My advice is to keep track of those defenses, but be careful about giving them too much power. You may feel overwhelmed. Focusing on specific behaviors can help mitigate the experience of feeling overwhelmed, even though those feelings are likely to recur. Just as we can best confront our feelings of being overwhelmed by action, so too is despair best confronted through action. May your steps be steady, graceful, revealing, and rewarding, and my you know them as part of the greater ecological dance.
Psychology is the study of the psyche or soul.
James Hillman, in questioning the focus of psychotherapy, offers us the image of a sinking ship. Deep in the boat's bowels, in a safe and cloistered cabin, a therapist and client are earnestly working away while the ship sinks lower and lower in the water, its crisis becoming increasingly critical. Clinical psychology once focused on the individual ego but has broadened its scope to consider the couple, the family, the group, and society. Ecopsychology is exploring broader definitions of the self beyond the skin-encapsulated ego and the rugged individualism of the American Dream. Universal health care is a step in the right direction.