You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 51

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi, my strong friends! Hey, I have exciting things coming up. For the first time, I am going to be a speaker at a healing summit. It's coming up at the end of December, so I will be sharing those links as soon as I have it. This healing summit is called coping with trauma and they wanted to have me come and speak about how to help others, especially when defense mechanisms are involved, which is what this podcast episode is going to touch on. 

I'm really excited about having this first opportunity of being a speaker. This was done as an interview style. Eventually I want to develop my skills so I can be a speaker for a Ted talk. Over the years. Ted talks have really helped me in different parts of my life. So I want to be able to give back. 

I believe I've figured out how to break the cycle of emotional pain that's passed down through the generations and also through our different community workers and friends and coworkers. So I want to be able to share this with as many people as possible. So when I get that opportunity to be a speaker on a Ted talk stage, I'm going to be able to help so many people. 

For now, I use my podcast and my online courses. I created three different online courses so far that I offer to both the members of my unshakeable men's program and to my one-on-one program members. The three courses are emotional freedom, unstoppable and defense mechanisms. 

In emotional freedom, that's where I talk all about mindset and the tools for how to find and change your unhelpful thoughts. This puts you into the driver's seat for your emotions and your results. It's the keys to give you unlimited freedom. 

In the unstoppable course, this is where we go over all of the steps of the clarity system, put you into action, creating each of those steps for yourself, getting into the routines so that you're achieving your goals without jeopardizing your mental health. 

Over the 50 podcast episodes, I've given little glimpses to what you can expect in both of those courses. Now, I want to start giving you a glimpse into the third course, which is the defense mechanisms course. This one sheds light on all of the different psychological defense mechanisms that we use and the typical pain that happens behind it. Having the knowledge and skill sets on how to resolve the pain behind defense mechanisms, it's going to help you to be able to truly help people and to have better personal and professional relationships. This really is the foundation of being unshakable around any person and any situation.

Psychological Defense Mechanisms - Friend or Foe?

So let's jump right into it! In this episode, we're going to go over four things:

1. What are psychological defense mechanisms? 

2. Are they actually helping us? 

3. What are ways they might interfere in our life? 

4. And then finally, How to recognize when psychological defense mechanisms are wreaking havoc in your life. 

Why Do People Act That Way?

When we think about defense mechanisms, we tend to think about other people and their actions and consider it to be a bad thing, right? Cause usually, their actions are adversely affecting us in some way, so we always think of defense mechanisms as a bad thing, but they're actually very important and necessary. They are the shield and the sword that our brain creates to keep us safe. 

Specifically cycling logical defense mechanisms are the actions and words that we take to decrease our emotional pain or our fear of emotional pain. We have physical defense mechanisms too, but that's really not my area of expertise. I'll leave that to all of the experts that know how to do that stuff. 

My field of study since middle school has been about the brain. I've been watching people since I was young, trying to understand what makes them tick. I'd see that some people would be happy and some people really were not happy. And some people were so unhappy that they were going down this path of self-destruction. And I could never understand that. 

Why would people go and put themselves in situations that would cause them more harm? 

They always had an option to do something else, but they would choose that. And I never understood that. And then I'd also observe things about myself and start to wonder, "Why did I say that thing?", or, "Why did I act this way?" All of it comes back to our brain. Our brain is the thing that's controlling all of the words that we say and all of the actions that we're taking. Humans are using psychological defense mechanisms all of the time. The actions can have a different amount of severity to them. 

So take, for example, there are people that need to distance themselves from other people. Although when we distance ourselves, it's keeping us safe, but it's also causing us pain of being isolated. Especially if we started off with a lot of people in our life and we systematically eliminated every single person from our life and now we're sitting all alone in all sorts of pain.

Bizarre Behavior

Why would someone choose to do that? There are some people in the world that like to collect things. We saw this one happen a lot in 2020 with toilet paper. Why would people be collecting toilet paper? Well, that's a psychological defense mechanism. Some people collect other things other than your basic necessities. Some have collections of things. Some people collect so much that they're considered hoarders, there's even TV shows dedicated to it and you can tell there's a lot of pain behind that. 

Back when I was in college, I lived next door to a woman that liked to collect trash. She would go and steal trash bags out of our dumpster and bring them into her house and bring them into her van. And I could never understand why would someone want to collect other people's trash and to an extreme. She didn't have much room to move around and the smell was pretty bad. 

Choosing Bad Relationships

I'm sure we've all known somebody or we might've even been that someone that voluntarily got in a relationship with someone that was abusive, that could be either physically abusive or verbally abusive. Maybe we didn't know it at the time, or maybe we did. Maybe all of those red flags were there, but we voluntarily got into the relationship anyway,...and we might've even stayed. 

That in itself is a psychological defense mechanism. It doesn't make sense to us, but that was actually the person's brain trying to keep them safe from something else and now they're in this situation. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense., but when I start sharing with you about the different types of psychological defense mechanisms, all of a sudden you'll be like, "Oh, that's why. There's an underlying pain that if resolved, that person would have never gone and put themselves in that situation." 

And who hasn't experienced either being someone that blames others or blames things or being the person who's getting blamed by somebody? Blaming in itself is a psychological defense mechanism. There's always a pain underlying that blaming. And it's possible to resolve that defense mechanism. 

The human brain is very resourceful. It's created twenty six different types of defense mechanisms. Twenty Six! 

The brain being this complex supercomputer can use a bunch of them all at the same time just to make it more difficult for us to try to figure out. Okay, no, really. It was really just to keep the person safe, but when you're someone on the receiving end of those defense mechanisms and you're trying to figure out, "What are you supposed to do?" Either your defense mechanisms are going to get triggered or if you're trying to understand the other person, it can lead to all sorts of confusion.

We All Do It 

If you've got all of these different defense mechanisms being used all of the same time, do you recognize when your brain is using defense mechanisms to keep you safe?

Let's use an example that all of us have experienced at some point or another. That's our inner critic. Oh, our inner critic. We just love that little critter, don't we? One that wants to hold us back from everything in the world. So let's imagine there's something that you always wanted to do. And right when you're about to do it, your inner critic starts screaming at you saying, "No, no, don't do it! You'll look stupid!", or maybe it's saying, "No, don't do it. You'll hurt someone else's feelings." 

Now I'm not talking about a mean action. You're not like intentionally hurting anybody. This is you just being you. It could be something as simple as raising your hand in a room full of people. Just to ask a question for clarification, but your inner critic doesn't let you do it. Why? Well looking stupid or worrying about making someone else feel bad, might seem like the answer, but that's just a surface level answer.

What’s Really Behind It

There's something else more primal going on. Psychological defense mechanisms are there to help keep us alive. It's the words and the actions that we take to protect ourselves from emotional pain or fear of emotional pain. There's always some primal root cause behind every psychological defense mechanism. 

If we look at it at the most primal instinct, the root cause always comes down to two things. 

1. The loss of love. 

2. The loss of status, so status meaning you're important. 

To help see the dynamics of this, let's picture old cave man times. I like to do this one because in the current world, everything is just so noisy and cluttered. There's buildings, there's tons of people. It's hard to see everything that's happening because there's so much of it. But when we strip it down to the most basic of just imagining the old plains and the old caves and you got the caveman and we have one tribe. Love and status become very important for your survival. 

You don't have a whole lot of extras available to yourself as far as resources of protection and food and shelter. What you have is pretty much so right there with the tribe. You could try to go off on your own and you could probably survive. But the likelihood of it is so much stronger if you stay with your tribe. 

So being lovable is really important because if you're not lovable to everybody else that's in the tribe, they might boot you out and you're going to be on your own. Your chance of survival might go down. Status is also important. If you're not important and valuable to the tribe, then your status goes down. If there's only so much resources to go around, you risk, back in caveman times, getting ejected from the tribe because there's just not enough for you or you just get the very last little bits of scraps.

So our brain is still wired in this primal way. We have this need to belong to a tribe. In order to be part of that tribe, we want to be lovable and our status is important. We want to be important and valuable. If we don't have those things, then we risk not being part of the tribe. 

Now the number of tribes that were involved in a modern day is limitless and the ability to survive on our own to have all of our own resources is also limitless. Some of the tribes that you might be involved in could be in your own home. It could be your family, your extended family, your friends, your work associates. It could be school. It might be social. At any one time, you can be in multiple tribes. Remember the whole point in our primal brain of having a tribe, being a part of it is to increase the survival.

That here's the thing: It's totally possible to survive on your own in this world. 

It doesn't always feel good. It feels a lot better to be around someone else and to enjoy their company, but we don't necessarily need them for our own love and for our own importance. We think that we do. We give all of that to them. We're always looking to other people to fill up our love cup, to fill up our value cup so that we feel like we're included in the tribe with them. 

Having Your Own Back

But it's possible for you to fill up your own love cup, your own value cup, to have all of the love and the status that you need for yourself and you can develop yourself to be able to have all of the resources that you need. 

That ends up being the biggest opportunity for personal growth ever. But when we have not gone down that path of personal growth to try to develop that skill set, we're still using our psychological defense mechanisms most of the time and truth be told, even when you are on that long journey of personal growth, your psychological defense mechanisms are still going to be there with you and you just become more aware of them and you can manage it a lot better. 

Most of the time, we're not even aware that we're using these. They feel so natural and automatic that we don't even recognize them for what they are. What we do recognize is other people's actions and their words. We're always sensing things in the world. We're using our eyes and looking out and seeing things we're using our ears and hearing, but to observe ourselves that's a little bit harder, like we would actually have to record ourselves. 

Record video or audio, or look at ourselves in the mirror to see our own actions because once it goes away from us, we're not really aware of it. When we're not actively looking at our own selves, you know, recording ourselves or looking in the mirror or whatever, the mirror that's out there in the world for us is other people's actions and reactions to us.

Basically their defense mechanisms can be a big clue for how we're showing up in the world. Now, does that mean that their defense mechanisms are a hundred percent happening because of us? No, of course not. We are not the only thing in their life. 

Observe the Triggers

All of us carry stuff from our past with us and we have different triggers in the environment and other people around us that can bring those defense mechanisms up to the surface. However, when you see other people starting to distance themselves from you or when there are a lot of those defense mechanisms, this is going to be a good indicator that there's something to look for. And if you feel some of your defense mechanisms kicking in, because some of them really are unpleasant, it's not fun to have some of our defense mechanisms happening. We can be aware of those.

So when we recognize that we've been triggered or that other people are being triggered, we know that's pretty unpleasant. That's when we know that we can do something. If we don't, then we end up just triggering each other back and forth. It becomes that unending cycle of emotional pain that gets in the way for both sides to be able to enjoy each other's company. 

Breaking the Cycle

So how do you make this cycle stop? The most important thing: 

Focus on the pain, not the actions. 

I'm going to say that one again: Focus on the pain, not the actions. 

The reason why is that if we can resolve the pain, there will be no need for the defense mechanism. If you don't have a defense mechanism going off, you're not going to trigger someone else's defense mechanism. If the other person had pain and their pain is resolved, they're not going to have the defense mechanism that adversely impacts you. We can just be humans without defense mechanisms that are enjoying each other's company. 

There's three steps on being able to do this:

1. The first is to be able to recognize that a defense mechanism is actually happening. To recognize it for what it is. 

This is not focusing on the actions. This is going, "Oh, those actions are this kind of defense mechanism." Part of recognizing the defense mechanism is also understanding the typical pain that causes that type of defense mechanism. 

So when we see those person's actions, we can think, "Ah, this defense mechanism got triggered in them. It's usually caused by this", right? That's a lot different than focusing on, "Oh, that person just said these words and these words in that person's such a jerk." Something totally different. It's just seeing it for what it is. It's this kind of defense mechanism usually caused by this kind of pain.

2. The next big thing is how do you actually dissolve it? 

So the dissolving, it is the approach that you take once you've recognized that the defense mechanism has been kicked off. So imagine like you're working at an animal rescue and in comes a cage with a little bear cub and it has a big splinter in its paw. What kind of approach would you take? It's like, it's cute. You want to help it, but you also know this little bear cub has teeth and claws. So what approach would you take to try to help that little bear without you getting hurt? So the approach is very important. How you approach the bear, or in real life, the other person. This will make all the difference in the world on whether you dissolve the tension or if you trigger more defense mechanisms. 

3. The third step of course is to resolve the pain itself. 

With the bear, It's, you know, simple as taking out the thorn. Now we know humans, it's a more than just a thorn that we're taking out. These are emotional pains that people are having. So how is it that you help someone to resolve their pain, or if you're the one that was having the pain, how do you help yourself to resolve that pain? 

I want to offer you a free guide on how to help someone without triggering their defense mechanisms. It goes over these three steps that I just talked about: How to recognize it and know the typical pain behind it, how to dissolve it, and how to resolve it. This guide is also going to list out the twenty six different types of defense mechanisms. You can find that downloadable free guide on my home page at myfreedomgrove.com.

Helpful Psychological Defense Mechanisms

Now it's time to take a look at your own life and decide, "Are defense mechanisms helping you, interfering with your life, or wreaking havoc?”

These can be your defense mechanisms or other people's defense mechanisms. Now, when is it possible that they could actually be helpful? Well, defense mechanisms are there to help keep you safe, right? Well, there's two that I want to share with you. Now, the twenty-six defense mechanisms are broken up into six different categories: 

This first one that I want to share with you comes from the self control category. 

That's where we're trying to control our own selves so that we can feel a lot better. This one specific one is on routines. This is establishing and keeping a routine. The typical pain behind this one is an unpredictable world. So if the world is unpredictable and it's changing, or your life has changed from something that was very structured, say a work routine or a school routine and now you're working from home or you're not working at all, or you're doing school from home. Your routine has been completely changed. And the world definitely right now seems pretty unpredictable. 

So our brain wants to try to help us out. A psychological defense mechanism is routines. It's creating your own routine. This can be very, very helpful. This is also helpful when you go out on vacation and so vacation, you're away from all of your regular routines. You might start to have some emotional pain that goes along with that. And thinking that, "If I don't do all of the right things, I'm not going to be lovable. I'm not going to be a good person. I won't look like I have my act altogether. People are going to think bad things about me." All of that goes back to fear of loss of love and status. Routines are one way that our brain helps us to deal with that type of thing. 

One of the other categories is shame shifting. 

There's about six different defense mechanisms in this one, including two different types of narcissism: 

• Healthy narcissism 
• Defensive narcissism.

Since we're talking about when our defense mechanisms are helpful, we're going to talk about healthy narcissism. The typical pain behind this defense mechanism is a fluctuating amount of self love and self value. So how someone can use their defense mechanism to counter out this and keep themselves safe, is doing little things like positive affirmations or keeping a Winlog with all of their different accomplishments. Even small ones, doesn't have to be big huge ones.

Talking in the mirror to themselves with those affirmations or with those wins or saying to themselves what they're grateful about. What are your individual strengths? All of that is very helpful. I'm sure it's probably going to come to a surprise to many people to know that those things are considered a defense mechanism and that it's specifically called healthy narcissism, but it is. 

When Defense Mechanisms Interfere with Life

One of the other categories of defense mechanism is called persuasive control. This one you may not realize is a way of being nice and helpful as a way of trying to control or influence other people to do what you want them to do. 

One of the specifics is called "overly loving". This is where someone is intentionally doing things for other people. This goes beyond people-pleasing. This is a little bit different. This is where you’re doing tasks for the other people that they could have been able to do themselves, or maybe they were struggling. 

So this person jumps in as doing the extra stuff. So this could be things like laundry or some of the extra work tasks or doing some favors for people, maybe giving people money. The typical pain behind this is that the person was not feeling important to the other person. So if they do things for the other person, then hopefully they're getting some attention from that person. 

So how this interferes though, this interferes in two ways. It interferes with the person who's doing all of these tasks and that they start to feel resentment after a while, because they might find that they're doing all of these tasks, but they're not actually getting the attention from the other person. 

They might start to feel some resentment towards them, or even some of their own overwhelmed from having too many activities on their plate. How this interferes in the other person's life is it has taken away their opportunity for personal growth. 

Every human has their own set of responsibilities. And sometimes, we have to struggle in order for us to figure out what's working for us and what's not working. And when things aren't working, then we can do experiments on how to change that. So a person that had too much on their plate might figure out what's wasteful and they're,...they're not going to do those activities anymore or they figure out another way of doing it that works within their own schedule or in an easier, faster way. 

If someone else has come in and is doing those activities for you, then you don't have that opportunity to experience the discomfort and to figure out how to do these things. This might be emotional growth. This might be capability growth. 

All of that growth is available, but if someone else has come taking those things away from you, you don't have that opportunity. You don't have a need to be able to develop that. And later on, when you need to have that capability, you're not going to have it. You might also start to feel resentment towards the person who was doing this stuff for you thinking that, that other person thinks that you're not capable of doing it or that they're, um, getting too nosy or getting too much into your business. So it can definitely interfere in each of those person's lives and also interfere within the relationship itself. 

Recognizing Psychological Defense Mechanisms Wreaking Havoc

Now, when can defense mechanisms wreak havoc on your life? 

So remember I said, there's twenty six different defense mechanisms. I'm not going over all of them in this podcast, but what I'm going to share with this one for wreaking havoc comes from the shame shifting category. This specific one is blaming. With blaming a person we'll shift the focus from the actual problem onto a different person or onto a different thing. This essentially starts a million little fires everywhere else because now it seems like there's tons of problems everywhere. Everything needs to be addressed. 

The typical pain behind this is that the individual who this started with who started the blaming had something in their personal life that was their responsibility to try to figure out how to resolve. So they had their own problem to try to resolve, but they didn't want to take responsibility for trying to solve it because it involved a lot of personal growth or emotional growth. They might've had thoughts like, "I don't know how to do it", or, "Someone in my life never taught me how to do it." So instead they will start blaming everybody else or other things. 

Where I see this happen a lot is when people get feedback. So feedback is hard to hear. Feedback usually means that there was something that you didn't do, right. Some people take it very personal, like it's a personal attack on them and their character. Feedback is usually just that there was something in your process, how you did something that didn't work and you might not have known what the process was or you didn't know how to do that specific part of the process.

It triggers the defense mechanism. And instead of taking responsibility and acknowledging, "Yeah, I didn't know how to do that", or, "Yes, I made a mistake at that spot." Blaming starts to happen instead. Blaming the person who delivered the feedback or blaming other things in life that contributed to why that part didn't work. All of it is to shift the shame away from the original person. The shame just being that you didn't know how to do it or that you had made a mistake or the way that you did it the first time just didn't work.

 How this starts to wreak havoc in someone's life is that it can cause a lot of resentment to the other people that are getting blamed because they may not have had anything to do with this one particular problem that actually happened. There can be resentment from the person who actually delivered the feedback. They might've been trying to be helpful and instead, they got to feel the defense mechanism coming right back at them. 

There can also be collateral damage. That could be extra work that happens. All of these other problems that have now been identified because of the blaming might start a whole cycle of people trying to resolve all of those problems that might not have ever needed to be resolved that didn't need the attention at that point. This might also cause challenges for other people's mental health. They might become collateral damage or there might be damaged from not addressing the original problem itself. 

I'm going to share one of my personal examples of when my blaming defense mechanism caused collateral damage in my life. And this might not seem like what you'd expect, but I had a dripping sink. I had a dripping sink faucet that I ignored for the longest time because it was kicking at my fears that I didn't know how to fix the sink and I was blaming everything inside.

I was blaming the other people in my house. I was blaming the location where I live, that I wouldn't be able to get a plumber. I was blaming my work thinking that they wouldn't let me have time off to try to meet with a plumber. I was blaming financial things like, you know, I had to spend money on these other things. I couldn't spend money on taking care of a sink. I was blaming my dogs because all of a sudden the water damage that happened as a result of not taking care of this dripping sink, it had dripped onto my floors and warped my wooden floors and then my dogs smelled it and started digging at it and I had this big, huge hole. 

So more collateral damage in that now I had a floor that had damage. All of it coming back to the original problem, which was, I didn't know how to fix the sink. I didn't know how to even diagnose the problem. That was just my own limitation that I can overcome. There are so many YouTube videos out there. There's so much research that can be done on the internet. It's possible for us to develop our skills to be able to figure all of this stuff out. 

Instead I spun for probably, I think it was at least nine months. I spun for like nine months in my defense mechanisms instead of dealing with the original problem, which was my inability or my lack of knowledge on how to fix the sink. So when I finally decided that I would take responsibility and start to address this, I did my research. I figured it all out and it came down to a $1 part. It was a little plastic ring that needed to get replaced and it was something that I was completely capable of doing.

But I had allowed my brain to kick in all of my psychological defense mechanisms and cause all of this collateral damage instead. My collateral damage wasn't just the floor, it was the increased tensions within all of my relationships at home and at work plus with myself. 

So when you're looking around at your life or your home, are you seeing where psychological defense mechanisms might be wreaking havoc? 

Are they your defense mechanisms, other people's defense mechanisms, or maybe it's both? 

Learning to Recognize When It is Happening

I can help you with all of that. The defense mechanisms course goes into detail on all twenty-six of the different types of defense mechanisms so that you can identify that that's even what's happening. You'll then get to learn about the typical pain that's behind each of those because when you can focus on the pain, not the actions, you're going to be able to resolve the pain and the defense mechanisms won't even be happening anymore.

The course goes into how you can actually approach someone safely. How to determine if they're ready, willing, and able and how to keep them safe. It goes into how you can set and keep healthy boundaries for yourself so that you keep yourself safe. And then finally, how you can actually resolve the pain and get complete. 

This course is available in both the individual one-on-one program and the unshakable men group program. It's great to have the combo of the course and the coaching. Having the course gives you all of the background knowledge, the step-by-step instructions so you can see the whole dynamics of it. It also has self guided exercises and then having the coaching that goes with it. This helps it to be more applicable to your exact life. 

You'll be able to bring your exact situations to me. We'll be able to look at this together, come up with a plan for your first experiment. You go out in the world, you do your experiment, you come back and then we do a lessons learned on how that worked out and what adjustments you would want to make for your next experiment.

 Make sure to download the free resource guide, how to help someone without triggering their defense mechanisms. It's available on my homepage. That's at www.myfreedomgrove.com. Scroll down the home screen. You'll be able to find it, click on that, and you can download it right away. 

Once you start understanding defense mechanisms and seeing them for what they are, you're gonna be surprised. Everywhere you look, you're going to see them in play. You're going to be so surprised. It's like a different take on life. And then once you understand the typical pain behind it, your viewpoint on the world softens up a bit. Your approach to other people becomes so much more compassionate.

The healing starts to happen right away. I think the more people that can understand this, that can have this knowledge to have this viewpoint on the world, the better we're going to be. We're going to be able to restore our relationships, bring the harmony back into the world. I think we can definitely use a lot of that right now. 

My friends. I hope that you have a safe week. Get out there, find a bunch of unexpected joy, enjoy the holiday season. All right. I will talk with you more next week. Have a good one! Bye bye.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove podcast. I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out unshakable men and unshakable women. The unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, the coaching and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to myfreedomgrove.com/work with me. I can't wait to see you there.