Compensation and Defense Mechanisms

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At a Glance

Compensation is a psychological defense mechanism when a person tries to "make up for" a perceived area of weakness in their life.

Compensation is a type of defense mechanism in which people overachieve in one area of their lives to compensate for failures in another. For example, people with difficult family lives may direct their energy toward excelling at work.

As a psychological strategy, people use compensation to cover up their inadequacies, frustrations, stresses, or urges. While it can sometimes be beneficial, compensation can cause problems when overused or misapplied.

Let’s go over how people use compensation as a defense mechanism and look at the positive and negative effects of the strategy.

What Are Defense Mechanisms?

Defense mechanisms are unconscious responses that protect people from feelings of anxiety or threats to their sense of self. Sigmund Freud first described these defenses as part of his personality theory. His daughter, Anna Freud, later did more work on psychological defense mechanisms.

Psychologist Alfred Adler was the first to describe compensation. Adler suggested that compensation as a defense mechanism could help people cope with feelings of inferiority, and could have positive or negative effects.

For example, a person may compensate for struggles in their relationships by becoming highly skilled in their work. A negative effect of this strategy could be that they work and overachieve to the detriment of their health and well-being.

What Is Compensation?

Compensation means excelling in one area to make up for real or perceived deficits in another. Compensation is often used synonymously with “overcompensation,” but overcompensation suggests that a person is going far beyond what is necessary to “make up” for a deficiency.

The term “compensation” is frequently used in everyday language. For example, people may say that someone is “just overcompensating” to imply that a person is overworking in one area of their life to hide insecurities about other aspects of it.

In some cases, compensation is a conscious choice. For example, if you know you have poor public speaking skills, you might try to compensate for those weaknesses by excelling in your written communications at work. When you compensate for a lesser ability, you minimize it by drawing attention to stronger skills.

However, compensation can also be unconscious. Your feelings of inadequacy can be hidden and may drive you to try to compensate for them.

Compensation can take two forms:

  • Overcompensation is when a person overachieves in one area of their life to make up for shortcomings in another. A person can become competitive and dominant and may tend to exaggerate.
  • Undercompensation is when a person addresses their shortcomings by becoming overly dependent on others. A person may also undercompensate when they are trying to avoid anxiety or pressure. People may also fear failure or embarrassment.

Examples of Compensation

To understand how compensation affects a person's behavior, let’s look at some examples.

Sports

A high school basketball player feels inferior because they can't score as many points as their teammates. Instead of putting in the time to practice or asking the coach for guidance, the player just stays on the bench. When they do play, they always make sure to pass the ball to a teammate who is a better player.

Another student feels they are not a skilled athlete because they never get picked for teams during physical education class. They overcompensate for their shortcomings in sports by becoming deeply engaged in other school activities, including the drama club and the school newspaper.

Intelligence

A student feels like they are not as smart as their peers because they struggle in math class. They undercompensate by doing everything they can to avoid being called on in class, and sometimes even skip class so they don’t have to face the anxiety that comes with it.

A researcher feels inadequate because they have not published as many papers as their peers. They become exclusively focused on their area of research interest and dedicate all their resources to studying it. In a few years, they made a breakthrough discovery.

Work

An employee feels less valued than their colleagues because they are always overlooked for promotions and their ideas go unheard in meetings. To make up for perceived failings at work, they put most of their energy into their home life and try to be “the best parent ever” to their children.

A manager feels that they are not able to be assertive and set rules with their subordinates in the workplace. They really do not want to deal with conflict or the responsibility of having to mediate their employees’ problems. Rather than trying to work on developing their leadership skills, they hang back and rely on another manager within the department to do all the disciplining so they can avoid conflict.

Skills

A person feels embarrassed because they are not a good cook and overcompensates by having an extremely tidy, organized kitchen. At the same time, they go out of their way to avoid having guests for meals.

A person finds it challenging to manage their money and fears they’ll make a big mistake. Rather than using tools or learning how to be more financially savvy, they rely on their partner to pay all the bills, set a monthly budget, and handle all the buying decisions for the household.

Health

A person compensates for their “bad” habit of smoking by being committed to “good” health habits like eating nutritious food and working out every day.

A person with diabetes struggles to manage their blood sugar. Instead of asking for help and working on becoming more independent and capable of managing the condition, they let their partner monitor their diet, check their blood sugar levels, and schedule medical appointments for them.

Relationships

A parent feels overwhelmed by the “perfect families” they see on social media and decides that they will never be a “good enough” parent. Instead, they throw themselves into their careers.

A person feels inferior compared to their partner’s ex. Instead of focusing on building a life with them and enjoying the uniqueness of their relationship, they put all their energy into becoming the “world’s greatest parent” to their children.

Pros and Cons of Compensation

Compensation can have a powerful effect on your behavior and decisions. While compensation is often portrayed in a negative light, it can have positive effects. Here are the pros and cons of compensation to consider:

Pros
  • Focuses on strengths

  • Encourages growth

  • Fosters stronger self-esteem

  • Boosts self-image

  • Reinforces the benefits of confronting challenges


Cons
  • Leads to discouragement

  • Causes stress in relationships

  • Reduces motivation

  • Promotes unhelpful coping skills

  • Inhibits growth

Pros

Adler suggested that when people experience feelings of inferiority, they automatically feel a compensatory need to strive for superiority. As a result, people will push themselves to overcome their weaknesses and achieve their goals. This drive can lead to several positive effects, such as:

  • Motivation: People who feel insecure in certain areas of their lives may feel motivated to succeed in others.
  • Self-image: People who focus their attention and effort on their strengths may have a better sense of self.
  • Self-development: People who feel insecure or inferior can become motivated to develop new skills, either in the areas where they feel they are weak or in areas where they are already strong.

Imagine that you just began taking a dance-based exercise class. At first, you feel out of your element and even a little intimidated because everyone else seems so skilled and experienced.

Given your initial feelings of inferiority, you may start practicing yoga at home to improve your flexibility, which you hope will help with your dancing. The urge to overcome your feelings of inferiority drives you to develop new skills and stick to a workout routine that you end up really enjoying. 

Compensation is considered a mature defense mechanism. Mature defense mechanisms tend to be the most helpful, but they need to be used effectively to be beneficial.

Cons

Compensation can prevent people from trying new things or addressing their shortcomings. For example, imagine that a young college student experiences feelings of inferiority because they don’t have many friends. They see their peers engaging in animated conversations with each other everywhere on campus, which reinforces feelings of loneliness and isolation.

The student compensates for this feeling by saying, "I may not have many close friends, but I have excellent grades!" Instead of seeking out social connections, the student focuses all their attention and energy on schoolwork and rarely attends social events or has fun. In this example, compensation has prevented the student from overcoming feelings of inferiority and limited their growth as a person.

Compensation, particularly if it involves relying heavily on another person, can also strain relationships. For example, a relationship can start to feel imbalanced if one partner relies on the other to always pay the bills or handle conflicts between kids.

People who are narcissistic often overcompensate when they experience low self-esteem and jealousy by seeking out power and attention.

How to Stop Over- or Undercompensating

If you’ve realized that you are overcompensating or undercompensating, know that having that awareness and looking at your behavior honestly is the first step in making changes. Here are a few ways that you can work on trying to stop overcompensating or undercompensating.

  • Check in with yourself regularly. You can’t change a behavior if you’re not aware of it, so it can be helpful to practice mindfulness throughout the day. These check-ins with yourself—even something as simple as asking, “How am I feeling today?" can help you catch instances where you might be over- or undercompensating.
  • Take notes. When you’re doing your daily check-ins, you might find it helpful to jot down your observations in a notebook or keep tabs in a note-taking app. You may start to pick up on some patterns or specific areas of your life where compensating behavior is happening and possibly causing problems. You also want to be on the lookout for instances where you are “talking down” to yourself or “beating yourself up” over something in your life.
  • Ask others to be honest with you. Sometimes, it’s hard to be honest with yourself about your behavior. You may find that feedback from your loved ones gives you some much-needed perspective or a “reality check” that alerts you to compensatory behaviors you’d like to change.
  • Reach out for mental health support. Working with a therapist can be extremely valuable if you are trying to understand and ultimately change your behaviors. You need to develop your emotional intelligence, self-compassion, problem-solving skills, and confidence, and therapy can be a safe space for doing that important work.
  • Be kind to yourself. Change won’t happen overnight. Chances are, you learned to do the compensatory behaviors you’re trying to change over a long time, so it will also take time to undo them or replace them with more helpful behaviors. As you work on forming new habits, try to be patient with yourself. Remind yourself that you are not perfect (no one is) and that you don’t have to try to be perfect. Find people in your life that you can practice being vulnerable with and learn to accept your weaknesses.
  • Set realistic goals. As you work on changing your behavior, take it one step at a time and celebrate even the little successes along the way. Keeping track of your progress will help you stay motivated and reinforce that you’re capable of making the changes you want to make. While you do want to give yourself plenty of opportunities to be challenged, make sure to also continue to do things you enjoy and are good at to boost your confidence.
  • Keep learning and growing. If there are areas of your life where you feel you have knowledge gaps or weaknesses, you may decide that you want to improve your understanding and skills in these areas. Find ways to learn more about them, whether it’s taking a class or reading up on your own. Just remember that you don’t have to “be the best” at something for it to add value and meaning to your life.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • What did Alfred Adler say about compensation as a defense mechanism?

    Adler suggested that compensation was a healthy defense mechanism that people utilize to cope with feelings of inferiority. He also introduced the idea of overcompensation, which involves compensating in ways that are excessive or out of proportion to the person's shortcomings.

  • How can you tell if someone is overcompensating?

    There is no definitive way to tell if someone is compensating, but there may be signs that they feel insecure about something. Examples include trying to hide shortcomings, putting excessive focus on minor accomplishments, talking negatively about other people's abilities, and always making negative assumptions about others are a few possible signs.

  • Is someone who shares too much on social media overcompensating?

    People often believe that positive posts on social media are a way to compensate for real-life insecurities. For example, couples might try to make their relationship look perfect and happy when in reality, it is anything but. Interestingly, while such sunny posts are often viewed negatively by others, research suggests that couples who post about their relationship and interact on social media tend to have happier relationships.

10 Sources
Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd
Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."