Hello and 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. Today we're going to be exploring the concept of psychological defenses, including what they are, where they come from, and what we can do to work with them more effectively. Now, this is a big topic, and I think that
we're going to be touching on a lot of different material during this episode. And I also know that Rick has been really looking forward to this one for a while because it includes some psychoanalysis content that he has just been dying to get into. So speaking of which I'm joined today by Dr. Rick Hanson, he's a clinical psychologist and he's also my dad, so dad, how are you doing today?
I'm great, and you said it. This topic is super rich, and I want to say in advance that it's rooted in a tradition that's fairly intellectual, psychoanalysis, which also is very focused
on practical benefits. So people listening can keep looking at their own mind stream in terms of how these various defenses operate, and also sometimes thinking about the mental processes of other people, because sometimes it's easier, frankly, to see defenses as they're operating in the minds of others, particularly defenses that are of the sort that we tend
to use ourselves and try not to be so aware of inside ourselves. But boy, can we see them really quickly in our friends and family, co-workers and partners? Yeah, maybe particularly the last of those. I mean, in relationships, this is an enormous topic. We might get into it a little bit at the end of this episode and might even spend
a whole separate episode on that topic, because it's such a big one. And just to let people know before we get started today, as you might be able to hear, I'm a little under the weather. I've been a little sick the last couple of days. I've also moved. So if you're watching the video and you can find us on YouTube, if you're listening to the podcast feed and you would rather be watching a video, that's why it looks different in the background.
So there's just been a lot going on, but we also have like a five year streak at this point of never missing a Monday. I didn't want to, I didn't want to break that streak. I'm very proud of that. So hey, here we are today. I'm kind of playing her a little bit. So I might be referring out to Rick a little bit more during this conversation. So let's just start there, Dad. Well, can I say first for us?
I'll go ahead. Yeah. I want to really credit you for that five year streak and for rallying, today, good for you. No thanks, Dad. I appreciate that. And so let's just kind of start at the beginning here. What do we mean when we say psychological defense? I've reflected a little bit on this and I want to quickly sketch four aspects of what we mean by this that are both interesting in their own right and we'll create a framework
for what we're going to get into. So first, a defense is something we do to keep it bay, that which is threatening. Second, what's the location of that which we're defending against? In this context, it is inside our own mind. The enemy is within. They're in the building. Do do do do do do. Right. And so immediately we get a sense that this is about getting at stuff that we tend to ward off, deny, push away, push down in
ourselves. And sometimes we do this in others to avoid stirring it up in ourselves. So it has that context to it. Okay. Third, to put this in the historical context of psychoanalysis and Freud and the work done by his daughter, honor Freud, who was brilliant in her own right. And at the turn of the century from the 1800s to the 1900s in terms of Freud,
and in the early 1900s in terms of the work of honor Freud. So in that context, there is a framing in which we are defending against stuff that is icky, dirty, unclean, nasty, primitive. It's framed in that way. And it's framed in that way on two counts, at least
two counts. One is we have the culture of the Victorian era in which very well educated, very privileged people like Freud and his family were caught up in sort of being proper and defending against and keeping it bay, you know, nasty impulses and particularly sexuality, including women's sexuality. And the second major kind of input into this sense of interdivision
and managing that, which is problematic, was informed a lot by colonialism. In that exploitation, that there was a kind of management of the ways in which those trillions of dollars of resources that were extracted from those continents and the people there to kind of justify that and to think it through. There was a view of the people in those countries as primitive,
heathens needing to be evangelized brought into Christianity. And so there too, we have this really interesting kind of guilt almost, if you think about a defense here as well, for European elite culture in general, taking these resources, justifying that by looking down on the people who lived in those countries. So there's that context. And then last point, interestingly, Freud himself was a neurologist. The 1800s were characterized by the discovery of
all these previously unknown unseen forces, electricity, magnetism. You know, there's a lot of interest in what powerful dynamic forces could be lurking in our biology and in our physics, unbeknownst to us. And so that notion of dynamic processes in conflict with each other in forms of turbulence with each other and needing to be managed various ways also very much informs the backdrop in which we're going to be exploring defenses. That's really interesting, Dad.
And there's there's a lot there. And what you're saying, obviously, it's like a very rich text. So I'm going to try to kind of simplify and boil it down a little bit to people more functionally thinking about psychological defenses. So these are largely subconscious strategies that we have to protect ourselves against different kinds of discomfort, often anxiety and often anxiety related as you are saying, Dad, to like fears about our true nature, that there is this aspect of ourselves
that we really don't like or this thing that we feel a lot of shame about. And so we push it away using a variety of different strategies. So importantly, there is an aspect of truth to the thing that we're worried about. And that's, I think, a really interesting aspect of defenses that we're pushing something away that is at least a little bit true or that we fear is at least a little bit true. And then most of them have three features. First, they are largely unconscious.
And we'll talk about this probably in some detail during this conversation, just how unconscious are they, how aware of them are they and how can develop and more awareness be a useful tool here for people. Then second, they help us reduce anxiety and particularly anxiety related to threats to our self-concept or self-esteem as I was talking about earlier. And then third, really importantly, these defenses are not totally true. They're based on a kind of inaccurate
interpretation of reality. We're either twisting reality into something that we can find more acceptable or we're distorting other people's behavior into something that matches our narrative a little bit better. Or we are in some way kind of displacing a desire and impulse a fear that we have from where it should be onto something else. And these are all kind of classic defenses. And I would love it here, Dad, if you could give people a couple of very practical examples of what
I'm talking about here. Well, first of all, let me say that that's a wonderful summary in common sense terms. And I do want to flag your highlighting of anxiety, which is appropriate while acknowledging that sometimes we enacted defense to ward off a dreaded experience or to prevent risking your dreaded experience, as you and I have talked about. And sometimes the dreaded experience
is itself anxiety. Very often though, the anxiety is what Freud called signal anxiety. It's the anxiety in his framing at least originally that we might experience when something starts bubbling up from below the water line and sort of force its way into consciousness to be known. And around which is a lot of anxiety, which then annex the defense to shove it back down below the
water line. Some examples, gosh, there's so many great ones. One of the classic examples was what was called glove paralysis in a famous case of Freud's in which a young woman presented as being paralyzed in her, I believe, right hand at the line of the glove so that she could not move her hand. And she was also, I think, insensitive to being touched on the hand. But the territory that was paralyzed did not follow any standard nerve tracks. So it must have been
psychogenic, that's a term of psychological origin. And in the psychoanalysis of her, it became revealed that her extremely authoritarian jerk of a father was a big bully in their home. And here we are, you know, 1910, 1905 maybe. She wanted to slap him. So the desire was to slap him. And very often what we tend to repress her in act defenses against are desires of various kinds with associated emotions. So it's the desire that gets suppressed. The desire was to whack him.
She could not tolerate that desire. So then she enacted this extreme form of defending against that desire. That's a classic example. Quite extreme. Much more common. So let's suppose a person has a view of another person as really good. Maybe let's say a spiritual teacher, a minister. And then you hear somebody else saying, well, you know, I'm minister has been doing some creepy stuff
with me or trying to, you know, and there's denial. So a funny kind of way of thinking about defenses is in terms of difficulty we have in terms of PHA's two models of cognition with accommodating new information into familiar structures that must be shifted to receive that new information.
So that that would be an interesting example. Another one would be someone who deep down feels inadequate and weak and pathetic and small and manages that sometimes based on the kind of culture they're in like male socialization, for example, by compensating for that underlying feeling of inadequacy, but by becoming a bully, by becoming domineering. And there's actually a particular
term for that defense, which we'll get into a little later. One last one I'll just say, let's suppose that you're a kid, understandably, you're mad at your parent, maybe your parent is overly critical or overly punishing, makes you feel small. So then, you know, you see this in primates, the big monkey picks on the medium sized monkey who then picks on the little monkey
displacement. So these are three common sense examples. To give a little bit of additional context into this and also help people who are listening learn a little bit of terminology if they're interested in this. So the concept of defenses, as you were talking about earlier, was pioneered by Sigmund Freud, but it was his daughter on a Freud that really went in and did a lot more detailed work on it, particularly she wrote a book called The Ego and the Mechanisms
of Defense, which she wrote I think in 1936. And she focused particularly on these five different defenses, a few of which you've already alluded to here. So first is repression. If you're listening to a podcast like this, you've probably heard of repression before. And this is when we kind of like block a thought or a feeling or an impulse of one kind or another from our conscious awareness.
An example of that could be blocking the memory of a difficult experience that a person had, or maybe even being kind of unaware of these repressed feelings that you were talking about in the instance of that glove paralysis. The daughter had these really intense feelings towards the father. So she found this very intense form of repression that led to her of being unable to access apart of her body even. Then another example of a defenses regression. This is when we revert to
behaviors typically of kind of an earlier developmental stage. You might think of somebody who is in a very difficult circumstance. So they revert to soothing themselves using mechanisms that might have been present for them when they were a child. Third, we have projection. And this is attributing our own unacceptable thoughts or feelings to other people. If you have any involvement in political discourse in any country, you have probably heard the word projection before. Everybody constantly
accuses everybody else of projecting. We're not going to get into that during this episode. But you're probably familiar with that one. Then fourth, it's the example that you gave before that reaction formation. And this is behaving in a way that's opposite to one's true feelings. So you feel weak and puny. So you act big and strong. And then the fifth one that you really dug into was called sublimation. And this is a really important kind of complex one because it's an
example of a more positive defense mechanism. And this is when a person channels their unacceptable impulses. Those thoughts and feelings that they might want to repress or those aspects of personality that they fear are more dark and socially unacceptable into some productive act. And this is like the classic archetype of the tortured artist or maybe in a more general
modern pop culture way. Somebody who has urges that are like violent or aggressive in nature who goes on to become a professional athlete or any other example you can think of where we're sort of funneling that energy into a more productive environment or using it in more productive way. Before I go on here, Dad, is there anything that you would like to say about any of that?
Yes. For the person who is enacting the defense, first, often the defense as a solution to a previous problem is actually increasingly burdensome today. The routinely what brings people to therapy is that, where I put it, is they're walking around in a suit of armor that three sizes too small. It was a necessary means to various functional hands, which we'll get into more about when they were younger, but now it's problematic.
So the defense itself is understood often in a frame of being costly. Maybe there's some benefits that are achieved through its functions, but there's some costs. Additionally, the person presumably is identified with the defense. The defense makes sense to them in the beginning at least. They're largely unaware of its function. They just seem to be that way. There's just
not much they could do about it. I would add one last little thing, which is that in the title of her book is implicit, a key point here, which is that she also really started to identify healthy ego functions of various kinds. So we have a sense of the ego as a core. We could think of it even like a cluster of functions that roughly coheres. That would be consistent with the kind of Buddhist view. It's differentiated. It is made of parts that are connected and changing. But it there is a
persistent cluster. Without having a functioning ego in this broad sense, which is different from being egotistical or arrogant or conceited superior, just it's normal functioning. Without having that roughly coherent cluster, persons in deep trouble. So you have that coherent cluster. It needs to manage. It needs to manage the demands of the world coming from the outside. It needs to manage these eruptions, these volcanic eruptions from the lower depths of the inner plumbing coming
in from the inside right. The ego is doing this through these various strategies. You could think of a defense as a strategy, a coping mechanism. So you've referenced some terminology here, Dad. You've talked about the function of the ego. We've also alluded to this more primal aspect of personality that has all these unacceptable urges that we try to try to manage. That's the id.
This terminology is built into psychoanalysis. It's particularly tied to Freud's model of the mind and the consciousness and just like how personality structure inside works inside somebody. Now, some of this stuff is a little out there in terms of the concept of it. I think that it's best understood kind of conceptually more than as a truth claim about the nature of reality. That's how I personally approach it. I'm not totally sure if we all actually have these
distinct aspects of personality, super ego ego and id inside of all of us. That's a truth claim that I'm not personally willing to make. But I do think that it's a useful model and particularly
is helpful to understand how defences function and what their purpose is. So if we can do it, I would love to take like five minutes here to do a basic overview of this psychoanalytic terminology and to let you just kind of like run wild here a little bit, particularly as it pertains to what we're going to be talking about in terms of the function of psychological defenses. So do you think you're up for that? Oh, sure. And I'll take less than five minutes.
I think so great. My own framing on this is to have a lot of sympathy for the beleaguered ego. And by ego, I'm using that single word as if it's a unitary entity. I really mean it much more as a dynamic, coherent cluster of capabilities and perspectives that loosely
together relate to the sense of the interior eye. So in that sympathetic framing, this eye that also isn't a developmental model, Freud among his brilliant contributions was to really track the development of the self through various stages in early childhood, moving into the teens and then adulthood and in which there is this kind of developmental movement from the infant baby who is seen as pure ed, raw, no coherent sense of identity yet, definitely no conscience,
you know, no super ego, if you will. And gradually being socialized by society. So the child develops over time and over time needs to acquire these various defenses. And defenses are also stacked developmentally in honor Freud's model from very, very young defenses. Or we could say if all else fails, pull the rip cord on the parachute defenses like dissociating entirely under trauma, you know, those defenses are where we start, but hopefully it's not where
we end up. And a lot of the project of therapy is about helping people develop more mature defenses and become a normal neurotic in Freud's language. Okay, so there's a developmental trajectory here. And there's a sense of, you know, the beleaguered eye who's managing all these various pressures. Again, pressures in this more hydraulic model of functioning with plumbing and forces in the larger context of it, you know, the science, the cutting edge science in the 1800s, there was a
lot about unseen forces and their dynamics with each other. We have then with regard to the sense of the eye, ego functions, executive functions we talk about a lot today, self-regulation, being deliberate, deliberate control, willpower, you know, we have a pretty common sense understanding of ego. We also probably have a pretty common sense experience near sense of our conscience, as well as the sheds that we internalize from all kinds of other sources as we grow up, some of
which over time we come to see are actually pretty wise. And over time, others we come to see are, oh no, that was a load of hooy. I'm not going to believe that anymore. So we have a sense of the sheds, conscience, sheds, societal standards. We can think of cultures like Vienna 1910, Victorian England, maybe some other cultures in which there's a very strict sense of propriety. Okay,
that's super ego territory. Then the id, the id is a little harder to get at because by its very nature, it's that which is more outside the realm of language, it's more what we tend to be kind of afraid of because it could get us into trouble. There are a lot of societal prescriptions against displaying id kind of stuff. You know, it's a little harder to understand, but that's sad. I think we can all have a direct experience of the emerging raw emotion in certain
situations that particularly raw emotion that's full of desire. And we can also have a sense of an amorality, even a more feral quality in ourselves. You know, the the id territory is really generative. It's a major source of our passions and our sense of aliveness, you know, the super ego is pretty deadening. So it's important to be able to find ways to integrate. That's a lot of what
this project is about. It's about integration and Freud was dealing with people who had warded off, if you will, intensive super eco elements and also warded off id like elements. And the psychoanalytic project a lot was about bringing into the light that which had previously been in the shadows and fostering a greater sense of integration and balance overall.
And then of course, just to finish, we had people like young who came in and in effect was saying, well, the framing here is that the id is nasty and has to be regulated. And then young came along and said, well, wait a second. A lot of what you're calling id is incredibly rich, archetypal material, the nonverbal imagination, depths of intuition, really good stuff in there. Don't be so quick to frame the id in a very kind of nasty inner colonialism,
kind of frame. I think that's really interesting, dad. And I want to I want to take what you've said so far about this, which is very much seeped both in the history of psychoanalysis and the history of psychology, where I think that there's a certain, I forget the exact phrase, but like there's a there's a secular kind of recapitulation here of what you're talking about between the history inside of this one moment and the history of psychology as. Oh, that's great. I think
you're saying what is it? Flawed you to something or on Toginy, I'm watching the quadruple something about it. I hate it. Okay. Sorry. We've lost like half of our history without their God. They're out the window. They're like, what the heck are these guys talking about?
Anyways, where we let's talk about fractal holograms. We're going to maintain some semblance of body and fear and I appreciate everybody who's hanging on before we get to actual functional material about what we could do about all of this mess, but I want to relate some of what we're saying here to the topic of psychological defenses. And part because when I was learning about this, I just found it super fascinating. So let's refer to the it as like our instinctual urges for
simplicity here. Good. And also out of a desire to give it like you're saying a slightly more positive connotation than in the manner that it's typically talked about. Like we can we can think of a baby as being mostly it. If you want to talk about it that way, right? It's this sort of just experienced desire. If you feel sad, you cry. If you're hungry, you look for food, whatever it is.
And as you're as you've said a couple times during this conversation that a lot of the desires particularly contextually in the cultural milieu that that Freud was talking about were sexual in nature. They were repressed sexual urges. So with that as context, let's just talk about it as instinct. So we've got this thing inside of us that's got all of these instinctual desires. But we have these other parts of us, particularly the super ego that functions as that kind of like
internalized societal standard. We can think about it maybe that way. And accompanying the super ego are all of these ideals for who we hope we actually are, who we wish to be at some point. And then we've got that beleaguered ego who's trying to compromise between our moral conscience on the one hand and these instinctual urges on the other. And so how does it do that? Right? The it has all of this energy. Some of that energy is productive. Some of it is maybe less productive and
less appropriate for a whole bunch of different reasons. But it's all energy. And that energy has to be managed in some kind of way. You can't just bottle it up forever. And when the ego can't resolve that conflict between the super ego and the it, we start to get anxious. We start to freak out a little bit. We feel the energy bubbling up in ways that we're uncomfortable with. And this is when the psychological defenses come in in terms of that classic psychoanalytic sort of Freudian
framework, right? And those defenses allow us to do two things. First, they allow us to express out some of the its energy and more acceptable ways. We think about things like sublimation. And then second, they help us keep the parts of ourselves that we don't like further outside of awareness. If you think about those aspects of denial or projection or maybe an example of let's say like a student fails a test, there are a lot of different reasons they might have failed
that test, right? And you know, they might all be true to some extent. But a big reason was maybe that that student just didn't study that much didn't do as much work as they should have done. But they don't necessarily go there. They go to my teacher was bad and the other kids weren't when me and I had a headache and I was late that day and and and there's always another
explanation. And this is a form of a psychological defense that helps somebody not see some aspect about themselves or something that they did in a true light, but also in one that I mean, it stings a little bit on the way down. And then as we were saying that part of the process here is moving to more productive or more useful forms of defense and away from ones that have more costs associated with them. Now that's a very psychoanalytic way of approaching this whole question,
right? And maybe a more like modern framework, a little bit more behavioral, a little bit more social emotional defenses are just things that help us solve different important emotional problems. And this means that they are highly functional for us. They exist for reasons. Your defenses are there for good reasons. My defenses are there for good reasons. And we all have defenses because they help us manage different difficult emotions and feel better about ourselves. We all want to feel
a little better about ourselves, right? And what I really want to emphasize here at the end of this, slow and many monologue is the functional nature of all of that, this, anything that we try to do from here on out to teach about or learn about our defenses is not intended as a way to remove them from a person. The question is how do we get to the same end using more productive means?
Yeah, one of the things I like about integrating and combining a psychoanalytically informed approaches with cognitive behavioral manifestations is that we're taking into account both the depths of people and the really important surface expressions in changes of behavior in the real world. So I'll just mention a couple of additional defenses, a couple that are in on a Freud's list and a couple of all add. One is the whole idea of altruism being driven by an attempt to push away
feeling bad by trying to do things that make you feel good. And one of the problems I want to name with focus on defenses is that it can pathologize all kinds of things that are beautiful and wonderful in us that really call for a much simpler explanation. If we just say to somebody who's being generous and kind to others, oh, you're just doing that because it makes you feel good. Well, yeah, happily, biologically, we evolved ways to feel good when we are kind to others.
Thank you, Mother Nature. And that's not the primary reason why people do it. So to minimize and reduce the nobility of their impulse to be kind to others too well, it's just a form of selfishness who on you, just is really not good. So we have to be a little careful about again, getting over incorporating into the psychoanalytic model, which does tend to load fairly heavily on an emphasis on that, which is sort of nasty inside us that we're just trying to manage
as best we can. There's a lot of wonderfulness and nobility inside us that we're also expressing as best we can. Okay, another one that I want to name that was not an onafroids original list is this notion of splitting. And the fundamental idea, again, in this developmental model, is that the young child is not very capable of ambivalence. Basically,
there's good mommy and bad mommy, good daddy, bad daddy. They're split. But then with time, the child moves from that initial sense of splitting into a more mature sense of ambivalence in which they see their parent, let's say, as a whole mosaic with many, many good qualities and
you know, some problematic ones. Okay, in the splitting, one thing that can happen deep down inside is that a child will need to preserve a sense of, I'll use this one, good mommy, which then gets split off from neglectful mommy and is held onto deep inside the child, very protected, very defended to maintain some kind of contact with a sense of a good mommy underneath it all. For the sake of the child's own development, so the child is then split off that aspect of the
parent in order to maintain some kind of relationship with the parent. And then later in life, a person may be able to function quite well, as I said, maybe in a business environment that doesn't trigger, doesn't activate this young material. But in their intimate personal relationships, including mate relationships that sort of replicate family top relationships, there's this tendency to split all good, all bad representations of their partner. Maybe by starting out by idealizing
them, that's the good partner. And then over time, devaluing them, knocking them off their pedestal and seeing them as entirely bad. So that would be what kind of defense is, that's not uncommon. Particularly when you're dealing with people with narcissistic or borderline tendencies in their relationships, the other defense that is not really named is more of an interpersonal defense.
This idea of preserving an optimal distance with other people, so to defend against the uncomfortable feelings that arise with growing closeness, people will do various things to distance interpersonally in electrolyzing, joking, picking a quarrel, doing a geographic where they move away, or reduce contact with the other person, that's another kind of a defense. Great. I think that those are really helpful examples for people to know. And it's also just
kind of fascinating stuff, right? Like all the different ways that are mind or psyche finds to compartmentalize information or to preserve our emotions and regulate them to help us deal with anxiety. And I think it does just really emphasize the idea that these are functional things that are happening inside of us. They have purposes, they're useful in nature. And our defenses play a
really crucial role in maintaining our mental health. And they help us deal with life and manage stress and even stabilize our sense of who we are, particularly for people who maybe are, as you've said in previous episodes of the podcast, at a little bit less tightly co-heared. They have a little bit more space inside of their personality structure. And so our goal isn't to overcome our defenses in some way here. It's to move to more adaptive forms of co-pen. Because while these
defenses are functional in nature, they're often kind of maladaptive in behavior, right? Because they rely often on the manipulation of reality. They're just not based on pure one-to-one interpretation of reality, seeing things clearly. Like the example that you gave a splitting there, dad, there's a twisting of reality in some way. We're breaking this individual into
these two separate parts. And we know that that's not actually true. They're really one whole co-heared person, but it's just hard for us to wrap our minds around that emotionally. And so this means that our defenses can put stress on our relationships. I've definitely had that happen in my life. And they often stop us from dealing with the real problems that we have, because we've kind of taken this protective emotional shortcut rather than really facing reality.
And so something that I want to ask you about is clinically working with somebody around these kinds of issues. How do you get in here? Because one of the problems with our defenses is that they're often automatic or somewhat unconscious in nature, and they can be very slippery. Like they're they're tied to a sort of interpretation of reality that is held too strongly while also not really being totally true. They're also tied to a lot of shame material. We've talked about the
impulses of the head as being kind of uncouth or unclean in these different ways. And people don't want to see that. They don't want to see those aspects about themselves. So I'm wondering when you're working with people, how do you start to work with this stuff? In a way, I think of the four stages of any kind of learning. And one way this is described is that you start out with unconscious incompetence. And then second, conscious incompetence, third, conscious competence,
and fourth, unconscious competence. So to track that, I'll only give an example here of in one in which I've seen fairly often when I was working in schools a lot, where there would be a parent, and often a male parent when you think about gender socialization, who themselves had their own soft, vulnerable, maybe sad, hurt feelings, attacked, suppressed, punished, shamed, so forth. When
they were a child, so those feelings then became repressed, warded off, held at bay. And along with that, this father internalized the contempt that he experienced as a boy for crying or breaking down or wetting his pants or something like that as a young boy and developed a kind of contempt himself
for those parts within himself. Barely standard process. And then becoming a father when his own son, as a first grader, let's say, or a fourth grader or eighth grader, was expressing vulnerability, was feeling sad, was feeling hurt, was breaking down, was crying, say. The father defended against the upwelling in kind of sympathetic resonance inside himself of those feelings that he had shoved down into the basement that were getting stirred up by his son
acting in those ways. And then the father would go overboard in being contemptuous of those feelings in his son and being critical and punishing about them as he learned to do when he was young, when other people did that to him. We can understand this example. And we can understand it in a sympathetic way for all the players. You know, the boy the father once was, the pain of the father right now doing things that are problematic and going to create issues over time with his own
son and the experience of the son. How do we help this person? Very often, we start with someone, as I said earlier, coming in because a solution to previous issues is now a problem. So maybe, you know, we talk about court ordered therapy, this could be spousal ordered therapy. You know, so the father is now in the office. What do you do? And you start to unpack, you start to understand the situation. And initially you tend to run into a lot of justifications.
And the father is hardly aware of, I'm just being normal. You should have seen my dad, let's say. So this is the first stage of unconscious incompetence. And I say incompetence, because it's kind of a neutral way to put it. It's just not skillful. They're more skillful ways. That's what we're looking for. So initially, it's just happening. The person's not even aware of it happening. They're definitely not aware of the worded off material. And I've had people who had
described to me, fabulous childhood. Initially, when you start to really unpack it, you hear all this sort of stuff. Like, like what your father hits you multiple times a week. What? You know, your mom was on tranquilizers and just kind of useless by the time you got out from school in the afternoon. What? You know, you were in a military family and you moved every year. So you'd never had any kind of stable friend group. You could take a refuge in what? You know, your beloved grandmother died
when you were six years old and everything changed after that. You know, you just start hearing all story here. But the person is completely unaware of it. They're unconscious. It's stage one.
So then you've asked me, how do you help the person? And now to move through the process, one of the really important things to do is to start by joining with the defense, not tearing the scab off the wound, not ripping away the exoskeleton, the scaffolding, the person is acquired, not dragging them out of the leaky robot that, you know, is a functioning vehicle and they know no other so far. But to start by really appreciating the importance of what
they're trying to accomplish. So you join with them and you gradually surface it. And all in the way you're trying to resource someone who so that they can tolerate the grief, the sorrow, of the cost to them and to those they love of their defenses being enacted and also the defended against material that's really hard to to be with. And at that point, the person is in the conscious incompetence stage. They're increasingly aware of the operation of the defense.
They're still yelling at their kid, even though they hate themselves, you're doing it. And they apologize afterward, but they're still doing it. Then you start moving increasingly into the third stage of getting more and more deliberate regulation of what's happening in part by just helping people practice other ways of being and developing supporting characteristics like
mindfulness and self-compassion, which are good general purpose factors, developing examples of how to be a good father even in kind of classic gender normative ways, which are much more nurturing and encouraging and let go of the really heavily toxic aspect of contempt and disdain for that which is arising in another person, which is very toxic. And then you start moving over time into that fourth stage in which these new ways of being become more and more automatic.
The person starts moving from states of more sophisticated defenses or more sophisticated functional forms of co-opening experiences of that. And those become increasingly internalized as new habits, new traits of a new way to be. And that's kind of the broad trajectory,
I think of a lot of effective therapy. And it's it's a trajectory that people in therapy or in different kinds of personal growth in general can really help themselves move through with a lot of sympathy for themselves and support during that kind of nasty second stage in which gosh, he really you're so you're aware of your stuff and you just can't stop doing it. If you're listening to a podcast like ours, you probably care about your long-term health and
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Shopify.com slash being well. So as we become more aware of this material over time, and alongside that we start to see our behavior a little bit more clearly, including the aspects of it that we're not super proud of for a whole bunch of different reasons, it's really easy for people to become sidelined by feelings of shame or guilt, oh yeah, related to their behavior related to those those impulses that are bubbling up inside of
them. And the reactions to that often but not always fall into one of two difficult buckets for people. The pain is felt, it solidifies the defense and it makes the defense even harder to work with. Bucket one. Where the second bucket, it just becomes totally destabilizing. Person collapses, big emotional upheaval there, you can no longer kind of get in there with them, either as a therapist or just as another person and whenever they touch the hot stove,
it's just too hot for them. Thankfully, there are responses that don't fall into those two buckets, but those are very, very common buckets here. And I'm wondering how you help people work with those feelings of shame or lack of self worth associated with the increase in awareness of those defenseless? Really common. It's really tricky in a lot of ways because even just the language of defenses can be taken as a criticism by people. Sure, yeah, it's going to pathologize them.
Yeah, potentially. And here we have the all-knowing therapist and then you drop in all the cultural motifs around that who is unpacking things about yourself that are really uncomfortable to see and with you cooperatively, hopefully. So it is a real issue. The unconditional positive regard of the therapist is really useful. An attitude of the normalizes, these ways of being really, really useful. A kind of neutrality of inquiry, in other words, we're just interested.
Well, don't know. A beginner's mind, don't know mind. It's not good. It's not bad. Over time, we'll start to understand the benefits and maybe the costs and what might be a better way. But meanwhile, we're just trying to understand. We're exploring. I think about the traditional medicine of the physician, light and air. We're airing out, we're unpacking the
understandably layered depths of the person and bringing more light to it. Also emphasizing the ways in which partly related to normalization that the nervous system is designed to do this. It's designed to acquire these, we'll say, defenses, these co-opening mechanisms broadly. It's not your fault. You were there when it happened and it was happening in its own way. It had a process that had a life of its own. You're not responsible for the installation of
these defenses. But today, you are responsible for their enactments and their effects on you and others and you have tremendous agency. You may have been helpless as a one-year-old or a one-day old or a ten-year-old in the acquisition of these ways of being, but today you're not helpless. And there's a lot of wonderful things you can do and we can do together, a corner quote, the coach or the therapist with the client on these sorts of things. So those, I think, are
really, really helpful. The other thing I wanted to say about all this is that a kind of humor is really quite helpful. We're not laughing at the person. We're laughing with the person. And I'm going to tell a story that I believe I've told in the podcast, but it was numerous years ago. So I'll just tell you again briefly. So I took the S training from greater by Werner Harhard
in 1975 and my wife, your mother, Jan did it as well. And one of the experiential processes in the S training was, I'm going to use a word here, the asshole process in which you basically, I think, vaguely would have partners and you would tell each other what assholes the other person was and the frame is we're all assholes. We're all assholes. And there was this moment when you're at the dinner table, I think you might have been around nine or so or 10 or 11, Laurel,
nearly three years younger. And for some reason, your mom and I were joking about this. And I said to her, yeah, Jan, you're an asshole. And then she said, yeah, Rick, you're an asshole too. You know, I think I might have said, yeah, for us, you too. You know, we're all assholes here. And there's something about lightening up about it. We're lightening up about it. Yeah, we're all neurotic. We all have stuff. We're all works in progress. We're all a hot mess. And there's a kind of humor
that can come in here. This often furthered by the therapist or coaches on self-disclosure. I think that's a really good that. And that's a great list and very helpful for people. The common humanity aspect of this is, I think, a big piece of it, that seeing the ways in which we all have material of some kind, that doesn't mean that all of our material is the same. I don't want to create a false equivalence here. But everybody's got something. We've all got something.
We're not proud of. We've all got an urge or an impulse or a desire or a thought that appears from time to time where they're like, whoa, that's, that's a lot. And a lot of being a mature person is not getting to a point where those thoughts go to zero. It's getting to a place with them where we are not burdened by them. And we're able to turn that energy into more useful energy in different ways in our lives. It's that whole concept of sublimation again. And I think that
there are some, some basic resources that tend to support people in doing that. And I want to ask you about one of them because it's a little fraught here. And it's this notion of distress tolerance. Because something that are, if you think about defenses in general, what are they
trying to do? They're trying to shield us from discomfort. So the more comfortable that we become with a degree of emotional discomfort, the less necessary a sophisticated psychological defense mechanism is because we can just be more okay with feeling a little not okay about whatever's going on. Distress tolerance has a complicated history as an idea. It's been used in some circumstances to talk people into feeling more okay about circumstances that are absolutely
not okay in their lives. Or, you know, to go like, hey, you just need to develop more distress tolerance when the reality is like, no, the person needs to get out of the situation that they're in. So emphasizing it can be a little tricky. But I do wonder about that as a piece of this. And as the sense of self as a whole is able to cohere a little bit, become a little stronger, a little bit more tightly knit together, there is more of a sense of underlying self-worth or
self-esteem. All of a sudden these threats to self become smaller by comparison. And they have less and less of an impact on us that requires that we move into some kind of an elaborate psychological coping mechanism. For starters, I'm just wondering what do you think about that? And if you think of it's relevant here, I'm wondering what a person could do to develop more of that.
Well, the effort altogether to become more integrated, to make more room for all of ourselves, all the aspects of ourselves, all of our parts, using internal family systems language, or making room for the, making room for the super ego, making room for the multiple ego functions, making room for all of that. That's really, really important. In my example of the father, he could not make room
as a boy, understandably, for his soft, hurting, sad, crying parts or aspects. But now as an adult, he needs to make more room for them inside himself so he can make more room for them and other
people. And there's an important point here that we push away and others that which we push away in ourselves and vice versa, which gives us opportunities in both domains to become more integrated, to become more spacious and present with and able to stay in place with qualities in other people, which by which I do not mean letting other people mistreat you. But being able to be more spacious there, that can help you be more spacious with that material
inside yourself and vice versa. So that's a broad aspect. And it really goes to things like getting more in touch with our bodies because a lot of what we repress are just sensations and various somatic markers like Dimasio's talked about. We wait down, not just wake up, as my friend's annual bonder puts it. As also a kind of metaphor that I think of is that when we're young, who we are is like a vast estate with beautiful sunlit meadows and kind of nasty smelly
swamps, where some creepy things really do live. And here we are, no, we enter into life. And we start being shamed or criticized or we see models around us in which we're not we're supposed to not have those aspects where we're supposed to live entirely in the sunny meadows. And so gradually we withdraw from our entire estate and in my imagery, we end up in the gatekeepers cottage living in a very small part of ourselves, peering out through the windows, continually managing
an underlying anxiety that the barbarians are going to be at the gates. And yet all the while,
they're already in the building, which really adds to that sense of anxiety. And so part of the the opportunity as we grow older is to reclaim our interior, to reclaim all the food we are, and to both hand, both tolerate the distress or the painful feelings or problematic desires, we're tolerating them, we can accept them, we include them as tarbrach puts it, this too belongs while also regulating them and encouraging other aspects of ourself that also may well have been
disowned. One of the primary things I repressed in my family system was love. So, you know, we repress all kinds of things, not just let's say the desire to whack our father in the face because he's outjerk. So, that's very important. It's very important to do this. So then the how of it, certainly being able to calm yourself, being able to be mindful, being able to bring compassion
to these warded off disowned parts of yourself, that's really important. It can help to recognize other people who you like or who are sort of like you or you look up to, and you can kind of see yourself in them. They're not so evolved or, you know, as themed that you just can't identify with them. People you can identify with who are more integrated, who are more able to include these feelings and desires and manners, and even kind of laugh about them or, you know,
and make room for them without being a jerk about it. You can, if you can see yourself in them, then you can imagine also being more and more that way yourself. And then I would just say last in terms of finding your way here, taking the first step of being a little open, safely open with someone, a therapist, a friend, a teacher, a partner, and say, you know, I know that I need to fill in the blank, and I'll speak for myself here. Gosh, I need to get more in touch with
my emotions categorically. I need to be more in touch with my own body below the neck. Oh, I need to not be so, I need to not resort to intellectualization, one of the major defenses, as a way to get away from my actual feelings. I need to learn ways to feel them while I'm saying them. And you can declare those kind of things to people who care about you and who can understand what you're saying or not get a run screaming out the door. Well, what a whack job, you know,
then that can be a really useful thing too. I think that's social support aspect that your highlight in here is really important because again, defenses are ways that we respond to stress and anxiety and much of the stress and anxiety that we face in life is social, right? It's based on other people. So if we're able to feel like we can be in relationship with more people in a safe way or we can be seen in some kind of way by others while also being supported by them,
we need to rely on those defenses less because we feel more stable. So building stronger and more authentic relationships can be a great way into this. To add a couple of other things, I think that just some basic interpersonal skills development can be really helpful for people. Many of the problematic forms of defense that people have are trying to protect us from really painful experiences inside of our relationships and our friends, family, significant others, things
like that. So as we develop better interpersonal skills, including communication skills, the ability to express our needs, ask for things for other people, draw clearer boundaries, all of that stuff. We gain the tools that help us interact in more skillful ways again without relying on those maladaptive defenses so much. And then finally, I would toss in again,
finding healthy outlets. So sublimation, this positive coping mechanism is based on the conversion of energy from one thing to another, more problematic forms of energy get funneled into more useful pursuits. So this could look like anything. This could look like exercising, doing different forms of art, dancing for somebody like me, pursuing a hobby with intensity, dedicating yourself to one kind of cause or another. Whatever it is that you're engaging in,
that is bringing you joy along the way. I think it can be a great way to funnel some of that energy into more useful pursuits for a person. And along the way, you're just going to feel better about yourself. You're going to develop positive aspects of self-concept that make you feel more assured about who you are. And I think that that'll have a natural, have a natural support of a fact and you're during that integration process that you were talking about that.
That's really, really, really, really well said. And as we kind of wrap up here and maybe could have a bird's-eye view perspective even on what we've been talking about. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, I think so much it kind of boils down to in a secular context. The truth shall set us free. It's really about truth. The truth of what happened as you were a kid and what you internalized and is now out of awareness that you can gradually become more aware of. The truth of the dynamic,
functional operation of defenses, how that happens. The truth of there are benefits for you. The truth of their functions and the truth of their costs and the truth of other possibilities. So there's a lot here that's just about coming into truth, about very normal processes that can still have problematic consequences. As we get to the very end here, Dad, I do want to ask you a little question about something that we alluded to in the very beginning of the episode here,
which gets to our relationships with other people. It is often so much easier for us to see this process inside of others than we can see it inside of ourselves. And that reality is the source of an enormous amount of conflict for people in their relationships because they can see when their partner is operating from a stance of defense or manipulating the truth or twisting things a little bit while also being unable to see when they're doing the exact same things. And so there's this
inherent kind of unbalance in that. And a lot of the questions that we get from people contacted being wellpogguest.com, you can send us a question if you like. We might answer it during the mailback episode. Get to some version of my partner does this thing or my friend does this thing or my parent does this thing. And it's driving me crazy. And it's also causing them a lot of stress. How can I help them with it? And that's such a big question. We could probably just spend
a whole episode on it here. But I'm just wondering if you want to leave people with something toward the end of this maybe quite briefly around helping other people come face to face with their defenses. Or if you even think that that's a good idea at all. Well, it's an incredibly good topic. And it's a long time couples counselor and a long time husband I should add, it's really something that I think it would be of interest to many, many people. And perhaps people will
write in to the mailbag some examples of this. And we might even do a whole session, a whole podcast on this a whole episode. First off, notice what it feels like when someone says to you, you're so defensive. Right. What do you, what's your first reaction? Well, get more defensive or not be offense. Not defense. Offense, baby. So and the truth is sometimes it's appropriate to quote unquote defend ourselves. Like somebody says, you know, you left the faucet on and you
can say, no, I did not leave the faucet on. It's appropriate to defend yourself if you actually did not leave the faucet on. So there's a place for that. And sometimes people attack us for having certain kinds of motives or you know, inner dynamics and to say, you know, honestly, I'm aware of my own mind. And that thought was not present in me or well, yeah, a little part of me does want X. But most of me really understands that X is a problem. What I really want here is why.
You know, there's a place for that. That's it. Some tips. You know, from, from my scars, in various kinds of relationships, you know, receiving and delivering. If you think about this structure of a defense is trying to accomplish something. And meanwhile, the person is often unaware that they're doing it or that it's problematic or that there's a better way. And so to come in
guns blazing against what they're doing, they just tend to intensify it. On the other hand, if you can find a way to just sort of be naming what's happening in a minimally neutral, if not kind and interested supportive kind of way, you're you're just inquiring. Don't know mind, beginners mind. That then can help a person simply become aware per se that they're doing that. For many people, that's enough. You've planted a seed that will gradually bear fruit in the garden
of their mind. Little example here. One of the defenses, which I think is it's a kind of dissociation, is for a person to go inert. They don't really disagree, but they just go inert. They kind of swerve away from the topic. They space out a little bit. They don't seem to track what's actually happening. You can see that sometimes in families systems where one partner really wishes
their other partner would step up, frankly, in certain ways. And the other partner defends against the anxiety about stepping up in the related uncomfortable distressing feelings and desires underneath it all by not really overtly disagreeing, even sometimes overtly agreeing. This is sometimes what's called passive aggressive behavior in a way. But underneath it all, they just swerve away. They forget that they've agreed to change. They get spacey and sleepy. They're in
attentive right there. So, with that as an example, you might say to your partner, you know, hey, I just I noticed this thing that when I ask you to fill in the blank, you know, do more of you share the housework, be a more engaged parent in terms of the authority functions of normal parenting in reasonable ways. I noticed that it seems like that is maybe uncomfortable for you to talk about or even face. So, I don't know. What's that like for you? What's that like for you?
So, there's I think that's a fairly neutral way into it. If need be, sometimes we kind of escalate. And then I think the structure of nonviolent communication is just wonderful. You know, when I ask you to let's say do more of the housework or you share the parenting and and you kind of nod, but you don't really hop on board when I'm saying. And in the face of multiple requests, it just isn't happening here. Not being critical, just describing facts. When that happens,
I feel, fill in the blank. I feel puzzled. I feel sad. I feel worried. I feel worried about the result I'm trying to accomplish here in our family. Let's say, I feel those things, maybe loading heavily on the softer kinds of feelings rather than I feel like I really should call a divorce lawyer or I want to yell at you for a while. If you have to go there, but maybe not. And then you get into, so because I need Z, because of deep down at all, I have a need to
feel like someone's with me in this really important endeavor of raising a family. So then I request from now on that or what do you, I was just for you, you open it up there. That's pretty effective. The last thing I'll say on this, and I hope we do talk about it more, is that self-disclosure is really helpful because it immediately comes as a critique and as a power move. You know, we're
trying to get the other person to change. So when you're on the receiving end of that critique, and that power move, that expression of influence, if not domination, that's hard to receive. So it can be really helpful if a person deliberately goes one down in the power structure by acknowledging their own lapses, their own defenses, including maybe the ways that they do the same thing they're talking about and are trying to help both of you, both of us, be different going
forward that can also really help too. And then that was a great list at and also we should definitely do an episode on this. And what's really coming to mind here at the end for me is all of the other stuff that we talked about as being supportive of helping ourselves work through our defenses is equally supportive if we can aid other people in that process. Yeah. And that's actually really where I think we have the most utility. We do not have a lot of utility when it comes to telling
somebody, hey, you're doing this defensive thing. There's just not a lot of there. Generally, it doesn't go very well, even when we think it'll go well, it never goes well. It just not a lot upside. Unless you really cultivated that kind of a psycho-educated relationship with somebody else, I guess, and there's a lot of trust developed and all of that sure maybe, but for 98% of people,
no shot. But what we can do if we're really in it for the long term with somebody else, if this is a close friend and intimate partner or family member, we can support them in the kind of self development that might help them over time start to peel back some of those defenses. We can support them and develop a stronger sense of self and becoming more self-aware and finding these outlets for energy, for sublimation of different kinds. We can do all of that. And that's actually where
we have the greatest lever. And I think that that's really interesting. Fantastic. Yeah, and maybe a good place to end this conversation because we've spent a lot of material here. I think this was a really interesting one. I felt like I learned a lot during it. I definitely learned a lot doing the prep for it. And I'm just really glad we got to do this, Dad. You've been wanting to have a conversation about psychoanalysis in some way or another for like literally years now. So I'm glad
that we finally got there. I think it's useful as you know, one of Freud's later books was civilization and its discontents. We can often internalize too much of civilization. There's so much pressure on us to not let our playful, passionate, juicy, wild parts out. Now obviously we have to be careful about aspects of ourselves that can really harm others and the ways in which those intensities and passions can start roaring down the highway. Initially at 60 miles an hour
and it's okay. But if you get out of the safe lane into the yellow zone, if not red zone lanes, you're still going with a lot of momentum. You're not going to be careful about it. But still just on the whole, I would sort of like to offer a plea for us to be not quite so domesticated, at least inside our own minds and not so domesticated, particularly when it's safe to be looser, juicier, more playful, even wilder in certain key relationships.
This was a really fascinating conversation today with Rick, focused on our psychological defenses.
We touched on so much different material here related to psychoanalysis, understanding ourselves, and seeing the roots of our behavior and part of what was so informative for me in learning about this material was seeing how those behaviors often flow from a desire to not see certain aspects of reality clearly, to not see ourselves clearly, to not see the world around us clearly, and even to distort how we view other people in order to protect our pre-existing views around them.
Because we covered a lot and I'm still under the weather a little bit, I apologize if this recap is a little bit more rambling or a little bit shorter than it might otherwise be, but we started by talking about just what are psychological defenses and these are subconscious strategies that people used to protect themselves, typically from anxiety, and they're defenses against reality. That's a really important part of understanding our psychological defenses. There is something
out there that's at least a little bit true. A fear we have about ourselves based on some underlying urge that we have, something that we see in other people, something that we messed up in the past, and we don't want to face that reality so we come up with a way of allowing ourselves to not face it directly. And most of our defenses have three important features. First, they're largely unconscious. They're not entirely unconscious, but they're largely unconscious.
We're typically not aware that we're using these strategies when we're using them. They're very automatic in nature. Then second, they help us reduce anxiety, and particularly anxiety related to fears around our self-worth, our self-esteem, and the less palatable desires that we might have bubbling away in our interior. And then third, they distort reality or they're somewhat irrational in nature. Reality around us is modified into something that we can accept.
We then gave a couple of relatively simple examples of psychological defenses. First, maybe a person receives a piece of information that they just can't handle. They can't deal with it right now, and so what did they do? They ignore it. They deny it. They push it away. That's denial. Maybe a kid is mad at their parent, but they can't express that anger because it's unsafe for them to do so, so they take it out on somebody else at school. That's called displacement.
Maybe a student fails an exam, and there are a lot of different reasons that they failed it, but one of them is that they didn't study enough, so they rationalize their failure by blaming it on external factors. They had a bad teacher, the test was unfairly difficult, they had a headache,
you know, whatever it was. And that last example I think emphasizes something that's really important here, which is that our defenses are often quite clever, because they will pick at things that are also somewhat true, but aren't the whole truth in order to shield us from the aspect of reality that we don't want to face. We then spent a little while talking about a number of different
defenses. I will not recap them all here before getting into some of the psychoanalytic backdrop of defenses, which helps us understand the function that they're performing. So in Freud's conception, our psyche is broken into these three different parts, these three kind of characters that are inside of us. The first is the super ego, and this is our moral conscience. This is also something that we export from external reality. In other words, we internalize society's
standards and hold them as our own, and that's the function the super ego has. Then there's this other part of us that's buried deep inside. It is this instinctual, energetic urge operating on what's called the pleasure principle, do what feels good, avoid what feels bad, and that's the it. And then we thought this third part, this kind of beleaguered manager part called the ego, which is the practical or more realistic aspect of ourself that mediates between these two extremes.
And the ego's job is to manage the desires of the aid in ways that society and our moral conscience, which again is kind of imported from external society, will find acceptable. This might include delaying the expression of those energies, channeling them in some other kind of way, using them to produce something else or just ignoring them entirely. And these all manifest as different kinds of psychological defense that we have out in the world. Now, this is a very psychoanalytic way
of thinking about this whole thing. And frankly, a lot of psychoanalysis has not aged very well over time. If you go back and read some of the stuff that they were writing on the 1900s, it's pretty out there stuff. A more kind of modern or behavior role or social emotional framework around this is that our defenses exist to help us solve important emotional problems, to shield us from painful emotions and to help us feel more good more often. And this emphasizes something
really important. Our defenses are functional in nature. They exist to solve a problem. They help us maintain our sense of self, manage life, cope with stress, do all of these really good things. So the question is not how do we get rid of our defenses and become like totally undefended. The question is how do we try to reach those same ends through more productive means.
And so our goal here is to move from reality denial, which is what most defenses are based on, to reality acceptance and then to move from reality acceptance to proactively addressing the real issues that our defenses are often shielding us from. To return to that example that I gave earlier, the student that rationalizes their failure is a lot less likely to pass future tests than one that accepts that their study habits are an issue and starts to create a plan for dealing
with them in a more effective fashion. But doing that requires a level of self confidence and self stability that frankly a lot of people act. It also requires the ability to manage and overcome various forms of difficult emotions to deal with painful experiences to look inside of ourselves and be able to face aspects of who we are that feel less good. And so I talked with Rick for
a little while about how we can go through that process. When somebody comes into the room and to the therapeutic office and he starts working with them around defenses, what does he actually do practically? Because one of the things that's so tough about defenses is that just calling
attention to them often reinforces them rather than helping somebody work with them. And that's why he highlighted the idea of joining with the defense, which is a technique used in therapy where the clinician goes out of their way to get on the same team with the client and particularly the parts of the client that are most resistant to change. Rather than attacking the defense directly, the clinician tries to identify different means that could get to same ends. Then I try to really
express to the defense how they're on the same page as it. How they want the same things, they just want you to have to work a little bit less hard. And we didn't talk about this so much during the episode, but you might be able to imagine here how you could apply that to yourself. Could you say something like, hey, you know, anxiety? I see you there. I get what you're trying to accomplish. I've gotten a message and I'm going to do my best to proceed thoughtfully here.
Because it's often weirdly when we accept and embrace our defenses that they start to relax, because they get that we've gotten the message. We then talked about a whole bunch of different useful skills that people could develop that might help them throughout this process. This could be things like self-compassion or self-acceptance, which Rick really talked about in some detail.
I emphasized interpersonal skills development, developing the stronger sense of self altogether, which I asked him about during the conversation as well, and getting a little bit more social support because so many of our fears and insecurities are social in nature. We fear that we will be left without other people. That if they see who we really are, they will discard us. And so developing
stronger relationships can be a great way into working with our defenses. And we close by talking a little bit about what we can do to help other people work with their defenses and Rick really laid out a wonderful and detailed process by which we could approach these conversations with other people. But the reality is that a lot of the time in most relationships, drawing somebody's attention to the fact that they're defended around something is really not going to get you very far.
Maybe there are some outlier relationships where that can be successful, but it's very, very uncommon. So what can we do? Well, we can help them develop all of the things I was talking about earlier, developing the stronger sense of self, self-acceptance, self-compassion, helping somebody see the
the aspects of themselves that are really worthy that they don't need to be worried about. So that when we approach this person with constructive criticism or an ask of them or whatever it is that we're looking for, they don't feel like they need to be so defended because they feel like the relationship is on more stable ground like they're they're full from the inside out. They don't need to be so worried about all of it. So they can really face and absorb what we're saying and
take it on with less content getting in the way. I hope you found today's conversation interesting. I would love to hear from you a bit about it. Did you like this sort of conversation which was a little bit more conceptual in nature? Were there aspects of it that you were particularly interested in that you would like to hear us delve into in more detail? If you're watching on YouTube, you can leave a comment. If you're listening to the podcast through the podcast feed,
you can send me an email to contact at beingwildpupcast.com. And hey, as long as you're here, you can take a moment to subscribe to the podcast. And if you'd like to support us in other ways, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash being wild podcast. And for just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and receive a bunch of bonuses in return. Until next time, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.