A few years back an attractive young lady told me a terrifying story about how her father brutalized her by beating her with a shovel. She was just a tiny child when this occurred. She would wrap herself around his legs while he madly hit her, crying out, "Daddy! daddy I love you!"

Can you begin to imagine the horrific pain inflicted on that child. I cringe every time I think about this story.

The young lady told me these terrifying incidents without any emotion whatsoever. She would describe them in quite vivid detail, recounting each horrible scene with a chilling detachment that at first was difficult to understand.

Every time she described another incident I would break down and weep. But not her.

After sometime I began to see that she had NO feelings whatsoever. She showed no emotion. She never cried, never laughed... never anything. The image that developed in my mind was of a walnut. Inside was a soft tender center but it was protected and hidden by a very, very tough shell, so tough in fact it was virtually impenetrable.

This young lady had locked her bruised and brutalized feelings away, beneath a cold, emotionless exterior where she would never have to get in touch with those early childhood catastrophic feelings again.

She survived her childhood by suppressing her pain so successfully that she lost her ability to feel anything as an adult. She was totally numb! That walnut shell was her defense mechanism. Without it she would have lived in endless and catastrophic trauma all her life. But when she saw me she was an adult and her childhood beatings had occurred some 20 years earlier. Her father had died and there was no one around to terrorize her.

But she was still protecting herself from the childhood pain with her walnut shell.

Defense mechanisms have been described as largely unconscious reactions that protect a person from unpleasant emotions such as anxiety and guilt. They are survival mechanisms which allow us to cope when our tender inner-selves are being undermined and threatened by overwhelming negative forces, whether they be physical or psychological.

We all have a repertoire of our own individual defense mechanisms we have used and still use to cope with what we perceive within ourselves to be life's threats and dangers.

Defense mechanisms are unconsciously acted out behavior we have largely learnt from young childhood to deal with situations that trigger off memories or feelings of previous negative experiences.

They are used to defend off the pain! They protect us from having to relive and refeel those times when all those deeply negative experiences seemed catastrophic, overwhelming and terrifying.

Others begin to see our "defense mechanisms" before we do! Because they are unconsciously acted out behavior, we don't even know we have them or are using them. Everything we do seems and feels natural or normal until someone else makes a comment or observation about the way we respond or behave in certain situations.

And if our "defenses" are up because of earlier criticism or undermining of our wounded inner-selves, we won't find it too easy to feel safe and secure when someone else offers some insight which seems to "criticize" us! We may retaliate, sulk, get depressed, withdraw or just go numb.

Outmoded or unnecessary defense mechanisms are the ones we find most debilitating and can produce in us all types of neurotic behavior. The young "walnut" lady had no feelings but was capable of making others cry with her horrific stories.

That, I learnt after a while, was how she expressed her emotions safely. Her defenses wouldn't let her feel her pain, but she could transfer it to others who then cried on her behalf.

Defense mechanisms can cause us to live and act neurotically or in ways not helpful to ourselves or others. We may find oursleves behaving in inappropriate or confusing ways, which could affect our work, our relationships or our ability to handle distressing and stressful situations.

When our defense mechanisms interfere with and begin to play havoc with our lives and those of others is the time we need to resolve them and lessen their impact.

Most of our defense mechanisms are survival mechanisms which in adult life we no longer require but still unconsciously use. What we need, to reduce their crippling impact, is safety, security and honesty from those closest to us.

We need to have others help us to "see ourselves" because we are not really capable of doing that.

But always remember when you discover one "defense mechanism" in someone else, there are always more you are not seeing in yourself.