Psychological Defense Techniques: The Punching Doll Method
Among the various psychological techniques for protecting yourself from other people’s aggression, the “punching doll” method is our favorite. Not only is it (admittedly) useful, but it also brings about irrepressible, joyful laughter—and sometimes even fits of hysterical giggling!
Common Scenarios and the Root of Aggression
Imagine a few common situations: your husband starts a fight, your wife yells at you, or your boss is shouting at you. Should we go on? Let’s get straight to the point and learn what to do in these cases.
First, it’s important to realize (otherwise, I won’t play along) that people don’t yell at us for no reason. If we were completely innocent, no one would be yelling at us.
Remember that popular phrase from the era of positive psychology:
“What if I walk out in a white coat and a truck splashes me with mud? How should I react psychologically?”
If you were truly in a good psychological state at that moment, you wouldn’t need to ‘react’—you simply wouldn’t have ended up in that place or situation. Ever.”
So, when people yell at or insult us, it’s at least partially deserved. But here’s the key: people aren’t attacking us personally—they’re attacking our “sins.” Our true selves (hard as it may be to believe) aren’t actually being touched, even if the insults seem very specific, down to the shape of our legs or stomach.
It’s just meaningless (or quasi-meaningful) “informational noise,” meant to hit where it hurts most. For example, if someone shouts, “You have an ugly nose,” it doesn’t mean they actually think that. The real issue is that the person has either guessed or knows that your nose is a sore spot for you, and they’re hitting you right where it hurts.
Ask them later what they think about your nose, and they’ll probably say, “It’s fine, why? I don’t even notice noses.”
Honestly, when someone is yelling, they’re not seeing you—they’re seeing a caricatured, imaginary “Generalized Enemy” that only vaguely resembles you. That’s who they’re really talking to—loudly.
Why Do We Attract Aggression?
If your boss (or husband) yells, “You haven’t done anything all month, just dyed your hair three times!”—in some way, we’ve earned this ugly scene. But not because we “did nothing” or “dyeing hair is bad,” but for other reasons. Maybe you recently hurt someone and forgot about it, or you think “that’s just how it is,” just like your boss or husband does. You might have hurt someone with different words and for a different reason, but it hurt them just as much as you’re hurting now.
Evil seeks out “familiar” evil to latch onto, and when it finds it in you, it merges with it to create new evil. If you respond to insults, the cycle continues. If you bottle it up, you’ll take it out on someone else or on your own body later.
This is how new evil is born—through illness, escalating arguments, or the “pass the dirt” game. We won’t let evil multiply. So, what should you do?
If you had no darkness, dirt, past misdeeds, or automatic mean thoughts—no evil at all—then someone loaded with nastiness wouldn’t even approach you, let alone yell at you. But unfortunately, we all have plenty of evil inside us, so other people’s evil sticks to us like a cold to someone with low immunity. More precisely, evil doesn’t stick to us, but to the evil within us. Can you separate yourself from your own evil?
Separate yourself from it. Separate the evil from yourself. And mold it into a “snowman”—or, in this case, a punching doll.
Eliminating Evil: Creating the Imaginary Punching Doll
The first part of the work (theoretical preparation) is done. We’ve realized that people don’t yell at us for nothing, and maybe we’ve even remembered times we’ve hurt others and mentally asked for forgiveness. That’s already a huge step.
Now, let’s move to the practical part. What do you do when someone is yelling at or insulting you? You “pull out” your pre-made punching doll!
How to Create Your Imaginary Punching Doll
- Make the doll the same gender and about the same height as you, but any age you like.
- Give the doll the most repulsive, caricatured features you can imagine—picture how it looks, walks, talks, and dresses.
- Invent a “past” for the doll, with misdeeds and flaws that you personally find most morally outrageous. In other words, imagine what this doll has done to deserve being scolded, insulted, or even beaten.
- Give the doll a funny, ridiculous name that makes you dislike it as much as its actions and appearance.
- Important: Never name the doll after a real person you know or make it look exactly like someone you know!
Done!
Now, whenever you become the target of sudden aggression (from anyone), immediately “pull out” your imaginary doll and say to it (in your mind), “Got what you deserved, you jerk?”
This is especially helpful for those who, while driving or crossing the street, get yelled at by other drivers. People who practice this technique develop almost a tennis-like reaction to such situations.
How to Use the Punching Doll Technique During Aggression
- “Pull out” the doll and place it just to your left, almost in front of you.
- Mentally direct everything the aggressor says at the doll.
- Nod your head and sincerely agree with everything the aggressor says, while glancing disapprovingly at the doll.
- Add your own mental criticisms, if you like.
- When the aggression ends, say to the doll, “See? That’s for this and that.”
- Now, mentally burn the doll in a flash of fire, send the smoke away from you, scatter it to the wind, and say, “Go, and sin no more!”
Whenever you need the doll again, it will reappear in your imagination, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. The doll may change appearance, age, or misdeeds, or it may stay the same. In reality, you’re starting a serious psychotherapeutic process—working with your Shadow, the repressed evil you don’t even admit to yourself.
We won’t get into Jungian theory here… It’s obvious, even intuitively, that evil meets evil and cancels itself out.
What’s important: each time, you’ll need the doll less and less, because “thunderbolts” will strike your house less often. This really works.
How the Technique Works
- You don’t respond to evil with evil.
- You don’t bottle up evil inside yourself.
- Instead, you channel the evil into a safe place—a disposable imaginary lightning rod, which you then mentally destroy.
The doll you create to absorb someone else’s evil really works like a lightning rod, or even like a “barf bag,” ashtray, handkerchief, napkin, or—if you prefer—the psychological equivalent of a condom.
Real-Life Example: “Ugly Elsa”
A friend of mine, as soon as she heard the rules, invented a doll named “Elsie.” Elsie had:
- Thin, dyed-black hair down to her waist, ironed flat to an unnatural degree
- A huge tattoo on her stomach
- A squeaky voice and loose manners
- Three-inch-long fake French-manicured nails
- An iPhone in the most “girly” case imaginable
But what really made Elsie “guilty” was that she hated men and dreamed of being a rich widow, openly discussing the flaws and intimate details of her unfortunate victims with her friends.
At the time, my friend was having problems with her husband, who would regularly throw fits about “us consuming too much.” Every time her husband started yelling, my friend would mentally place Elsie just to her left, nod in agreement with her husband’s complaints (like a mother agreeing with a father scolding their son), and think, “See? Uncle Pete is right! You deserve it!”
This made my friend instantly start to smile and even giggle, while her husband, seeing her so content, would lose his train of thought and quietly leave the room. My friend would then laugh herself silly.
The next time, Elsie appeared in a completely different form: 60 years old, wearing a greasy, worn-out robe, smelling of medicine and cabbage soup, with sagging breasts resting on her belly, and messy gray hair through which pinkish skin showed. This time, Elsie’s “crime” was wishing illness and death on everyone she looked at.
It only took my friend burning two dolls for the aggressors in her life to leave her alone for a long time. By the way, when she mentally burned her second Elsa, the smell of something burning actually wafted in from outside!
Why Evil Finds Us—and What to Do About It
At the start, I said that external evil always seeks out the internal evil within us and merges with it—”Bam!”—and that’s how we become victims of “unpleasant situations.”
This raises a logical question: “If I have no sins, will people and circumstances stop bringing their evil to me?”
Unfortunately, no. Life on earth in a human body is not a resort. We’ll always have some “sins.” It’s like cleaning your apartment: you can (and should!) keep it relatively tidy, but you can’t make it sterile or remove every germ and speck of dust.
Even hermits and saints who retreated from the world suffered from the evil that clung to them, which no longer hid its true, inhuman form or intentions. Because even saints had sins—like pride. The fewer other sins, the more pride grows, taking on the most elaborate forms. So, everyone has their own struggles.
We’re not saints ready for serious spiritual battles, so the evil we face is just the right size for us to handle. And you can absolutely overcome it with the psychological technique described above.
And that’s all we need. Our humble task is to defuse these sneaky “firebombs” with laughter, tongs, and a big tub of cold water. Although, I do like the condom metaphor even more…
Create your punching doll in advance, so you’re ready if someone decides to yell at you again.