Responding to stress and anxiety by reaching for simple solutions from childhood and even infancy.

Example

Imagine a high-functioning woman who is able to juggle all of the responsibilities of work, and kids, and social life with relative ease. She’s generally pretty good with planning and not forgetting appointments, but also knows how to say no and take time for herself.

Then her mother gets cancer, her brother’s alcoholism spirals out of control, and she get a promotion at work, which brings a sharp increase in monitoring and performance expectations.

Gradually, instead of coming home and spending some time with the kids, having a chat with her partner, and then going for some exercise to work off the day’s stress, every day she pulls out her phone and goes straight upstairs to bed. On her phone she gets hooked on the app version of Magic: The Gathering, a game she used to love as a kid, and then download copies of the Narnia books and read the whole series from start to finish.

Eventually, she finds herself spending every free hour re-watching the Never-Ending Story and Labyrinth and Legend and avoiding contact with anyone or anything that might make some kind of emotional demand on her.

Worst of all, she sees herself doing it, and the negative impact it’s having on her health and her relationships, but she can’t understand it or get herself to stop.

Discussion

When pushed far enough, all of us return to some “childish” seeming way of dealing with a situation. Typically, the higher the level of stress we’re under, the more child-like our behaviour becomes. Above, I’ve used the example of nostalgia, but what makes it regression isn’t the fact that she’s wasting time with kids’ games and movies, it’s the compulsive escape from stress by disappearing into familiar fantasies that make her feel safe.

Road rage and emotional eating are also good examples of regression, because they are the simplest way of expressing or managing an unpleasant feeling. The road-rager basically has a temper tantrum, and the emotional eater soothes their anxiety by giving themselves the comfortable feeling of a full belly.

A temper tantrum is effective at expressing strong emotions that have become overwhelming, but it rarely leads to a positive outcome. You’ll probably get what you want, but only through frightening, frustrating, or exhausting others to the point that they simply give in. This is what makes the temper tantrum (aka. acting out) a simple, or “primitive,” defense: it is effective, but it’s not productive.

Animal Impulse

“The retreat of the psyche into more primitive stages of animal impulse.” (Frankl 2020)

Victor Frankl’s reference to “animal impulse” is the heart of regression, because the needs and emotions involved are usually simple, powerful, and existential.

Emotional eating, or drinking alcohol and taking drugs, are “regressive” because they manage loneliness and low self-esteem by quickly and directly creating good feelings that temporarily satisfy the “infantile” need to be safe, warm, and well-fed.

Regression is a problem because the long-term effects of simple defences are always negative: chronic over-eating leads to obesity and associated diseases like diabetes; drugs and alcohol have a destructive effect on both mind and body even at small doses.

This is characteristic of all of the “young” defenses, they are immediate, direct, and effective, but in the medium- and long-term they are at best counter-productive, and at worst actively life-threatening.

Definitions

Chaplin

1. A retreating.
2. A return to earlier levels of development; the manifestation in older individuals of more primitive levels of behavior.

English & English

1. Moving backward.
2. A return to earlier and less mature behavior; or, manifestation of more primitive behaviors after having learned mature forms, whether or not the immature or primitive behavior had actually formed part of the person’s earlier behavior. (English and English 1974)

Quotes

Cabaniss, et al.

“Regression occurs when people go back to earlier ways of functioning to avoid anxiety-provoking feelings. People who generally function at a very high level may use this defense during periods of stress.” (Cabaniss et al. 2016)

References

Cabaniss, Deborah L., Sabrina Cherry, Carolyn J. Douglas, and Anna R. Schwartz. 2016. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: A Clinical Manual. Second edition. John Wiley & Sons Inc.

English, Horace B., and Ava Champney English. 1974. A Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychological and Psychoanalytical Terms: A Guide to Usage. 11. print. McKay.

Frankl, Viktor E. 2020. Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything. Beacon Press.