Keywords
psychological protection of parents
children with autistic disorders
How to Cite
Abstract
The article analyzes the features of psychological defenses of parents of children with autistic disorders. Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are genetic in nature and are a congenital disorder of brain neuron development. First of all, problems related to autism concern family members of children affected by this disease. For the most part, the family of an autistic child falls into a situation of isolation, which is accompanied by a feeling of loneliness. The models of helping parents of children with autism are now extremely diverse. One of these models is the psychological model of helping parents. It is the most important. Psychological protection is one of the most controversial properties in the personality structure, as it simultaneously contributes to both the stabilization of the personality and its disorganization. Defense theories view human individuals as motivated to accumulate and maintain mental resources for the purposes of resisting anxiety, strengthening one's composure, and normal functioning without falling into intrapsychic chaos.
To determine the mechanisms of psychological protection of parents of children with autistic disorders, we used the method of measuring psychological protection (Pylyugina, & Suleymanov, 2020), with the help of which we determined the following mechanisms of psychological protection of parents of psychotic, neurotic, infantile, and adaptive genesis. The empirical study was conducted on the basis of the Development Clinic Medical Center (Kyiv) during 2019-2021. Two groups of parents who have children with autism spectrum disorders participated in the study. The total number of researched persons is 125. The age range of the studied parents is 25-46 years. The age of children is from 2 to 6 years.
According to the results of the comparison of the reliability of differences according to independent and dependent variables, it was established that the mechanism of psychological protection according to the type of dissociation reliably prevails in mothers. It has been established that the mechanisms of psychological protection of infantile genesis are more characteristic of mothers, than fathers, which function, as a rule, at the level of emotions and are caused by emotional infantilism. It was established that mothers reliably differ in the type of compulsive behavior, passive aggression, defense mechanism, and the type of denial. Accordingly, the investigated mothers may be characterized by obsessive behavior that periodically arises and is realized in specific behavioral rituals or mental acts.
So, the protective profile of mothers is mainly characterized by dissociation, hypochondria, isolation, displacement, passive aggression, denial, reactive formations, compensation, assumption, prediction, while fathers ‑ by rationalization, sublimation, mechanisms of adaptive genesis.
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