Defence mechanisms — Sublimation

Defense mechanisms (DMs) are ways of coping with reality while being unable to accept it.

Out of most DMs, sublimation is one of the “positive” ones. By positive, I mean that it has functional value, versus the ones that tend to have primarily negative outcomes.

Then, what is “Sublimation”?

Sublimation is the DM that transfers your focus/energy into something personally or socially productive while something that you can’t quite handle is happening in your life.

A few examples of sublimation are:

- Cleaning your room.
- Working extra.
- Engaging in social activities.
- Helping others.
- Engaging in physical activity/sports

Notice that I don’t mention things like going out, hanging with friends, gaming or engaging in other forms of entertainment — as all of these activities are mostly escapist and do not contribute to your personal or social wellbeing other than being a vent or a time waster.

In order for something to be identified as sublimation it must bring some sort of value to your life or the life of the people around you.
So, whenever life hits for whatever reason, a quite effective DM is to sublimate, to be productive in one field or another, that way we get to pull ourselves up faster or cope with whatever is going on.

Now, we could argue that sublimation is a list of things that any satisfied/normal person would do. However, it is set as a DM and not just a “normal thing to do” because of the underlying reason as to why we started doing the things that we are doing.

We are coping or trying to avoid something.

So, for example, it would be a productive thing to focus on our career and to be ambitious, but if we are doing the same thing because of a bad breakup, then it stands to reason that a person is engaged in sublimation. So the reason that we want to be better or more productive is not our set of values, rather it is a consequence of us needing to fill some sort of void in life.