Dealing with Other People’s Defenses

Hey everyone, welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today and if you've listened before, welcome back. We recently did an episode on psychological defenses. There was a lot of interest in that episode and at the very end of it, I asked Rick a question about interacting with the defenses of other people. We got great feedback about that question and people asked that we do a full episode on it,

so that's what we're going to be doing today. One of the things that makes interacting with other people's psychological defenses really challenging is that there's often a kind of asymmetry between our perception of ourselves and our perception of other people. Because defenses are subconscious in nature, it can sometimes be easier, at least we think, to see other people's defenses operating than it can be to see our own. This is one of the reasons that dealing with

these defenses is often a major issue for close friends, couples and families. It's great that I'm joined by somebody who spent a big chunk of his career working with couples and families, Dr. Rick Hanson, clinical psychologist, and hey, my dad, so dad, how are you doing today? That's why Freud called psychotherapy the impossible profession. You just call it balls and strikes in there all the time. Oh man, sometimes I thought about a carpenter. You know, you have a board who turned in maybe

connect a couple boards, screw them together. But what if you're a carpenter and your job depends on connecting these boards together, but they're squirming and fighting you in the process and blaming you for continuing to be unhappy that they're not connected together. You know that? You're life's such a challenge. I know. I feel that for you all the time. I know. I know. You should just feel so sad. I thank my lucky stars every day that I get to do what I do. It is pretty crazy

that this is actually my job these days. But okay, we're going to get into the episode focusing on dealing with other people's defenses. Well, can I say one more thing about this relevant? Just the phrasing defenses is rooted in early psychoanalytic thinking in that the client is quote unquote resisting the therapeutic process. And that frames it immediately in a kind of critical way that is somewhat seeped into the culture, including related to people saying to each other,

don't be so defensive. The proper way to understand this, as you well know, is that defenses serve functions. And they're there for good reason. It's really important to really understand that when we explore defenses here, we're doing so really sympathetically and respectfully with kind of a don't know spirit and a lot of gentleness. Great. So before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to quickly let you know that Rick also has a new workshop that's coming up. It's focused on

insecure attachment styles. It's called healing insecure attachment. It's a four hour live online workshop that's happening on August 17th. If you can't make it live, it'll also be recorded. And if you'd like to learn more, I've included the link in the description of this episode. It's Rick Hansen dot com backslash attachment workshop pretty easy to remember.

And you can use the coupon code being well 20 for 20% off the workshop. So to add on a little bit dad to what you were just saying there about what are psychological defenses and what's their function in the first episode that we just did a couple of weeks back, we talked about this in some detail. If you are already familiar with that, you can skip this part. But if you missed it, psychological defenses are mostly subconscious strategies that people use to protect themselves.

This is typically from feelings of anxiety or stress, uncomfortable emotions, various kinds of threats, maybe to self esteem or self worth. And essentially anything else that they don't want to think about. Some common examples that you might have heard of could include denial. This is refusing to accept reality, repression. This is unconsciously blocking uncomfortable thoughts,

feelings or desires from our conscious awareness. Maybe something like rationalization, justifying our behaviors or feelings with seemingly logical reasons that aren't actually the true reason. And then a projection. If you follow politics at all, you hear about projecting a lot. Attributing are unacceptable thoughts, feelings or desires to another person. Now just as Rick was saying, defenses exist for understandable reasons. And they play this really critical role in

maintaining our mental health. They help us manage difficult emotions, cope with stress, stabilize our sense of self. They do all of this good stuff for us. The problem is that they typically come with a lot of costs. And those costs are heavily loaded into our relationships, which is what we're going to be focusing on here today. But the goal, big picture, is not to just remove all of our defenses and become this like idealized, totally undefended person. That's not a real thing.

It's to move from kind of more problematic forms of defending ourselves to less problematic forms of defending ourselves. So okay, with all that set up out of the way, when I was preparing for this episode, dad, I started thinking about something that I wanted to ask you about, which was that asymmetry of noticing defenses and how it contributes to all of the issues that people have here. We often think that we can really perceive the behavior of other people in a more

objective way than they can perceive their own behavior. And people often struggle to apply that same level of awareness to themselves. We recently did a whole episode on self-awareness, for example. And this can lead to the sense of unfairness inside of a relationship. This person is doing all of these problematic things to me. I can't see the problematic things that I'm doing so this whole thing is unbalanced. And that can be kind of the root of a lot of discord inside

of a relationship. As somebody who's actually talked to, I don't know, several hundred, if not thousands of couples about these kinds of issues, what do you think about that? Well, I think it's fantastic that you're starting with this notion of asymmetry. And it's true. So therefore, it's important to have a kind of carefulness, even humility about bouncing on other people's defenses.

And you're highlighting for us. One thing I think that's very important in addition to that humility, which is a focus on the underlying function or motivation underlying the defense. Like, for example, when I entered college, UCLA, 1969 to 1974, kind of the height of the human potential movement, I had a lot of people tell me I was stuck in my head and they were pretty critical about it. Well, the truth was, I was stuck in my head because the rest of me hurt.

My feelings hurt. Why would I want to open up my feelings? So there's a motivation there that I had to come to terms with and then find other ways to hopefully to some extent accomplish the same function of not being overwhelmed by sadness or feelings of an adequacy or hurt. I needed to do that, but still gradually feel the feelings enough to be functional in the world and capable in

the world. So the whole point about defenses is that they're understood to be problematic. In other words, it's understandable that a person, for example, is naturally kind of introverted. So it's not that they're defending against other people in their desire to have a lot of alone time or if they get kind of exhausted after an hour or two at a party, you know, they just kind of want to go home and read a book or watch YouTube speaking of myself. That's not a defense. That's just

coping. It's not problematic. It doesn't maintain systems of distress or dysfunction. It doesn't create issues with other people generally. It's just a form of coping. It's when it becomes problematic that we move into the territory of labeling it a defense. Before we go too far here, I just want to highlight what you were saying the second ago about motivation, which I think is a huge part of this because yes, sometimes we really can see other people's behavior more clearly than we can

see our own behavior and maybe more clearly than they can see their behavior. We are inherently like a third person figure to it. We see it from the outside. And what that perspective lacks is a sense of the motivation. In other words, why is this person doing that behavior, right? But we understand all of our own motivations. We know why we do the things that we do. And because we can see those motivations, we can have more compassion and more understanding for why we've gone into

the behavior. And this is a form of something called the fundamental attribution error, which is our tendency to judge other people's mistakes in particular as being based on their character or personality while attributing our own bad behavior to external or more situational factors that are outside of our control. In other words, we tend to cut ourselves breaks that we don't cut other people because we have a more complete picture of why we did what we did.

That's great. And then also often there's projection. We call people on stuff that we do ourselves. There's even actually a technical defense called projective identification. The idea being that there's content inside our own mind that we're very uncomfortable with. This is very psychoanalytic like feelings of rage. Okay. Like, oh, I can't feel my rage. So I project my rage onto my therapist. I think my therapist is a real rager. And then in certain kind of titrated ways, I start to

identify with my therapist's anger that I've put on them rather than owning it for myself. It's kind of complicated. So the point being that there can be lots of really interesting complications. And very often a good question to ask ourselves is when we see another person doing something that bothers us, well, ask yourself, huh, might that bother me because I do that a little bit at least myself. Yeah. The stuff that other people do that really bothers us tends to be attached to our

own vulnerabilities, right? So if you're somebody who has a vulnerability around being hyper-conchi-enthus, because you were really trained into a perspective that you need to be super aware of other people's needs. And you see somebody who just kind of does what would feel good to them. They're not doing it in a mean way, but they're looking out for their own needs. They're making asks. They're making requests of other people. They're saying, hey, you know, I would actually

prefer to sit in this seat rather than that seat. You might not just sit in this seat over here. That person's not doing anything wrong, but it might be really bumping into your hyper-awareness around conscientiousness. So you've got two people. They're both behaving more or less appropriate lane, either of these people are doing something really inappropriate here. But they've come into a degree of conflict because their behaviors or their vulnerabilities are just lining up with each

other in a way that doesn't feel good. And then layer on top of all of this kind of more psychoanalytic stuff is just the reality that sometimes we're wrong. We misunderstand other people's behavior. We misinterpret why they're doing what they're doing. We attributed one meaning to their behavior, one really another one was in play. Maybe they had a totally different reason for doing something

than we thought. And this I think really impacts everything else that we're going to talk about today because it affects the kind of tone that we should approach these conversations with people with. You know, very much a tone of don't know mind, openness to possibility, not overclaiming our own knowledge or own clear seeing of another person. And I think that that's a really important

vibe to just go into these conversations with. That's beautiful for us. And could you say more also about empathy somehow, putting ourselves in the shoes of the other person as a good start for any kind of conversation about their defenses? Yeah, I think that for starters, holding everything that you said in the beginning about the role of defenses and the ways in which we've kind of positioned them as just this bad thing and how the movement that we should have

is more towards like this under this undefended state. But the reality is that these defenses are serving a useful psychological function. And what we can do is we can try to validate the feeling that somebody has without necessarily supporting the way in which they're going about getting to

that feeling of that makes sense. So in my own relationship, I can think of a number of instances where it's been really valuable for me or for Elizabeth to really try to listen to what was underneath the communication that somebody was making as opposed to the exact form that it took. You know, because people are unskullful sometimes. But really trying to hear to what's underneath that I think could be really helpful for people. And just in general, like understanding

that when somebody calls us defensive, like how do we react to it? Generally not great, right? Like I can recall times around the dinner table when I was a kid. And you know, you said something about me to be defensive about something. And I was like, well, screw you to add it. That was kind of it. You know, it's sort of hard to come back with. I know. I know. I know. Can we please go back

in a time machine? It's just how I've been aware of that. You know, it is. I think again, a really good place to approach this with because sometimes a man, there's a certain kind of personality in the personal growth psychology world that just really likes to show off their psycho education. Yep. And call people on their stuff. Yeah. That like that's not really a good way. And if you're actually trying to solve problems there, yeah. That's good. That's right.

And what do you have to say about that? Like what do you think is actually helpful? Well, let's kind of make it real because the way it usually happens is that let's say, let's create a couple scenarios. All right. So one scenario is that person name, person B, person A says something critical to person B about person B. So as an example, your mom will say something to me like, why did you leave the air conditioner on or something like that? I grew up in a fall

tiny home. So this fairly innocuous criticism on a zero to 10 credit quality scale is like a one hits my preamps, my turbochargers, the relics from my childhood, or they turn it up to a three or four or five. Okay. Which then tends to initiate my defenses against it, which take, which take various forms denial is very primitive defense. I didn't turn the air conditioner on one air conditioner. That one doesn't work very well. Another more sophisticated defense would be

something like rationalization or even counter attack. So then what do we do with that? What could she say to me when I'm being defensive? That would be useful or flip it around. Sometimes what happens again, A and B, a different case. A says something very heartfelt to be that would tend to draw a person B into greater closeness with A. It's intimate. Like for example, maybe they both

had a pet in common and person A says, yeah, I'm still grieving that. There'd be a natural pull for a greater closeness for B. But maybe B for B's reasons doesn't want closeness or doesn't want closeness with A. So then B says something very deflecting like, oh, I'm over that. Now come you're still bothered or something like that. What do you do then? It wants to pose that B did that because B did not want to get closer and B did not want to contact their own grief.

Let's say over the loss of that pet. So you have these two cases here, right? What do you do? And I find that what's really helpful, if you're the person who's observing the defense, the A person in both of these cases, it really helps to slow it down. And to use the fact that the person, the other person B is suddenly no longer in rapport with you. They're no longer

kind of in the same groove you are as a flag to slow it down. And then I think there can be really good use in inquiry just sort of, oh, well, can you say more about that or how is that

landing on you? What I said, kind of an inquiry style. And I think also nonviolent communication would be one form of that, you know, when you over there not get defensive, but rather when you over there push back against me talking about the air conditioner or when you over there, something get very distant after I share that I'm still grieving the loss of our shared pet. I feel kind of sad or I feel a little startled or I feel sort of anxious because I need,

I don't know, a sense of closeness and harmony with you. Well, what's going on over there with you? So I'll just kind of finish on that and say for me, it's helpful to make this kind of real. And maybe also I'll just say that the person who is accusing the other person of being defensive

suddenly is one up in the power dynamic. And it's interesting to kind of pay attention to, is that your position generally that you're the one who gets to call other people on their stuff or you're you the one who gets to handle their case, pay attention to that flip the other way, can if you're in the receiving end of some kind of critique or request that tends to elicit a defense, can you help yourself realize that this is not necessarily a dominance power struggle?

The other person is just bothered by something or just want something. And it doesn't mean that they're presumably, you know, higher up, higher archie than you are. So you can then just deal with what they're saying on its own terms at face value. I think that's a great point, Dad, because it highlights again that if what we're really interested in is improving the relationship, whether that's a friendship or romantic relationship or otherwise, then subverting that dynamic

can be a very useful step of the process, right? Because inherently when you go to somebody else and you say, Hey, I have seen this thing about you that I don't think you see. That's a power statement like you're you are really making an assertion there about reality inside of the relationship. And again, just drawn from my own relationship, things just go a lot better when there is a lot more spaciousness around it. When it's, Hey, this is how I felt about it.

Or I wonder what you think about fill in the blank. I'm curious about why this seems to happen. Like, why do you think this happens? And that's just a very different stance to approach an interaction with. Then like a lot of declaration, a lot of true statements about what's going on. Completely true. Maybe we can make this kind of practical here, Dad. I don't really know which category of defenses this would fall under. Maybe you could help me or if it's just hey, this is just

more of a like a relational dynamic thing. A lot of the time when we feel like we bring content to another person, there's a quick response from them to bring content back to us. Yep. You know, it's the classic responding to a complaint with a complaint counter attack. And that's a cycle, particularly in relationships that just kills people. Yep. And it's extremely common. So maybe we could do something with that. A bit of a frame here is material I've developed. And

we did it together in the book, resilient. It's the idea of practicing unilateral virtue that disrupts this, you know, your fault notes, your fault notes, really your fault or well, you need to change. Well, you need to change. Okay, I'll change if you go first, you know, like that. And the way out of that is to realize that, you know, yeah, spend 20% of your time trying to get them to improve and at least 80% of your time on improving yourself. For example, for all kinds

of good reasons, that tends to disrupt the dynamic there. Also, what disrupts it is to make agreements about taking turns. If I were to kind of do a role play here, let's say, go ahead. Yeah. Let's suppose there are two roommates. And, you know, one roommate tends to be needer or the other one tends to be messier, pretty typical. The knee roommate says to the messy roommate, hey, you know, I thought we made some agreements here that everybody would get their stuff out of the common space,

the living room and the kitchen before going to bed. And I noticed that three days in a row now, your, you know, your boots have been in the living room alongside your pack. Person B says, what three days are you like monitoring me? That's a counter attack. You're shooting the messenger and you're also critiquing the form of the complaint rather than dealing with the substance. Okay.

Now, A's opportunity is or their choice, they could go after, they could escalate, they could say, you better fucking believe, pardon my French, you better believe, I mean, tracking you for three days. And if I didn't say a word, I know it would become 10. And then you can just imagine it would go from there. Okay. Let's suppose take two better way is person A says this stuff about the boots in the pack in the living room for three days. Person A reminded person B of an agreement they had

already made. So there's already a foundation here. And person A also framed with the end to say as a request. So could we please from now and they focus on the future? Could we please from now on so forth? Then let's suppose now that person B has been defensive. Person A, if they're skillful, will not take the bait. They will not be distracted by the side issue, which often is thrown up to avoid dealing with the substance. Person A also might deliberately soften their tone

because B is getting heated. And one way to do that is to maintain a sense of dignity, you know, and kind of calm self-respect. So then person A might say something simple like, well, oh, I just noticed it and not a deal. You know, it's just stuff, but I'm just kind of going back to the agreement we all made. Kind of soft, no big deal. And then generally the B person will rum rum rum rum mumble a bit and agree. And then obviously if you're trying to

work with something like this, you're trying to establish the agreement from now on. And so that you have even stronger foundation next time, you know, they leave their boots in their pack in the living room. So that would be an example. Okay. What do you think about that example? And I hope I did not go into too much detail. No, I think that's a great example. Super common one. You

can spread it out to a bunch of other situations that are kind of like that. I wonder about situations that are less mechanical in nature and are more emotional, relational in nature. So let's say a and because just the reason that I highlight that, by the way, is because classically with psychological defenses, they were to defend against various kinds of emotional experiences by focusing on those emotional experiences. We can get to kind of a deeper level

with the psychology aspect of this. And so I wonder about a situation again, very common. This is more of a romantic situation and might come up in friendships too, where one person wants more close less and the other person wants more distance, particularly there might be a sense from the person who wants more close to that, that the person who wants more distance is uncomfortable with emotional closeness. And you know, understandably they want that from their partner. And so they've

made various bits for it. But when they've made these various bits for it, it just hasn't gotten very well. And I'm wondering about how you've approached situations in general like that. And I think that this is an example, particularly where joining with the defense could be really useful for people. And so I'm wondering if you can give an example of that. It's a great example. And it's really common classically in relationships. So these two movements

joining and separation, right, close to some distance. And they can often create a circular dynamic in which you can have the pursuer and the distance or the more the pursuer pursues, the more the distance or distances, the more the distance or distances, the more the pursuer pursues. There you are. So one way to look at this is also to think about more broadly, what do we do when we see something in our partner that we think would be good for them and good for the

relationship to grow with regard to in some way. Like for example, maybe we see that our partner has just a huge charge on any, the least, anything that might sound like a criticism from their childhood. And we'd like to help them become less prickly about that sort of thing. Or maybe we see that our partner is just very socially anxious. And that leads them to want to avoid social situations that we'd like to enter into with them. How do we talk about that

with people? And we know that in our past efforts, we've tried to get them to be more open and so forth and it hasn't gone well. Okay. One thing I can imagine is the person who is wishing for something different from their partner would, as you say, join with the defense. They themselves might just start self-disclosing about how they're uncomfortable with certain feelings and tend to push them away. And in a fact, without being too on the nose about it, but in a fact, they're

starting to model a way to relate to our kind of soft, murky interior for their partner. And they're demonstrating a flexible, nuanced, scophole, healthy way of relating to it all. That includes also not being ashamed of this and normalizing that of course we push away, it was scary feelings. You know, until we get really used to them. You're right. So you get modeled and you can do that.

A second thing is you could frame something in a very kind of hard-to-heart way, like along the lines of, because I value you, because I'm really interested in all of who you are. And I really care about you and I care about the soft, vulnerable parts of you. I really like feeling in contact with them. I like having a sense of closeness with you as a result. So it's because I care about you that I'm really interested.

And you know, getting to know all of you, including what lies beneath the surface. I think it also lasts. It really helps to reassure people that you're not going to mount a frontal attack on their defenses. You're happy for things to happen at their own pace. You're not going to rip this cab off the wound. You're not going to strip them other armor. It's okay. You're going to go slowly. You understand. What do you think about all that?

I think it's great. The last bit definitely gets to this idea of joining with the defense switches. A technique often used in therapy where the clinician will go out of their way to get on the same team with the client and particularly the parts of client system that are resistant to change. So like you were saying, rather than mounting this frontal attack, shaking a lamb, why won't you love me, etc., etc. There's more of this feeling of, hey, I understand why you

would want to avoid these kinds of interactions. They can be fraught. They can be uncomfortable. I get that. That's really okay. I want to make sure that as our relationship depends or changes, or we get to know each other better, that you always feel really comfortable. And you always feel very sturdy inside of yourself. And you don't feel like I'm trying to overwhelm

you emotionally. That's very important to me. And I want to highlight how that's very important to me that you don't feel emotionally overwhelmed ever by the interaction that we're having. That could maybe be a form I'm just doing it as a layman. Yeah. Shopify's already taken the cash register online, helping millions, sell billions around the world. But did you know that Shopify can do the same thing at your retail store? You need a point of

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I do wonder a little bit about part of what you said there, Dad, so I want to ask you about it, because obviously I'm not a clinician. My experience in interactions like this is that for people who want a little bit less or a little less comfortable with that emotional depth, going to more emotional depth with them is not necessarily a way to get more of what you want. So what I mean is that like going to this really emotionally revealed like oh, I really want

that from you. I'm really looking for more of that kind of a thing. Like that can actually kind of get a little overwhelming for somebody. Yeah, I'm wondering what do you think about that? I'm sure it can sometimes. So you have to judge. And ultimately this gets into that big broad category of what do we do with regard to important things we'd like from another person, including big important things that they're not that inclined to work. Currently, what do we do

about that? And what's the sweet spot? The middle way in which we ask for it. And we have to decide ultimately what we're going to do if we don't get it. And if it's really important to you, and you're willing to rest the relationship over it, sometimes your only path is to gradually escalate and see what you've got here. Knowing that, for sure, the fact that you have to escalate means that you could be less than a 50% chance of you getting it. But on the other hand, if you

don't escalate, there's a 100% chance you'll never get it. I think that way, I would say again, as just a nonclinician, somebody's bumped into this in my own life is that the question for me is have you tried joining an empathy before you go to escalate and test it in the manner in what you describe? Because in my experience, just inside of myself, it's often when we embrace what our defenses are trying to tell us that they're finally able to relax. And I think a lot of the time

what happens is understandably other people's defenses frustrate us. They're really frustrating. Because they are so psychologically complex and so difficult to like get around or grasp onto sometimes, they could just be incredibly annoying. And so most people are in kind of a cycle inside of their relationships as Newer as I can tell, where they're just a little bit pissed

most of the time about something that their partner is doing. And whenever they do that thing, they just go to be pissed about it, even if they're kind of playing lip service to various things. So I wonder about that joining aspect before we go into more pushing for what we want. Yeah, well, let me ask you this for us for this kind of situation that you've brought up. How would you handle it? So let's suppose that you're in a relationship with someone. And you

notice that they never talk about anything significant. They're quite happy talking about things that are displaced. They're mutual friends, the state of the world, sports teams, politics. They're fine with all that. And they're a warm and caring person. But it just never gets past

something, yeah, kind of shallow or tepid in terms of the topic. And you don't have a sense with them that they have any skin in the game that deliberately they're talking about things that arms length because it's scary for them to talk about things that really matter to them. Yeah, my very first question would be, have you developed enough emotional safety with that person inside of the relationship to get them to go there? How would you get them to go there?

I think that the first step is checking yourself a little bit, going, okay, have we gotten to the point in the relationship where those kinds of conversations are on the table? Let's assume that we have because I think a lot of the time, honestly, people just are much quicker to warm than the person that they're interacting with. And for them, you know, we've known each other for six months. And that means that we're like really good friends. And for this other person, that's just

not the case. They're slower to warm around it. So that's my first question. My second question is about what kind of an environment have you cultivated inside of the relationship? So defenses serve the function of protecting our emotions, right? So this means that high anxiety environments equal more defenses, like definitionally, right? If somebody's experiencing more anxiety, they're going to need to defend themselves more. So have you created an emotionally safe environment?

Is this an environment where this person feels like if they say kind of the wrong thing or do it not quite the right way that you might criticize them a little bit? Something I had to really learn about Elizabeth and our relationship is that we have a specific style inside of our family of query. You know, we ask questions about stuff. Oh, why is it that you fill in the blank? Or oh, that's really interesting. Why did you do that thing? That is not the communication

style inside of Elizabeth's family. And so initially that was kind of experienced by her as an implicit criticism. The fact that I was asking her question in that way was making her feel, oh, did I do something wrong? I must have done something wrong. And so the little communication issues like that, have you worked through them and have you processed them in a way that might lead to more of that emotional safety, right? So that would be my first pass here. Have we done

all of that stuff? Then from there, I would go first, little examples of putting a little bit more of myself on the table. And I would see what happens. I wouldn't start at the deep end. I would start at the, we're talking about this thing that happened today. And I just go to kind of a place of emotional sharing around it. Oh, yeah, that really made me feel fill in the blank. See what happens. Oh, how'd that make you feel? Okay, see what happens. So you're really graduate in here. And you

can think of examples. I don't want to like spend too long talking about this. You can think of examples in your own life of how you might graduate up from there. And if you then get to the place where they're just totally resistant to this process, then maybe that's a point where you could do a little amount of commentary. A little, hey, I've kind of noticed in the past that when I do this, it just feels like you're not that interested in it. Like, what do you think? Or you could

ask it even more gently than that. And that would be kind of my, my blueprint for the beginning parts of this process. I'm thinking that in some ways, this, this episode of the podcast is about how to create an environment in which other people don't feel the need to be defensive. Yeah. And I think that that's kind of the meta commentary that I'm doing here. Because most of the content that's out there having to do with like interacting with another person's defenses is I think excessively

combative and not very useful. Because the truth is again, the kind of meta commentary that we're doing is that it's really hard to interact with other people's defenses, man. And I think we need to kind of flip the framing here a little bit from a framework of how do we stop this person from doing this bad thing, aka defending themselves to, okay, how can we support this person in doing more of the things that would be good for them that we want that would give us all a sense of

fulfillment from our interactions. In other words, how can we support their growth rather than going into a state of criticism of them for how their behavior and does that make sense? Yeah. This is probably going to get me in trouble. But in a way, maybe part of what we're saying is that dealing with other people's defenses is often really hard because pick your percentage to the population, that percentage does not have a growth orientation. Oh sure. Yeah. No interest at all

in changing their defensive structure. And frankly, if push came to shove, they would blow up a relationship and walk away rather than fundamentally budge deep down inside. And so take away number one is try not to be that person yourself. And look for people who maybe aren't oriented. Yeah, you can. Yeah. And because try not to be that person yourself because you'll be happier, you'll function better. And odds are you'll probably live longer too, in terms of pure physical health

and longevity. And as you say as well, look for people who weren't so much that way. So I think that maybe is one of the takeaways here that to really get out, defended, deeply defended material. It's not easy. And I'll say one one form of the defense is people who nod and smile and say, yes, you know, you're right. And they don't change at all. They go inert with regard to it. Or maybe they don't even say, oh, you're right, it just kind of get quiet. That's a defense. They're

not they're not going to budge. So what do we do? Right? What do we do when we want important things from people who are really pretty reluctant to do them? That's where I'll be straight with you. I think that you're absolutely right about laying that foundation. And sometimes that foundation alone, which is always worth doing, sometimes the foundation alone has magic and it helps to dissolve the defense because deep down inside, we don't want to be defended. Deep down inside, we want to be

like that radiant little child. We all were way back when for many of us, it was way back when. And that little radiant child is not defended. So deep down, we want that. But oh, it could be

really quite scary. So at that point, then, you know, I think we're using the methods that you and I talk about in resilience or in my other book, making great relationships where we just kind of gradually build our case and gradually bring forms of influence to bear that increasingly engage other people in very direct ways around conflicts that we have with them, which at bottom, sometimes have to do with defenses of different kinds. I do want to give people if we can

a little bit more in the way of practical tools. Yes, I'm hope around. There is help. There is a lot of work there is to be so I do want to give maybe an example of my own for my own life here. Yeah. I think there is a huge difference between trying to create an opening with somebody versus seeing the opening that presents itself with them. What can happen inside of a relationship is

there is no movement seemingly around something for a period of time. And then for whatever reason, maybe enough emotional safety has been created and maybe the person just got to this phase with it. A little opening will happen where a person will offer an opportunity to talk about something. So it's the difference between waiting for consent to be offered essentially rather than asking for consent from somebody else because a lot of the time if we go to somebody particularly in

relationship and say, you know, hey, do you mind if I say something? It's really hard for them to say now. It is just real hard practically inside of a relationship to say no to that bit. But in my experience, things just tend to go a lot better when we're able to see the openings that somebody offers us as opposed to trying to create them ourselves. Some of this gets to

being able to find peace inside yourself. If this is a relationship you want to be in, a person you want to be around, where you just get a little bit more okay around some of the things that annoy you until that opening comes along. I do think that can be a part of it for people. I also think that we can develop a relationship where more of those openings are offered again generally by going first by starting with like, hey, I've been thinking about this thing and I

wonder what do you think about it? Having to do with me, you know, put yourself on the table a little bit. Are you willing to do that? And I think that it's really worth looking at if you're not, but you're really concerned about how to find that your partner is. I think it's really helpful to build on what you've talked about previously about the foundations. You know, operating in the world with a good heart, with good intent, in good faith,

practicing unilateral virtue yourself. So you really are taking care of your side of the street. Being very open to input from other people, including veiled input or, you know, it's kind of hard to get at, but you know, there's something there. They're wanting, you know, being really stand out as a responsive person. You're laying that foundation there.

Let's say also you're laying a foundation of clarity about other people. If it's clear that another person just has zero capability to respond to something you might bring up, there's no upside, almost no upside in banging away at it. And yet you're prepared to, you know, smile at them as you pass on the corridor. It work in a very relaxed and superficial way. That's okay. So let's assume all that is laid out. Then the question becomes, what do you do on that foundation

when the stakes are significant for you? When, for example, you want to put some truth on the table. And you just think more or less, it's important to assert something factually, even if that other person doesn't agree. Or maybe the relationship you've laid a foundation and there is an opening in that other person, even though, you know, they're going to get uncomfortable and squirm me about it. But if you're reasonably skillful, you can get somewhere with them. So what do you do

then? I guess I come from a background and a culture, am I on nature? It's on the one hand to not push people very often because I think it's often not worth it. And a lot of people don't have tons of capabilities about responding to input or inquiry on the one hand. On the other hand, I think it's important to have self-respect and to realize that it's okay if you think it's important enough to assert what you think the truth is, what the facts are. And I also have a lot of faith in

a kind of gentle, kind, even loving, vulnerable inquiry process with other people. So that's my context here. I get that as a context and I, I, I, by and large totally agree with that. I think the way in most of the time is putting things in the middle of the table as a value, as opposed to as a criticism. Yeah. So that's what I mean by that. I think that you can have, you can try to create a

relational value on whatever it is that you care about. Yeah. Deeper emotional relationship, intimate sharing of feelings, spending 15 minutes at night, in some form of like close physical content, cuddling on the couch, watching a movie. Hey, I just want to kind of hold hands with you when we watch TV shows. I know you're generally not a handholder. How can we get to some more kind of physical relationship here related to that issue? What would be comfortable for you? That kind of

normal stuff, right? And I just think the way to approach it is again, like centering it between the couples or between the partnership as opposed to placing it on the other person coming in with, hey, I have a real value on this thing. What do you think about making this thing a bigger part of what we do? Yeah. Yeah. Like that's true. Kind of the way to go about it other than, you know, it just really feels like you don't care about this thing and I do and that's really bugging me.

Like those are two very different conversations. I'm pausing partly because I've just seen so many couples in my office and that's why I'm asking about it. Like, you know, it helps here. Yeah. Here's the typical scenario. Couple has children heterosexual, let's say, gender roles. Mom is the primary homemaker and child care person. The father is the primary breadwinner, fairly common arrangement. It's not the only arrangement obviously. So they're now there in my

office and she is saying to him, essentially, we need you home more. If a big job, you love your job, you know, there's always a reason for it, but you're almost never home before 730. You know, and you've promised me you've said you're going to get home at six o'clock routinely, which will reduce your workday by 10%, but increase your time at home by more than 100%. And yet day after day,

week after week is not happening. Her partner gets a very defensive as well. I make all the money and, you know, I wouldn't have to work so hard if you'd finally get a job and, you know, most other people have their kids and tons of child care by now, but you want to be some kind of perfect mother and more their counter attacking. What do you do then? It becomes really challenging, you know,

for the person who's on the receiving end, you know, to soften around their defensive. So, you know, as a therapist, I might translate it or by coach, let's say the mother to say it this way, essentially, we all really value you. We love it when you're home. It's so important for us, when you get home in time for us to have a family dinner and, you know, have a sense of ease in the evening and your, the kids really love it. You know, I really value you. We really value

that's why we need it. Now, at this point, I want to tell you something, of course, I've modeled this way of talking in front of noodles of family groups. And at this point, many of the mothers in the room are getting understandably quite irritated because they're sick and tired of having to walk on eggshells to avoid triggering their partner's defenses around what to them should be patently obvious. And so it's complicated, right? There is a place for really helping that other

person see the light, you know, and soften. There's a place for that. But at a certain point, also, many people get kind of fed up to kind of slice through here a little bit, Dad, these are two separate issues. And what I mean by that is that there's a huge difference between managing our own frustration and other people versus the strategies that we think will be effective in an interaction with them, right? And that frustration management part of it is a huge part of being

able to apply the strategies that we think are effective. I'm not making the person like wrong for feeling frustrated. Yeah. Frustration could be a totally rational response here. And if you want to go in with frustration because you're frustrated, you're empowered to do that. I'm just

telling you, it's not going to work out for you very well most of the time. Except sometimes, it's only when, in this instance, the mother finally stops, you know, using perfect nonviolent communication style and gets kind of heated about it and, you know, raises the temperature and the volume. That's when she finally gets through. So I just say sometimes that becomes the

effective strategy. But yeah, I think that that could totally be the case and might be more likely to be the case than the kind of demographic that we typically speak to a little bit more psychoeducated, a little bit more concerned about these kinds of communication issues. My suspicion is that on the distribution of like humans living in first world countries, that's like 5% of the people and 95% of it is the other way around where there is way a massive lack of that

kind of communication and a few gemphyses on complaint. Yeah. Including very quiet forms of complaint. Yeah, for sure. So that's my bet. I could be wrong. But yeah, that would be my guess. Yeah, no, I entirely agree with you and I have this little saying, play the long game to win. You know, the Winston awhile, there's an emergency. You've got to run into the house, you know, and pull the kids out something. But usually you have a lot of ed bats. You have a lot of opportunities.

And keeping your cool, maintaining your alliance, not giving them pretexts so that they can use to shoot the messenger or attack the form of the message. Do that, do that, do that. And then if you eventually need to be a little irritated visibly, it's on a big foundation. And you can point to that foundation about having, we've talked about this, you know, probably at least, you know, six times over the last six months. And honestly, I'm getting pretty, I'm getting

kind of upset about it. You know, then you're in a much stronger position when you do finally communicate your upset about it. So I'm agreeing with you entirely. Totally. You're very wise for us, even though you haven't been married or had kids. It's because I, because I internalized it, well, I've been, you know, what is marriage, Dad? I've been in the close relationship for seven years now. I'm taking it back. I take it back. But

and it's because I learned so much from you. I learned so much from you, buddy. You taught me so well. I'm starting to tell you so well. That's why that's why it's going so well for me. But as we get tired of my own lessons and just getting dressed here as I age. As we get to the end of the conversation, though, you hear that. I do want to ask you about something

because we just did an episode on self-awareness. Yeah. We're going to do our next episode, by the way, is going to be on Young's concept of the shadow and about embracing other aspects of personality, which also gets to self-awareness, also gets to psychological defenses. We've done this like accidental psychoanalysis series here, which I'm sure you've been loving that. I'm loving it. Okay. Self-awareness. So I want to ask you really quickly here. A huge part of recognizing

defenses is about being aware of our interior. A lot of people, just not very in touch with their interior, for a lot of different understandable reasons, you know, no blame about it just as the way it is. Do you think there's anything that we can do, particularly in like a close relationship, family relationship, really close friendship, a romantic relationship, to help other people become more self-aware, particularly if that's something that they do actually care at least a little bit

about? Or is that just an entirely self-directed process where it's like, look, if they do it, they do it, if they don't, they don't, and you just don't have a lot of agency there? I think there are some people, small fraction of the population who are just dogmatically opposed to any kind of self-reflection and any kind of reception of external input, and especially from you or people like you, or in this case, people like me, call that 20%. My experience is that 80%

of the population is actually open to sincere affirmative inquiry. Most people, when you establish a bit of a basic thing, if you were to say something and then they were to say something, and then you were to ask them, oh, well, that's really interesting. Can you tell me more about that? Or, oh, that's really interesting. What do you value that leads you to say that? It seems like your emphasizing extra something. Can you say more about that? You're trying to get underneath the

surface? Or if you were to ask them, you know, you're getting kind of human and yourself disclosing along the way. That's also a very important point. If the other person is disclosing more deeply or animately or vulnerable than you are, whoo, fairly over, fairly quickly, there's an asymmetry there that can make them uncomfortable and can activate some defenses. So you want to be

matching the level of depth along the way. Okay, let's see, do that. And then you might ask a person, you know, just kind of normalize very simply, well, yeah, that would piss me off too. Or yeah, man, I felt bad when that happened. You know, it's tough. Like, in every life, there's some loss. Or yeah, you know, regret is love. Like if we regret or feel remorseful, you know,

that's a kind of respect or love actually, like, yeah. So we're doing little things that are firming and inviting and not trying to go all the way immediately in terms of depth and closeness. Think of it zero to 10 scale. You're trying to, you know, you're working your way up the ladder. I have stepped at a time. Maybe I find that many, many people really like that actually. And they've rarely had a conversation like that. You know, you just kind of go deeper with somebody.

Generally speaking, if people feel respected and that you're interested and you're not trying to change them, but you can offer a helpfulness from time to time and you're just closing and being vulnerable along the way. I think it really usually works. Mike's variance. So to take what you said there, which I totally agree with and pull out a couple of little things for people that might help somebody else develop a little bit more self-awareness here a few things you said.

You said, essentially something about I go first, you know, sharing your own process, putting something on the table as a conversational topic, putting a bit out there. Yeah. I think that a lot of people are essentially endlessly waiting for somebody else to ask them an interesting question. Yeah. But they're never the person who asks the interesting question. They just really want somebody else to ask them. And the reality in life is that if you want

things, you got to create a most of the time. That's the way it goes. So that's kind of the first thing that you mentioned. The second thing that you mentioned was that idea of putting it on the table as a topic, as opposed to putting it in the other person. You know, that's probably a little too penetrative for most people, particularly if you're in that more kind of interactive dynamic level. And then I think that the curiosity that kind of filled what you were talking about there

was a great part of it. Can we build curiosity as both of value and as just a thing we do inside of our relationship with each other? Where we're just curious about stuff together. We're curious about everything from what's the weather going to be like tomorrow to oh, what's the best way to put this thing together to oh, how do we get better at cooking to whatever

it is? You know, you're developing that fundamental sense of curiosity as a positive thing. And I think that actually a lot of people lack curiosity or lack a sense of curiosity as a value that they can have. And if you can't have that curiosity in general, you definitely can't have it about yourself. And I think that that's the foundation of real self awareness. I think you're totally right. Is there anything else you want to add at the end here dad? We've been talking for a while now.

I have thoroughly enjoyed talking about this forest with you. And I'm left with a bit of a reflection about how we regard the people we know. It's been a personal aspiration for me to become increasingly undefended to the flow of life because what I see people who are really far along in practice, that's how I would describe them. They feel very

undefended. They're very permeable to reality. And that's a way of considering, you know, who we want to be ourselves and who we like being around and recognizing those qualities of openness and undefendedness and receptivity to input in other people. Can I tell us a story here at the end? The short version here is that in my 20s, I was really involved in the human potential movement. And a major aspect of that culture that was somewhat hierarchical was who got to call who on

their stuff. So as it turned out, I got very involved in a intense personal growth organization. I was maybe 26 at the time. And I had a girlfriend and I was one of the teachers in the organization. So I was someone who, you know, could handle the case of other people. For a few months, you know, I was giving her input. I was helping her understand how she needed to grow,

as helping her become better and all the rest of that. And then we ended up having a meeting with some of the, or senior people who were just kind of asking us about our relationship. And I realized that she had grown dramatically over the previous several months. And I had not grown at all. She had gotten the gold of growth because she was open. She was undefended. She was really receptive to input. That was her focus. Genuine healing and growth. Me, I got the fool's

gold. I got to be right. I got to be superior. I got to be the knower, the teacher. Well, it's a great reflection, Dad. And I think it's a good way to close today's episode. So I really enjoyed talking about this with you. And I'm really looking forward also to the next episode that we're going to do in together. I hope people watch out for that. And yeah, it's so great that we get to do this. And people are interested in listening to it, which means we get to keep on doing

it. That's right. I had a great time talking with Rick today about what we can do to interact more skillfully with the defenses that other people have. And one of the points that we started the conversation with, which kind of set the tone for everything that came after is that defenses have two characteristics that are really important to understand. The first is that they serve a useful

function to help protect us from feelings of anxiety, stress, uncomfortable emotions. The event helped maintain a certain coherence of self, which we're going to talk about more next week when we have a episode focused on exploring the shadow, the young game concept of the shadow. I think that'll be really interesting. I'm really looking forward to that one. Because psychological defenses serve this useful function, it's really understandable that a person would get more defensive when we

attack their defenses. And this leads us to the second big point. It is really hard to interact with people's defenses. It's hard enough to interact with our own. It's even more difficult to deal with other people's because of that self reinforcing nature. And this then led to a lot of the things that we talked about today. For starters, we have to decide how do we want to approach these

conversations with people? What overall tone do we want to have? And one of the things that informs that tone is how confident we are in the things that we're saying to them, how confident are we that we really are perceiving this other person's behavior as clearly as we think we are. Because it's really easy to over claim our confidence, particularly when it gets to evaluations of other people's behavior. And while we might be seeing the behavior accurately,

what we often lack is the sense of the motivation behind that behavior. We see our own motivations all the time. We know why we do the things that we do. At least we now on a conscious level what's going on in our minds, right? We don't see those motivations for other people. We don't understand what is behind their imperfect behavior. What are the justifications for it? What are

the reasons for it? And this makes it a lot more difficult to have compassion for it. In the same way that we can have compassion or at least a sense of understanding for what's going on inside of us. This is a cognitive bias that's called the fundamental attribution error. And it's widely

regarded as one of the most important cognitive biases out there. This is our tendency to judge other people's mistakes as being based on their character or their personality while attributing our own bad behavior to external or situational factors that are largely outside of our control. If you're late to a meeting, you know why you were late to that meeting. You know about the traffic, you know about the fire you had to put out at home, whatever it was, right?

Someday else walks in late to a meeting, you're just like, wow, they're a late person. So for starters, just at the beginning of this whole process, we can cultivate a sense of don't know mind of hmm. I wonder why this person is doing that thing as opposed to making a lot of assumptions about what's going on behind their behavior. And this can then lead us to a softer and more thoughtful tone in general when we're interacting with somebody else. And particularly when

we're interacting with their defenses. First of all, think about how you feel when somebody calls you defensive. In general, not so great. That doesn't really feel good. It doesn't put you in a receptive state of mind and it generally kills the conversation before it even begins. Second, we've got that self-reinforcing nature of defenses, right? The more the defenses attacked, the more it reinforces itself. So going in that way, generally not very effective.

And then third, it's easy to overestimate how much we know about other people. So we want to be a little bit cautious about that level of knowing. What does this push us toward? An overall framework of empathy, understanding the role of defenses as serving a useful psychological function, then validating maybe the function or the feeling that that defense is trying to protect the person from without necessarily supporting the truth claim that's emerging from them as part of

that defense, right? And then really importantly, hearing what's underneath what somebody is saying or doing. What's the emotional desire that the person has? And could you support them in that emotional desire in a healthier way? Is there another way that we could solve this problem that the defense is trying to solve without dealing with all the costs that come with that defense? And for a lot of people just feeling heard and validated in the function the defenses trying to perform

is a totally novel experience for them. They have literally never had the experience of somebody saying, Hey, you know, I get it. I understand why you do things that way. Makes sense to me. Yeah, sure, maybe other people have criticisms about it or whatever, but I really get it, man. That can be incredibly powerful for somebody. We then talked for a little while about a couple of common examples of defenses, particularly ones that can emerge in a relationship between two people.

One of these was more functional in nature is more of a functional example about picking your stuff up consistently. Then we also gave an example that was about getting to deeper levels of emotional connection with somebody else. And Rick and I made some points throughout the conversation that I just want to kind of summarize and condense here at the end that might be helpful for somebody. Because over and over again, we talked about how this is hard to do, but we still wanted to give people

something that they could kind of take home with them. First of all, as I was just saying, joining with the defense, what can we do to validate what the defense is trying to accomplish without getting so bogged down in the problems that are associated with it? Second, being aware of the power dynamics that often accompany any kind of critique. When we criticize another person, or even when we just appear to criticize another person, inherently creates a one-up, one-down

power dynamic. I see this thing about you that you don't see. And for some people, that's why they criticize. They do it in order to feel powerful. So if our goal is not to just like feel good about ourselves in that way, but instead to actually address an issue inside of a relationship with somebody else, it's helpful to subvert that dynamic as much as possible. In other words, we're trying to make it not about this power dynamic, but instead about how can we solve this problem together.

Third, you can go first. When we want things from other people, it's almost always best to start by giving them ourselves. So if we want other people to ask us that deep and interesting question, well, have you tried asking them a deep and interesting question and seeing what happens from there? If you want somebody to lower their defenses and get to a deeper place of emotional

connection, have you tried doing that yourself? Or alternatively, if there's somebody who feels really supported and validated and comfortable in environments that are maybe a little bit less emotionally intimate, have you tried not pulling for that emotional intimacy constantly over and over again every day for months on end? Have you tried giving them a break? Have you tried doing it

their way for a minute? And just seeing what happens. Fourth, we can create relationship environments that are more safe and secure and less anxiety-provoking, which tends to have the result of people lowering their defenses a little bit. Fifth, we can have a general orientation toward curiosity. We can really cultivate curiosity as a value inside of the relationship. Not just about self-awareness or looking inside of ourselves or any of that stuff, or curiosity about behavior, curiosity,

but everything. Curiosity just as a value. Sixth, we can get out of the back-and-forth of Vali that tends to consume a lot of interactions about relationships. And this often takes on a form of, I'll do A, if you do B, and then the other person says, well, I'll do B, if you do C, and the other person says, well, I was thinking about doing C, but I really need you to do A, and so on, and so on, and so on. Somebody else saying the snippy thing to you doesn't mean that

you have to say a snippy thing back. And if you're interested again in having more successful interactions, it's generally better to just kind of like drop that as an issue and return to the content as opposed to getting really bogged down in the format of the interaction itself. Then finally, we can change the overall frame in here. We can focus less on getting somebody to drop their defenses and focus more on doing different things to support their growth as an

individual. In the episode we did a couple of weeks ago focused on psychological defenses, I talked about all these different things that can support us in developing healthier defenses or healthier coping strategies, things like emotional regulation scales, a stronger sense of self, giving somebody more social support in general, working on different kinds of interpersonal skills or maybe finding healthier outlets like exercise, uplifting goals, fulfilling hobbies,

whatever it is that a person is into. Most of the time, realistically, we have way more space when it comes to supporting another person in developing those kinds of skills that tend to lower defensiveness than we do in changing the defense directly from the outside. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Rick. I really enjoyed it myself to give you a quick reminder Rick has a workshop coming up. It's focused on insecure attachment. It's called healing insecure attachment so you can

guess what you'll be doing during the workshop. It's a four hour live online workshop on August 17th and if you can't make it live, it'll also be recorded. The link is rickhanson.com slash attachment workshop. If you'd like to just have something easy to click on, if included it down below in the description of today's podcast episode. If you want to register for that, you can use coupon code beingwild20 for 20% off. If you'd like to support the podcast in other ways, you can find us

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