Dr. April Staples hailing us.

All right.

So, uh, acting out is a primitive defense, um, where some feelings aren't able to be symbolized into words, um, and so they are acted out.

So another way Nancy McWilliams talks about this is, uh, enactment, which is a word that a lot of us have used as we've gone through this cohort, you know, having a patient enact these- Old patterns of behavior that they aren't aware of.

Um, so they haven't symbolized that behavior into words yet.

Um, so this defense helps them to have agency over these feelings that they haven't yet verbalized, so they still exist in this unconscious space or this, you know, non-verbal space.

And they can be both positive and negative, right? So they-- some of them can be self-destructive.

Take it away.