Defense Mechanisms: How the Ego Keeps You Stuck (Part 2 From The Eli Recht Series)

Eli Recht

Projection basically means that we’re externalizing what’s coming from inside. So we’re attributing something to others that actually belongs to us. So for example, projection could be like judging or criticizing others for a quality that we can’t accept in ourselves. We’re judgmental ourselves, but we can’t tolerate the fact that we’re judgmental, so we judge others who are judgmental. That’s projection.

Lorne Brown

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm, and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when you remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

This is a special episode on the Coherence Code Podcast because it’s from a webinar series called Anatomy of the Ego with Eli Recht, where we focus directly on psychological defense mechanisms and their role in maintaining suffering. And I believe it’s really aligned with what we talk about on the Coherence Code Podcast. So I wanted to share it with you guys as well. I think if you watch this on YouTube on the Coherence Code Podcast YouTube channel, you’ll get even more out of it because he has slides, but you can benefit from just listening as well. I hope you enjoy. So as I was mentioning, last year in 2025, Eli guided us through a five-part Modern Mind, Timeless Truth series, and there we explored the intersection of psychology, spirituality, suffering, healing, and awakening. And this year in 2026, we’re continuing that journey with a four-part Anatomy of the Ego series.

So in the first webinar, Eli introduced the ego as a lens of perception rooted in separation and explored how it contributes to what he called the cycle of suffering. Great slides went with that as well. In that webinar, he discussed how unawareness can lead to false beliefs, fear, emotional suppression, and the patterns that keep us stuck. And one of the key takeaways was that while pain may be inevitable, suffering often arises through our resistance to what is. So suffering is optional. Today, my understanding is we’re going to take a deeper dive into one of the ego’s primary tools in that cycle of suffering that he shared, called defensiveness. And he’s going to help us understand what psychological defense mechanisms are, why they develop, how they show up in everyday life, and how awareness and surrender can help us move beyond them.

So Eli, welcome back. We’re grateful to have you and we’re looking forward to today’s presentation.

Eli Recht

Thank you so much, Lorne. That was a beautiful intro and a nice recap too. There’s a lot we can talk about today, so I’m going to dive right in. And like Lorne said, we’re going to be continuing our Anatomy of the Ego series. This is going to be part two, where we continue to dissect the ego. And today we’re going to focus on the defensiveness or the defense mechanisms part of the ego. It’s not really a fun topic, but it’s important if we want to transcend ego and abide in spirit. So basically, as Lorne said, there are three sections we’re going to try to cover today. Number one, defining and exploring the defense mechanisms. Number two, talking about specific examples so we can really understand and sink our teeth into the concept. And number three, some practical solutions on how we can surrender them. So with that, I’m going to start with a recap of the last one and I’m going to share my slides again.

You’ll find these slides familiar from last time. Recap of webinar six, which was Anatomy of the Ego series part one. The ego has three basic components working together as one egoic process. Obviously, it’s not really possible to split up these components. It’s really just one process, but it’s helpful to draw the pieces out in order to be able to see, understand, and transcend ego. So the three basic components are number one, the false beliefs, which is the ego identity. You could call that the innermost core of the ego or the ego itself. And that occurs on the mental level or the causal dimension. Number two, you’ve got the subconscious feelings, which is also known as karma, karmic energy, unspent energy, and I call that the food or the fuel of the ego. And rather than being the innermost core, it’s in the center, on the heart level or the energetic dimension.

And the third component is defense mechanisms, which we’re going to talk about today, which spiritually is also known as attachment and resistance. And that’s sort of the outermost wall of the ego, and that happens on the body level or the physical dimension. And together, these are the source of suffering and they create the cycle that veils or overshadows our true nature as conscious awareness, which prevents awakening or self-realization. And in the center you can see the ego, that swirling darkness. But of course, in the very center, there’s that star, which is that spark of divinity, that spark of true nature that’s always there and can never be touched or tarnished. We’re going to move on. That’s my recap, but there’s going to be more recap as we go. So zooming in on just the defense mechanisms piece, what are defense mechanisms?

In a nutshell, I like how Pamela Wilson, a spiritual teacher, describes them as the ego’s bodyguards. Defenses are the tools that the ego uses, the actions that it takes in order to fortify and reinforce itself to create a false sense of stability and solidity for the ego. Defenses are used to prop up the ego and protect it so that it feels real and in control, which is ultimately an illusion. And we covered briefly in the last webinar how it’s an illusion. It feels real, it’s very real in experience, but it’s not true nature and therefore it’s ultimately illusion. So of course the nature of ego is outward facing. It focuses on the world and others, on the body, on comparisons, on material possessions, external motivations, things like that. And the defense mechanisms are the most external or outward-facing aspect of the ego.

So you could say they’re the ego’s outer shell, and this is why I thought it would be a good way to start this dissection of the ego. We’re going to move from out to in over the next few webinars. And I wanted to do it in this way because that’s how I unraveled it. And that’s also, I think, a nice sort of linear progression because the defense mechanisms are usually the ones that we encounter. It’s the part of the ego that’s most visible. So I thought that would be a good place to start. And of course, even though the ego is fundamentally mental, and the innermost core starts with the false beliefs on the mental level, the ego has its roots in all three dimensions, the body, heart, and the mind, which we just covered, but not the soul.

And that’s an important point. And the defense mechanisms are the ego’s roots in the body. So they’re action based, and action could mean inner or outer action. Inner action meaning psychological action, we’re taking action internally, or outer action meaning physical action on the environment. And the center of the body is the gut, which is sort of around the third chakra. And the gut is the center of willpower where action originates. So defenses end up utilizing willpower. The ego co-opts the center of will to do its bidding and to deploy defenses, and that stems from attachment to the body and identity with the body. And we’re going to get more into the willpower in a bit. The more official mainstream definition is that defense mechanisms are the psychological tools that the ego uses to ward off uncomfortable or disagreeable stimuli from our conscious awareness. And that stimuli can include anything from sensations, emotions, feelings, perceptions, even realizations and information.

And I lump all those stimuli together into what I generally call subconscious feelings, or karma when it’s been suppressed. And that’s what we’re going to talk about more fully in the next webinar. So when the ego pushes the stimuli away with the defense, it actually traps these energies in the subconscious, which then veils the consciousness or contributes to the veiling of consciousness and prevents self-realization. And by pushing these energies out of our awareness, we think we’re getting rid of them, right? Something comes in, it’s uncomfortable, we don’t like it, we push it away, we think we’ve gotten rid of it, but the reality is we’re just storing it for later in our subconscious mind, in the body, and we will have to reckon with it at some point in the future, which is why defenses lead to suffering. And I love this quote from Neale Donald Walsch, which I’ve edited a little bit for our purposes: “What you resist persists, and what you face, you erase.” So what you resist persists, just what I was saying.

Something comes in, you’re resisting it, you think you’ve gotten rid of it, but you’ve actually just stored it for later. So it persists. It’s going to come back with an equal and opposite force. You pushed it away with a certain amount of force. That energy’s going to come back with that same amount of force. But if you allow it to come into your consciousness and let it flow through, it can express itself, it can dissolve, and it gets erased. So what you face, you erase. So ultimately there are three criteria for a defense. And this is really important because defenses are totally subjective and we can’t always determine what’s a defense from the outside in. So here are three basic criteria to help people remember what it is. Number one, it’s employed to maintain ego identity. Number two, it’s employed to avoid feelings, which are energies or stimuli that come with intelligent information about reality.

And number three, it’s employed subconsciously, or at least partly subconsciously. And we talked about last time how the ego’s nature is unawareness. So these defense mechanisms are being employed in an unaware state. They’re subconscious. In spiritual terminology, defense mechanisms are basically the same as attachment and resistance, like I said, which is also sometimes known as indulgence or avoidance, attraction and repulsion. And attachment and resistance are two sides of the same coin. So if we’re attaching to something, we’re resisting its opposite. And if we’re resisting something, we’re attaching to its opposite. And the reason we cling to certain things is because the ego labels them as good. And the reason we repel certain things is because the ego labels them as bad, which are false beliefs. Good versus bad is a false belief. And that’s how you can see that the false belief leads to these defenses.

So how and what we attach to and resist comes from what we believe, thereby reinforcing our own self-created mental identity, which is all for the purpose of avoiding reality or avoiding truth, capital R, capital T, due to fear or lack of trust in truth, which ultimately stems from this fundamental belief that the ego has that it’s separate. And everyone labels good and bad differently based on their past experiences and conditioning and what they were taught. So for example, and maybe this is a silly example, but it hopefully illustrates the point, let’s say you had a car accident and it happened to be in a blue car. Well, now you’re going to resist blue cars, right? Consciously, you may not resist a blue car, but subconsciously, every time you see a blue car, there may be something in you that shows up. Or if your first car was white and you loved it, now you attach to white cars.

So this is how these things start. These beliefs start and then these defenses get deployed in order to maintain those beliefs. Another example: if every time you felt joy, Mom told you that you were being naughty, now you’re going to resist joy because you labeled it bad. But if every time you felt sad, you got attention, now you attach to sad because it’s been labeled good. And so everybody has their own good and bad and therefore their own defenses. But one caveat here that I know we talked about before, but I want to mention again because a lot of people get confused on this point, is that attachment and resistance is not preference. It’s different. Having a preference is more like having a want, whereas having an attachment or a resistance is more like a need. Even though that need might be a false belief, we believe that it’s a need, and it feels more like a need.

So having preferences is not egoic, it’s not defensive, and they don’t lead to suffering as long as we can be okay if we don’t get what we want. And the same goes for healthy boundaries. This is also one that people mistake. Even though setting a boundary, a psychological boundary, can create a relative or relational separation or division, it doesn’t create a separation on the level of identity, because a healthy boundary is created consciously, not unconsciously. And so a healthy boundary is not egoic and it’s not defensive. And that’s an important point. The root of all defenses is control or constriction. These are the primary actions of the ego. The ego does a lot of things, but when it all boils down to it at the very core, control and constriction are the two basic actions that the ego uses. So control would be the primary external action, manipulating the environment, and constriction would be the primary internal action, blocking the flow of energy by constricting the nervous system, which is a form of inner control, which then creates subconscious feelings.

And so anything can be a defense if it’s used to block the flow of energy or it’s used to avoid feelings or stimuli, but ultimately it always comes down to these two. All other defenses are built on these two. And I wanted to depict the defenses as a maze of barriers and walls, which you can see here on the slide, that are blocking the flow of energy, right? The energy can’t really flow smoothly. It gets shunted through these walls and barriers because of the defenses, right? And then that reifies the illusion of separateness. So if you look at the body, the maze gives you this feeling of separation, and the energy channels are constricted, and then in the heart dimension, the energy can’t flow. And we’re going to zoom in on this maze even more in the next slide. Defensiveness is an internal process because it originates from the identity on the mind level, but it obviously can be activated externally and it can bleed into the external.

And so the more the defense attempts to manipulate or control the external world, the more severe it is. And in psychology, we call that a primitive defense. The less it attempts to manipulate and control the external world, the less severe it is. And we call that a mature defense in psychology. And of course there’s a spectrum from most severe, most primitive, to least severe, most mature. On one side, there’s maybe intense blocking of the flow of energy and extreme action externally. On the other side, there’s just blocking some flow of energy and it’s just an internal process. We’re not actually manipulating or trying to control the environment. We’re just doing something internally. And this spectrum from primitive to mature is a good indicator overall of how dense or thin an ego is. And some specific defenses generally fall in one camp, but most strategies can manifest across the entire spectrum in different ways.

So for example, just to bring it down to earth a little, the most primitive version of control would be like kidnapping someone in order to get your way. The most mature version of control would just be like telling someone to stop doing something or to stop acting a certain way because it hurts your feelings. Or if we take dissociation, the most primitive version of dissociation would be having multiple split personalities. You’ve dissociated these different parts of yourself into distinct personalities that don’t talk and don’t know of one another’s existence, which, believe it or not, does happen. And the most mature version of dissociation would be like just spacing out. You just dissociate a little bit. And then you have things like splitting, which is sort of like black-and-white thinking or black-and-white acting, which is an example of a defense that’s almost always primitive because it’s so inflexible.

And then you have things like humor, which is an example of a defense that’s almost always mature because it brings light. And we can talk more about all of these, but I want to say that just having a couple of severe defenses is not a statement on the density of a person’s ego, in case you’re saying to yourself, “Oh no, I do that.” That doesn’t mean that your ego is super dense. You want to take in the overall defensive picture. There’s a lot that goes into it, but these can be good indicators of where someone’s at, how conscious a person is. This is just the final point: defenses usually get turned into outer action, where we resist or attach to outer things. We control things externally, but the real thing that we’re attaching to, resisting, and controlling is our inner state.

It’s our feelings or our thoughts. Those show up in response to an external situation. So we think, right, okay, this person did this to me, therefore I’m going to resist. Believe it or not, we’re not actually resisting the thing that that person did to us. We’re resisting the feeling that arose in us or the thought that arose in us as a result of that person doing something to us. That’s why we defend. It’s an illusion that the external world causes suffering. We have to resolve these defenses internally. And even with our thoughts and beliefs, the ego actually originates in the heart because of a blocked heart. So it all ultimately comes back to the heart. We defend to avoid the heart. That’s the bottom line. And of course, it doesn’t mean that we can’t act. We still have to make decisions and take action in life.

We just want to act from clarity and calmness and love and wisdom rather than defensiveness and reactivity and fear and contraction.

Okay. So why do defenses exist? This is the next question that I get a lot. Other than the reasons I already mentioned, which are to maintain ego identity and to avoid feelings, they exist because they’re useful and they have value. And I like to say that if something didn’t have value, it wouldn’t exist. This is all happening in divine mind. And so if it exists, it’s because it has value. It plays a role in this creation, in life. What do I mean by they have value? Sometimes we need them to get through the day or through a particular situation. If a circumstance is too heavy to experience, if we can’t take on the full emotional or psychological impact of an experience, we can use a defense mechanism to block it from our consciousness temporarily. So a good example I like to use is if you’re at work and your doctor calls you with test results that point to a really serious diagnosis, if you can’t tolerate that, you may fall apart right then and there without a defense.

So you make a quick decision, unconsciously, subconsciously, or at least partly subconsciously, to deploy a defense mechanism like compartmentalization, right? We’re just going to put that over there for now. Or suppression: we push it down. Or denial: this isn’t actually happening, I didn’t have that phone conversation. That ensures that you can get through the rest of your workday and do your tasks and drive home safely and keep it together. But once you get home from work, and this is easier said than done, the ideal would be that then you have time to process the test results and the call from your doctor, and then you can feel your feelings and you can take in the information about reality, about what might be happening in your body, and you can release that energy and then you can move forward with clarity. So this is one example of how a defense mechanism is actually really useful and valuable, but the important thing is that we use them temporarily, not permanently.

Defenses are designed for the short term, not the long term. If we maintain them long term, it causes a lot of problems due to the energetic buildup in the subconscious, in the body, and in the nervous system, and it can create a whole swath of issues, pretty much anything you can think of, like mental illness, emotional dysregulation, anxiety, suffering, trauma, physical health challenges, relationship issues. Basically, it can damage every aspect of your life. And that’s why this topic is so important, because they can really wreak a lot of havoc on our system and on our lives if we don’t let them go when it’s time to let them go.

Lorne Brown

Eli, I’ll add, I think in the webinar before this, there was a lot of discussion around how there’s an external trigger, but the suffering inside of you is not the trigger. It’s what was already inside of you, and that’s what you get to face and accept.

Eli Recht

That’s right. And—

Lorne Brown

If you resist it, you feed it. And I think that came around the quote, “Pain is inevitable.” So there’s this uncomfortable hurt or feeling. Suffering is optional. That’s when you start to judge it, analyze it, say it’s good, bad, it should or should not be this way. And so you’re not talking about spiritual bypass or resignation.

Eli Recht

No.

Lorne Brown

You’re talking about bringing the awareness to the feeling so it can move through you and be released, versus resisting the feeling so it gets stuck in your tissues.

Eli Recht

Yes. It doesn’t mean you have to like it. It doesn’t mean you have to want it or call it forth or try to keep it around. You don’t have to, but the wise thing is to open up around it and just let it exist and allow it to express itself. And you’re exactly right, Lorne, that the external world can trigger something in us, but it doesn’t create it. We created it through our own attachment and resistance, through our own false beliefs. We created it and stored it there. The external world is just serving as a mirror to show us what’s inside of us. And so if the external world activates our stuff or triggers us, you could actually see that as a gift, as a benevolent thing, that life is actually trying to help us by showing us what’s being activated inside so that we can clear it and find peace and wake up.

How do defenses originate? This is really important, and you’ll see why when we get to the solutions, hopefully. So defenses usually originate when we’re really young, as the ego’s being built or formed, which is why we don’t realize that we have defenses until we start suffering or until they get pointed out to us later in life. So they actually start as important, healthy, creative, and adaptive ways to protect ourselves psychologically. So for example, let’s say there’s a toddler, right? Every toddler has a bunch of needs and desires, right? They’ve got that id that Freud talks about, the raw instinctual drives. They need sleep, they need food, they need shelter, they need eliminating, nurturing, play, socializing, you name it. But if the caregiver is unpredictable and sometimes gets emotionally volatile, the child is going to realize that expressing their needs triggers anger in the caregiver or withdrawal in the caregiver, causing the child’s nervous system to dysregulate.

And then a feeling-belief is going to arise, like “I’m unsafe” or “I’m bad.” It’s going to show up in the child. But this might not be a cognitive thought or a belief. It may be visceral, somatic, emotional, right? It’s subconscious, but the child is going to attach to safety and resist unsafety or insecurity, and then the child quickly suppresses its need using a defense. And we can talk about all the different ways it can do that in order to maintain peace and feel safe. And it figures, maybe not consciously, but subconsciously, if I’m small and quiet, then I’m protected and I’ll get what I need, because then my caregiver won’t be reactive. They won’t withdraw or they won’t attack me. Or: I must be the problem, I’m bad, so I should not have needs. So they suppress their needs. The existential fear is avoided, which isn’t ideal, but for the child, it’s better than the alternative.

And it may not be aware of this mechanism, but it works, so the defense gets perpetuated and the child carries it into adulthood without realizing it. And this is just one of infinite examples of how defenses can originate. So the point I want to make about this is that defenses are universally human. Just as it’s universally human to have an ego, we need defenses until we don’t. They’re part of our survival mechanism and they’re encoded in the collective unconscious. We instinctively know how to create them and use them. And the issue is not the defenses, it’s whether we can release them when they’re no longer needed, right? Kids tend to need defenses. It’s not a bad thing, because as kids, we’re very helpless, we’re at the mercy of adults. So we build this toolbox of defenses in order to keep us sane and keep us going. And then we grow up and we’re like, “Whoa, where did all this subconscious trauma come from?” It’s because we defended, which was what we needed to do.

It was the wise thing. I call it innocent wisdom in little kids. But then our world doesn’t teach us how to release or transcend these defenses when it’s time, because most adults in our world don’t understand this process themselves. But at some point we’ll have to pivot and change our tools or let go of them completely. It’s sort of like an initiation that all humans have to go through, or so it seems.

And so all of this to say that there’s no shame or judgment in having defenses. We want to have compassion and understanding for them, and we actually need compassion, I believe, in order to work through them. And then the last thing I want to say here is each culture and family and individual is going to have their own unique set of defenses. We all have our own toolbox, which is shaped by our caregivers, our role models, our culture, our temperament, our personality, our experiences, our stress, our environment, all that. So, next slide. We’re zooming in even more into the maze. And hopefully everyone can see these words. They’re not too small, but these are some of the most common specific ways that we defend, that we attach to separateness, that we resist oneness, that we fortify the ego and avoid awakening. And you can see that this is a close-up of the body with the maze of walls and barriers blocking the flow of heart energy and strengthening division and duality.

So you can see that the heart isn’t able to flow into all the channels. It can only go through a few. And so just for reference, the closer the word is to the edges of the screen, generally the more primitive and severe the defense is. The closer to the center the word is, the more mature and internal and less harmful the defense generally is. It’s impossible to really make that mathematical, but I just wanted to give a little sense of it visually there. And again, before we dive in, I’d like to say that not everything right off the bat is a defense, like humor. It depends on whether we’re using it to avoid something. So the context is critical. Humor can be a wonderful thing. We’re not necessarily defending against something, but if we’re using it to avoid something, then it’s a defense. Same with sex, same with meditation, same with eating food.

These are all wonderful, beautiful things in life, but are we using them to avoid something? That’s the key. Ego isn’t good or bad. It’s just useful until it’s not.

Lorne Brown

How many do you think we’ll cover today? That way we—

Eli Recht

I don’t know. I don’t know.

Lorne Brown

Okay. We’ll see how it goes.

Eli Recht

Hard to say. Yeah. Okay. So spiritual bypassing basically means that we’re using spiritual or religious concepts or practices to avoid a psychological reality. And there are a lot of examples, but I’ll give you a few. So like meditation, like I just mentioned: if we’re using meditation to dissociate from life or to suppress stress rather than to face it, rather than to face life’s challenges and be present, it’s a defense. Then we’re spiritually bypassing. Or the common phrase, “Everything happens for a reason.” That is a true statement. Everything does happen for a reason. But are we saying that to ourselves to dismiss a feeling so that we don’t have to feel grief, for example? Then it’s spiritual bypassing. Or using the excuse of karma to explain a hurtful act that we’ve done and not take accountability, like, “Oh, I’m sorry. It was my karma. The devil made me do it.

It was my darkness. It must have been meant to be,” rather than just being able to take accountability and say, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry.” We’re avoiding that feeling of taking accountability. Or one I hear a lot, which is non-attachment, like, “Oh, I’m not attached. Therefore, I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to do my best.” That’s spiritual bypassing. Toxic positivity is an example of spiritual bypassing. Of course, it’s good to be positive. We want to be positive in life. That’s the key. That’s the goal. But are we being overly positive at the expense of the negative? Are we not able to face the hard parts of life and our suffering? Then it’s a defense. Or one you see a lot with spiritual teachers is like, “I’m awake. From my place of wisdom, I see that everything is perfect. There are no mistakes in God’s creation.

Therefore, I can do whatever the hell I want and I can hurt people. Everything is one, therefore I can treat others disrespectfully.” These are very common spiritual bypasses that we see, and these are defense mechanisms. All right, let’s talk about projection. Projection basically means that we’re externalizing what’s coming from inside. So we’re attributing something to others that actually belongs to us. So for example, projection could be like judging or criticizing others for a quality that we can’t accept in ourselves. We’re judgmental ourselves, but we can’t tolerate the fact that we’re judgmental. So we judge others who are judgmental. That’s projection. Or assuming others feel the way that you do. Let’s say you’re really tired, just overtired, and it’s really hard to face that. You’re going to walk around the world and think everyone’s tired. That’s a projection. Or blaming others for your own actions or your own suffering, because if you’re blaming anyone for your own suffering, you’re projecting, because suffering comes from inside of us, not from outside.

Or here’s another one I see sometimes, which is, let’s say you’ve cheated on your partner. The guilt is so intense that you end up accusing your partner of infidelity. So you’ve projected onto them what you can’t tolerate in you. And one little caveat here about projection is that the word projection is sometimes used in spiritual terms to describe how God emanates creation from himself or herself, but this is a different use of the term. When God is projecting creation like a movie, that’s closer to truth. But when we’re projecting as a defense, that’s resistance, that’s resistance to truth. So I just wanted to make that clarification. And then introjection, since we’re on this topic, is the opposite. That means we’re internalizing what’s actually coming from the outside. We’re taking it on as our own. For example, parents come to the child and say, “Honey, we love you.

We’re getting a divorce. It’s got nothing to do with you.” The child blames themselves. That’s introjection. The child cannot tolerate the pain and the grief of the parents’ divorce, so they blame themselves for it to give themselves a sense of control. Even though it’s miserable, that’s better than having to face the grief or the loss of the divorce. Let’s say someone’s abusing you and you take on the narrative and you say to yourself, “I deserve this. I deserve to be abused by this person.” You’re introjecting. Feeling responsible for another person’s suffering, that’s introjection. And then the big one, the big introjection one, is the inner critic. I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with the inner critic, and I know a lot of people have an inner critic. If you have a voice in your head that’s constantly attacking you and berating you and judging you and telling you all the things you’re doing wrong, you’re introjecting.

That’s a defense mechanism. That inner critic is actually covering over something deeper that we can’t tolerate. And this one was a big one for me on my journey, the inner critic. So humor, of course, is not a bad thing in and of itself, but if it’s a defense, it means you’re using humor to avoid pain, and it’s a subtype of sublimation, which means that you’re taking energy and transforming it into something better, but it is technically a defense because you’re not able to sit with the energy in its original form. So for example, let’s say you’re at a funeral and it’s just so heavy and so intense and you feel terrible, and then you start cracking jokes because you can’t tolerate the heaviness of the funeral. You’re going to start cracking jokes to lighten the mood. And again, that might be a good thing.

Maybe the people there need some lightening up. That’s not a bad thing. But if you’re doing it because you’re avoiding something, then you’re not able to face reality the way that it is. Or let’s say someone is sitting you down to have a conversation about how you can take accountability, and you start making fun of yourself, self-deprecating comedy or something like that. Then you’re not really taking it in, you’re not being serious. You’re not taking in the depth of the conversation. So that’s humor. Distraction basically just means filling your attention with stimuli to avoid facing something, whether that’s facing something inward or facing something outward, like staying compulsively busy or doomscrolling on social media because you don’t want to face the grief or the loss, or maybe you’re procrastinating by doing really unimportant things. It’s like you don’t need to clean that room anymore, but you’re cleaning it again because you’re distracting.

You don’t want to actually face the task that you have to deal with. Reversal: I kind of combined reversal with another one called reaction formation. They’re different, but they’re mostly the same because they have to do with turning something into its opposite. So you convert an unbearable feeling into its opposite, internally or behaviorally, to make it more tolerable. A classic example of this is Stockholm syndrome, for those of you who might know what that is. There’s the story in Stockholm where criminals took people hostage. Basically the idea is that you fall in love with your captor. You can’t tolerate the intensity of having been kidnapped and the uncertainty of what that feels like, what might happen. We have no idea. There’s so much fear, existential fear and dread, that you end up choosing to reverse the feeling, so you fall in love with the person who did this to you because it’s more tolerable.

It sounds silly, but believe it or not, it happens. Or maybe you feel a sense of dependency on someone, so then you make them dependent on you. Or hazing is a classic example. You were hazed, you didn’t like it, but then when it’s your turn, you haze the next generation. It’s kind of the same thing. And it can look like we’re actually gaslighting ourselves, for those who are familiar with the term gaslighting. Reversal basically means we’re gaslighting ourselves. And anger can be a defense mechanism if it’s used to cover up another feeling. So acting out basically means that we’re discharging a feeling that we can’t process through actions as a way to avoid it. So if you’re breaking or throwing things or you’re yelling or slamming doors, having temper tantrums, that’s acting out. Contrary to popular belief, we think that when we’re acting out, we’re actually feeling the anger, but the reality is we’re not feeling the anger when we’re having a temper tantrum.

We are avoiding the anger. We’re actually expressing it outward as a way to avoid feeling it. So acting out doesn’t mean we’re actually feeling anger, it means we’re avoiding anger. Sexualization obviously just means using sex or sexual behavior to avoid something, and it’s a type of acting out. So I’m glad this one came next. Like compulsive sex or porn to mask something like loneliness or inner dread, right? Nothing wrong with sex, but if we’re using it to avoid something, it’s a defense and it’s going to reify the ego. Or let’s say every time you feel anxiety, you go masturbate, right? Nothing wrong with masturbation, but are you using it to avoid anxiety or to reduce it? If you’re not able to really sit with the anxiety as it is, that’s sexualization. So I just want to briefly say overall, before we move on to solutions, that anything can be a defense, right?

An action can be a defense, like we’ve talked about, like acting out or sexualization or control. A physical sensation can be a defense, like constriction or somatization, which we didn’t talk about, which means that you discharge feelings into physical problems or physical symptoms. Emotions can be defenses. Anger is a common one if it’s used to cover something else up, and fear or shame or guilt are classic emotions or feelings that usually cover up deeper feelings. Thoughts can be defenses, like judgment, rationalizing, like “everything happens for a reason,” right? Projection. Beliefs can be defenses, like the inner critic, “I’m a bad person,” spiritual bypassing, and there can be layers of defenses. But of course, control and constriction are always at the bottom. They’re always the bottom layer, and then other defenses stack on top. And then one more thing before we go to solutions. Once you’re aware of these defenses, you’re going to see them everywhere you go.

It’s human nature, but it’s really important to focus instead on our own defenses rather than fixating on others’, because that in and of itself could be a defense. And the reason we want to do that is because we can’t know whether something is defensive or not. It’s totally subjective. You have to be the one employing the defense in order to know whether it’s a defense or not. And even then we sometimes don’t know, because we don’t have the awareness. So from the outside in, it might look defensive, but it might not be. So you don’t want to get caught up in other people’s business, and the only wise thing to do is focus on your own. And then once you can clear your own, other people’s defenses won’t bother you anymore, because you’ll see them for what they are. So the question for you guys to take home before we move on is: what is your toolbox?

I encourage you to do your own self-inquiry and research these defenses, the ones we didn’t get to and more, and try to figure out what’s your defensive toolbox, what’s your defensive cocktail, so to speak. And that’s really the first step to getting through these things. So, solutions. Okay. So this is a brief recap from the last webinar again, but this is the solution to the cycle of suffering, called the cycle of peace. And the ultimate solution to the defenses and to anything egoic is loving awareness. And that’s the center, that’s the crown chakra or the light emanating from the center. Loving awareness is the opposite of ego, which is fear-based unawareness. The ego cannot exist in an environment of loving awareness, because that’s what we are, that’s our true nature, that’s the nature of God or spirit. And so that’s the most important solution, and every other solution flows from loving awareness.

So if you have that, you don’t really need anything else, but that’s a tall order. So if that doesn’t work, the next best solution would be to reduce unawareness. If we can’t increase awareness, we want to reduce unawareness. And that means these other two components: resolving the subconscious feelings by turning them into conscious feelings, by feeling them, and then resolving the false beliefs through clear seeing, through being able to discern that the beliefs are false. But that’s hard to do if we have the defenses, because that’s what protects these things. So you can see how it’s kind of like a chicken-and-egg type thing, but of course that makes sense. If we can feel our feelings, then we’re not going to have subconscious feelings. And if we can stop believing our beliefs, then we’re not going to have false beliefs. And if neither exists, then what would we need defenses for?

What would we be protecting or defending against? There would be nothing we’d be attaching to or resisting. There’d be no identity there. In other words, quiet the mind, open the heart. These lead to loving awareness. If that doesn’t work, then we can zoom in. And the antidote to defensiveness specifically would be acceptance. In other words, can I accept this moment as it is rather than defend against it? Can I accept that I have this defense? Can I accept what the defense is resisting? Or if I can’t accept, can I at least accept the non-acceptance? And whenever I think of acceptance, I think of Tara Brach, because she talks a lot about radical acceptance. So that’s something you could look into. And if we go to the spiritual terminology, that’s non-attachment and non-resistance, which is the antidote to attachment and resistance. And that basically just means doing our best and letting go of results, caring but not minding, allowing everything to be as it is.

Attachment and resistance are two extremes. Non-attachment, non-resistance is in the center. And then just going briefly here, at the bottom it says the root is surrender and openness. So surrender would be the antidote to control. Openness would be the antidote to constriction, which are the two primary defenses. So surrender can look like just having faith or trust in the universe, letting go of the illusion of control as best you can, realizing that the control is not real. But we don’t want to surrender to the control. We don’t want to surrender to the defense, because the defense has co-opted our willpower. So we don’t want to surrender to that. We actually need to use our willpower to reclaim our willpower and use it to push through or overcome the defense. We want to surrender to the thing that caused us to defend in the first place.

We want to surrender to the feeling or the stimuli, not to the defense mechanism itself. You don’t want to just say, “Oh, I have this defense. I surrender,” because then you’re just perpetuating it. Nothing’s going to happen. And then openness is the antidote to constriction. That basically just means relaxation. Open up the energy channels, open up the system, and let the energy begin to flow. And people might not realize this, but keeping constriction in place takes up so much energy. It takes a lot of energy to maintain the ego. So if you can release the constriction and find openness, you’re going to have so much more energy than before. And you can see the image. It depicts the same body, but now it’s see-through. Now it’s full of light, because the defenses have been dissolved. There’s still a sense of individuality. There’s still a body, but now it’s transparent, right?

Now it’s an appearance. It’s clear, and there’s no longer this fortification of separateness. The channels are open and flowing. And if that doesn’t work, then there are all these solutions, which are the most common ways that we can arrive at acceptance and openness and surrender, dissolving the defenses. And we’re zooming in again. We’re inside the transparent body. Now there are no more walls. Energy can flow freely. The words in the top half are more top-down approaches. They’re more psychological things that we can do, focusing on surrender to counter control. And then the words in the bottom half are more the physical or somatic actions that we can take, more bottom-up approaches that generally focus on openness to counter constriction. So gratitude just means thanking defenses for their service, right? Letting go of them little by little, but also reflecting on what we gained and learned from them, maybe writing down what we’re grateful for, and just trying to choose this perspective even when it’s hard.

And I think that connects to compassionate understanding as a solution too, because you want to recognize where the defenses came from and their origins, which is why I wanted to talk about it earlier. How were these useful and protective? Honor them and be grateful that our inner child used them and understood how to use them and needed them to survive. So being able to see it from the child’s perspective, and maybe also from the parent’s perspective; both would be great. And just being gentle with yourself, especially if it’s challenging to let these defenses go. You want to bring compassion and give yourself grace. We’ve been using these strategies for a long time, so it may be really challenging to unwind from them. So gratitude and compassionate understanding are connected for me. Upgrading basically means, as consciously as we can, replacing the more primitive and severe defenses with more mature or healthier defenses.

So it’s like leveling up. If you can’t get rid of it altogether, then at least level up. Do the best you can. Sexualization: you can level that up or upgrade that to sublimation. So instead of acting out all the sexual energy to avoid something, you can allow the energy in and bring that sexual energy up and transmute it into higher states of consciousness and things like that. Sublimation is transmuting energy for a higher purpose. Or upgrade projection to introjection. I personally think introjection is generally, though not in all cases, a more conscious defense than projection. Projection is so externally focused; at least introjection is internally focused, even though they’re opposites. Or acting out to humor, right? If you want to stop throwing temper tantrums, then start cracking jokes. That’s better than breaking stuff and slamming doors and things like that.

So that’s an example of upgrading. There are a lot of ways we can do that.

Lorne Brown

Can you unpack acceptance and surrender? How would you define them, and their differences and similarities? Vibrationally, accept and surrender seem very similar.

Eli Recht

They’re similar. I just chose words to try and evoke a certain feeling or a response. You can’t really put words to these things. It’s just trying to find the right words to generate a certain understanding.

Lorne Brown

I find practicing acceptance puts you into the state of surrender, right?

Eli Recht

Yeah. There you go. I like that. I agree with that. And speaking of acceptance, I wanted to give you a little shout-out, Lorne. This has to do with identifying and catching, that’s the one up here. And I thought of you, Lorne, with your NAC process: Notice, Accept, Choose Again. Yeah. So the idea with identifying and catching is first you want to identify which defenses you use, right? Discover them. Then you want to catch them, notice them in real time, which requires awareness; accept whatever it is, accept that it’s there; and then choose again. Consciously move it aside, look inward, not outward, and then choose a different path forward, maybe responding rather than reacting. So I think identifying and catching, or Notice, Accept, Choose Again in real time, is really important for undoing these defenses. Building real-time awareness is key.

And you can do that just by naming it as it arises. Even if you just notice resistance show up, you can just say “resistance,” or a defense shows up, “defense,” right? Avoidance, contraction, control. Just naming it can sometimes be enough to orient yourself to these things.

Lorne Brown

Eli, thank you again.

Eli Recht

And thank you, everyone, for being here. It’s been really, really great.

Lorne Brown

Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Code Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown, and I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe, or follow the show, and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.