THE HEALTHY PERSONALITY, DEFENSE MECHANISMS AND LONG TERM CARE INSURANCE   

The first in a series written by LTC Tree Advisor, Joe Houston.

In the coming weeks  LTC TREE will be presenting several articles, discussing the healthy personality, how psychological defense mechanisms play into our decision-making processes in our everyday lives.  We will dig in to discover how as we age how when we begin to realize our own mortality and how needing long term care assistance and figuring out how to pay for the care becomes uncomfortable reality.  

We’ll start off today describing a healthy personality, and over the coming weeks go into detail of the various defense mechanisms.  The defense mechanisms we’ll be exploring will be repression, rationalization, intellectualizing, reaction-formation, projection, categorical thinking, denial, over- sensitization, regression, devaluing others, fixation, over- compensation, and isolation.   Since the human mind is so complex and creative, other defense mechanisms may pop up, and if they do we’ll give you our thoughts on those also.          

There are several ways of looking at the healthy personality concept, but we like to keep complicated things as simple as possible.  A healthy personality implies a strong ego, as many early psychological researchers used to say.  All that meant was when an individual thought about him or herself, he might say to himself something like, “Hey, I’m not perfect, but I am trying to get better most of the time, and so far that’s going well-- so I’m okay!”  When such a person sees a threat coming her way, she will look at it, seriously consider it, gather more related information, and act in a manner that deals with it to promote her growing self-concept.  She would need to continue this process in her everyday life so she could continue to say to herself that she’s okay!  This okay self concept will be continuously monitored by the individual in relation to her own subjective world within her own mind, in conjunction with her family, community, nation and the world.  There will be continual adjustment between the person’s image of herself and the world around her.      

The defense mechanisms that we’ll be discussing in the coming weeks are all basically sub-consciously designed to protect ourselves from real or imagined threats, which we perceive will interfere with the way we think, feel, or behave—which we have grown comfortable with and do not wish to change.  We may be trying to not feel guilty, get others to see us in a certain way, getting others to like us, controlling anger and sexual impulses, creating a safe world around us, etc.  So when something comes along to threaten this self image we have developed over the years, our natural tendency is to employ one of the several defense mechanisms to maintain the status quo.  A good analogy is how we all respond to pain, wherein pain can be viewed either as a threat or an informational warning.  When a person experiences a pain, he is presented with a choice: avoid what it is saying and anesthetize it with a drug to make it go away, or, seek medical advice and treat it accordingly.   

The healthy personality, when threatened with something in his life, seeks more information, and then makes a constructive adjustment that will reinforce his healthy concept of himself.  Though we all use defense mechanisms from time to time, they do not promote healthy personality growth and we should minimize their use in our lives.  Like drugs, defense mechanisms do take care of the immediate problem at hand very often, but their use deprives us of an opportunity to grow.  And as an colleague of mine used to say,  “If you aren’t growing—you’re dying!”

For example, when a person begins to plan for retirement a healthy personality will clearly see that because modern medicine is keeping people alive longer that in order to insure a financially comfortable retirement for you and your family, that buying the most "uncomfortable to think about" type of insurance in long term care is a must.  Long Term Care Insurance protects:

1. A person's independence--not having to settle for moving into a government run nursing home because they didn't plan ahead. 
2. Nest Egg--all the wealth that was built from blood sweat and tears over the years can be spent the way you want to, not having to.
3. No burden on the kids--never having to have that conversation with the children saying," son/daughter, I failed to plan for long term care, I took care of you, now I need you to take care of me."