Rowan Tree and Red Thread

Hmm, tough. How about "People adapt to the trials of life be means of certain defenses, ranging from the “psychotic” (adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania) and “immature” adaptations (acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy) to the “neurotic” defenses, like intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, and finally to “mature” adaptations that include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship)."

And it's not at all clear that one can predict how any individual will develop these defenses over time or when they might move from one to another.