers were asked to watch a computer screen on which words appeared for only a few milliseconds. Although these individuals were unaware that there were even words on the screen, let alone what words were on the screen, they attempted to answer questions about the words. Rather than answering with the simple answer of “I don’t know,” their minds quickly worked to create plausible explanations of the experience, and the volunteers ended up stating simple facts that they were aware of, such as “I watched the computer,” and “I was tired” in order to consciously negate the inadequacy they felt by not knowing the true answers to the questions.