Let Down Your Defenses, You Are Safe to Love and Live

I had to admit to myself that I didn’t want to be seen as arrogant and defensive. Or, I had to admit to others that I was that way on purpose.

You can’t see yourself the way others see you. You have been called rude when you are merely standing up for yourself. Your partner confronts you about your tone, and you accuse them of making you defensive. You admit that you have little tolerance for people, but justify your impatience by believing people provoke you with their stupidity. If this is your idea of “keeping it real” I hope you read this article to the end.

Change of Purpose

Anyone who has a personal history of trauma can justify a pattern of hyper-vigilance in relationships. Facing regular microaggressions based on race and gender, on top of unhealed trauma, made me dig my heels into self-protection even deeper.

I spent too much time being unnecessarily arrogant and defensive. Even as a psychologist, I bore those traits out of ignorance rather than intentionality. I didn’t realize I had created a porcupine defense.

After decades of teaching psychology and facilitating the mental health of others, I finally began to apply my knowledge to move toward higher humanity. I had to admit to myself that I didn’t want to be seen as arrogant and defensive. Or, I had to admit to others that I was that way on purpose.

I wanted more than ‘good enough’ relationships. I wanted to have great relationships. By great, I wanted to improve my relationships with everyone, not just people close to me.

I got tired of hearing my friends’ negative first impression of me. I didn’t want people to have to jump through hoops to have a friendly conversation or get to know me. I saw myself as a caring person and wanted to project that image. I wanted consistency between my heart, my perceived self, and the feedback I got from the world.

Mirror, Mirror

I began to pay close attention to all, and I mean all of my interactions with people. I looked for signs that I was uncomfortable, and if I made someone else uncomfortable. When I noticed someone shutting down, I tried to salvage the interaction by shifting my disposition.

The goal of my past interactions was to win, or at least not lose. I shifted my goal from protecting myself to engaging with others.

Showing my knowledge, revealing my inner strength, and expressing my independence may have served my ego well, but my soul wanted something different.

I wanted to know that my adult children would call me first if they were struggling with anything. My spouse should not have to walk on eggshells to make the marriage work. My friends should trust me to listen without trying to fix them. Co-workers and organization members should be able to disagree without me tension. Strangers should feel emotionally safe in my presence.

Lessons

I had to commit to self-observation because people avoid giving feedback when you have a pattern of defensiveness. These are the lessons I learned:

• Silence in a heated exchange does not mean you won. Shutting someone up means that you have shut them down. I stopped counting other’s silence as a win. You can’t win by making the other person feel like a loser. Human engagement is not an athletic competition where there can only be one winner.
• Creating a legacy of potential is more empowering than a legacy of intimidation. Porcupines are not the most respected creatures on earth. Lions, on the other hand, are among the most popular animals. Everyone knows the lion’s potential without seeing its teeth.
• Expressing vulnerability is strength. When I start a tough conversation by stating how I grew into my perspective, people are more willing to listen. In the past, I stated my viewpoint as fact rather than experience. Leading with vulnerability suggests that you are not trying to win. Instead, you are trying to be understood.
• Asking questions that do not interrogate keeps communication open. When you ask people questions to participate in a dialogue, they relax into conversation. However, when you ask people questions that demand them to defend their position, they shut down. When I engage people in a dialogue of understanding, I’m much less likely to lose them.
• People deserve an opportunity to be wrong. Life does not require perfection. We don’t have to fix every incorrect statement or warn against each poor decision. We can allow life to unfold for people. We never have to say, “I told you so.” If an opportunity arises to help someone process a teachable moment, we can do so. Otherwise, we can just be a soft landing for people when life hits them hard.

Open-Heart Surgery

Letting go of the defenses that helped us survive, but no longer serve us, is difficult. I had facilitated the process for others, so I knew the troublesome defenses. I accepted total responsibility to reopen my heart and face the world with authenticity and transparency.

Freud, the psychologist better known for sexual interpretations of the psyche, also informed the field of psychology about human defenses. Human beings use defenses to protect themselves while making their patterns seem normal.

Reaction formation, displacement, and projection are common defenses that can negatively impact any interaction. These defenses had crept into far too many of my relationships.

Reaction Formation

Reaction formation is showing an emotion that is opposite of the feeling you are experiencing inside. For example, vulnerability is frequently transformed into anger, the intent to power through.

When a person feels afraid, they may respond with a display of power to hide their vulnerability. Reaction formation is how love turns into hate so quickly. When love toward a person can no longer be expressed after a breakup, the mind defends itself by converting the feeling to hate.

Once I allowed myself to step into my vulnerability, I no longer needed to form a reaction to hide it.

Displacement

Displaced reactions are directed toward a person who had nothing to do with eliciting the negative emotion. Men are sometimes on the receiving end of women’s displaced emotions. Women are sometimes on the receiving end of men’s displaced emotions.

A wife may react with hypersensitivity toward her husband when he greets her with a pat on the buttocks. Spending all day at the office avoiding her boss’s subtle advances is the real source of her irritation. Since addressing her boss may lead to consequences, she expresses frustration toward her husband.

Men who feel small from not being able to live up to a macho male image may use their wife as a punching bag to instead of addressing their frustration. There can be a danger in unexplored and unaddressed emotions.

Addressing past pain will go a long way in dissolving the defense of displacement. There may always be residual pain from past experiences, but the pain does not dictate your interactions with others.

If I feel like pain from my past is interfering in my interactions, I lean into the vulnerability. I may share that I have experiences that infringe upon my ability to engage in the conversation objectively. If the circumstance does not allow for disclosure, I process the emotions later with a friend. That way, displacement is less likely to happen in the future.

Projection

Many of the wise have noted that the world is a reflection of how we see ourselves. Freud referred to the reflection as projection. The unconscious feelings that we have inside that we do not feel safe to express we identify in others instead.

Instead of admitting that we do not like someone, we create a narrative in our head that they do not like us. Rather than acknowledge that you are interested in someone outside of your committed relationship, you suspect your partner of cheating. Parents often project their desires onto their children and live vicariously through them.

Avoiding projection means being honest with yourself. Every time I see something in someone I don’t like, I ask how that person reminds me of myself. My friend laughed when she asked me why I did not like a particular yoga instructor. I responded that the person was abrasive. Then I admitted, “she’s too much like me. I don’t need any more of that in my life.”

My friend laughed because she’d never heard anyone admit they don’t like someone who reminds them of themselves. Open heart surgery calls forth brutal honesty about self as a replacement for brutal criticism about the world.

An Upgraded Life

I do believe that people see me differently than they did several years ago. The world reflects more of my self-perceptions as I interweave the heart and mind with the intention to dislodge outdated patterns of survival.

Emotions, as vital as they are, should not be your guiding force. They beckon for our attention to resolve what was unaddressed. Emotions do not tell us what is right or wrong. Emotions tell us what was left unattended to.

You live your best life when you stop defending and protecting yourself. You become bigger and stronger when you live with an open heart. Allow yourself to take up the space you need to live your fullest expression. When you do, no one can threaten that space. There is nothing to defend. All you do is grow.

References

Bakari, R. (2019): What Makes Me So Amazing: You Should Be Amazing Too. Medium. what-makes-me-so-amazing-you-should-be-amazing-too-4aab8902e370

Cherry, K. (2019): The Life, Work, and Theories of Sigmund Freud. Very Well Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/sigmund-freud-his-life-work-and-theories-2795860.