The premise of a token economy is that a individual can earn a certain number of tokens by exhibiting desired behaviors.

**A client receives tokens as reinforcement for performing specified behaviors. The tokens function as currency within the environment and can be exchanged for desired goods, services, or privileges.

Acting out is inappropriate behavior specifically intended to attract attention.

**Emotional conflict is dealt with through actions rather than feelings**

(ex: such behaviors may include arguing, fighting, stealing, threatening, or throwing tantrums)

Conversion are often described as your body's way of dealing unresolved stress or unexpressed emotions that triggered the disorder. In other words, the physical symptoms distract the person from the emotional duress.

**Repressed urge is expressed as a disturbance of body function, usually the sensory, voluntary nervous system (as pain, deafness, blindness, paralysis convulsions, tics)**

Decompensation is when someone with a mental illness, who was maintaining their mental illness well starts to worsen.

**Deterioration of existing defenses**

(ex: patients experiencing decompensation have an inability to maintain normal psychological functions and defenses)

Denial is a type of defense mechanism that involves ignoring the reality of a situation to avoid anxiety.

**Primitive defense inability to acknowledge true significance or thoughts feelings, wishes, behavior, or external reality factors that are consciously intolerable**

(ex:someone denies that they have an alcohol or substance use disorder because they can still function and go to work each day)

While idealization places a person, place, or thing on a pedestal, devaluation refers to the action of assigning exaggerated negative qualities while disregarding the good. During devaluation, flaws, weakness, and negative traits take center stage, and positive qualities are completely ignored.

**A defense mechanism frequently used by persons with Borderline Personality Disorder in which a person attributes exaggerated negative qualities to self or another; it is the split of primitive idealization**

Displacement is a defense mechanism that involves transferring negative feelings from one thing to another.

**Directing an impulse, wish, or feeling toward a person or situation that is not its real object, thus permitting expression in a less threatening situation**

(ex: a person angry at their boss may "take out" their anger on a family member)

Idealization refers to a person's tendency to assign exaggerated positive qualities to a person, place, or concept.

**Overestimation of an admirer aspect or attribute of another**

(ex: when we engage in idealization, we may see another person as perfect, that they can do no harm, and ignore their negative attributes)This type of admiration and infatuation with another person can lead to unrealistic expectations and can end in disappointment, anger, and feelings of abandonment.

Universal mechanism whereby a person patterns himself or herself after a significant other; plays a major role in personality development especially superego development.

(ex: a young child may idealize the actions and imitate the actions and behavior of somebody that they identify with and look up to)

Primitive mechanism in which psychic representation of a person is or parts of a person are figuratively ingested.

**According to psychoanalytic theory, incorporation is the most primitive means of recognizing external reality, and the prototype of instinctual satisfaction. It first occurs in the oral stage when the infant feels or fantasies that the mother's breast, and perhaps her total being are becoming a part of himself during the process of nursing**

Introjection which is common among children and parents, occurs when a person internalizes the beliefs of other people. A child might take on elements of parents' personalities or beliefs by adopting their political ideology, concept of right and wrong, or ideas about sex.

(ex: a person in an abusive relationship for example might begin to believe the claims of a partner who is abusive and internalize feelings of worthlessness or failure.

When people intellectualize, they try to understand difficult experiences through information and intellect rather than feeling them emotionally. They may make logical and scientific statements that describe their situation, but be reluctant to reveal how they feel about the situation or how these statements relate to them.

**The person avoids uncomfortable emotions focusing on facts and logic; emotional aspects are completely ignored as being irrelevant. Jargon is often used as a device of intellectualization by using complex terminology the focus is placed on the words rather than the emotions.

(ex:someone who has had a miscarriage may dive into the research about why miscarriages happens. They may explain their loss in scientific terms but be unable or unwilling to talk about how it has affected them emotionally)

Avoiding the experience of an emotion associated with a person, idea, or situation. This defense mechanism may be present in someone who describes the day their house burnt down in a factual way without displaying any emotion.

**Unacceptable impulse, idea or act is separated from its original memory source, thereby removing the original emotional charge associated with it. (ex: someone could talk about their abusive childhood with no emotion on their face at all. This is often seen in trauma survivors. They may appear to be totally detached or describe the event as if it happened to someone else).

Projection is a form of defense in which unwanted feelings are displaced onto another person, where they then appear as a threat from the external world. A common form of projection occurs when an individual, threatened by his own angry feelings accuses another of harboring hostile thoughts.

**Primitive defense attributing ones disowned attitudes wishes, feelings urges to some external object or person** (ex: a person who's having an affair may accuse their partner of infidelity)

Rationalization involves justifying behaviors, thoughts, or feelings using logical explanations. While such explanations sound reasonable, they disguise unacceptable thoughts and don't accurately depict a person's true feelings and motivations.

**Third line of defense not unconscious giving believable explanation for irrational behavior motivated by unacceptable unconscious wishes or by defense used to cope with such wishes**

(ex: minimizing the situation "its really not that bad" making excuses "I didn't have enough time anyways")