Why Your Well-Meaning Defenses Are in Over Their Heads

Transforming Your Inner Programming

Source: Artist's Name Omitted/Pixabay Free Image

In my previous post, I discussed why, when we’re young, we all must rely on certain defenses. But, as we age, we require them much less. Yet they remain fixed in place and in their extremity, typically prompt us (depending on the particular situation) either to overreact or underreact. And in psycho-actively “managing” our lives, they can at times take us over, seriously sabotaging us in ways we’re oblivious of.

This post will explain why, as single-mindedly devoted to our welfare as these human-like defenses are, they end up doing us more harm than good. Which is why it’s essential to learn how to identify them, actually talk to them, and update them about your physical and mental development—subsequent, that is, to their assuming the role of protecting your psychic equilibrium.

Ironically, as uninformed as you may be about how they operate in your brain, they’re equally unaware of how they’ve become increasingly detrimental, preventing you from achieving the self-realization, harmonious relationships, and state of well-being you aspire to. In fact, the remedial self-talk that almost all schools of therapy emphasize is, deep down, what you need to engage in if you’re not to continue being governed by outworn defenses. For rather than respond to present-day reality, they unknowingly camouflage it.

Nonetheless, other than having been traumatized as an adult by some uncontrollable event, just about all your defenses emerged during childhood. This was a time when:

• your emotional resources for effectively dealing with challenging circumstances were markedly limited;
• you didn’t experience yourself as possessing any authority in your home environment; and
• given your dependency on your caretakers, you were obliged to defer to their authority, whether in praising, judging, or punishing you.

Relatively defenseless back then, to quiet the emotional storm inside you whenever your all-important attachment bond to your caretaker(s) felt threatened, you desperately needed a defense to counter their discordant communication. Without such support or reassurance from within, you’d have felt so emotionally overloaded that your basic functioning could be gravely impaired.

Enter, then, a defense mechanism, which (however unconsciously) you experienced as life-saving. After all, it served to restore as much personal security and stability to you as was possible back then.

The defense could have been dissociation, which would have taken you out of the situation you weren’t emotionally prepared to handle. Or projection, which could enable you to disown, or avoid taking responsibility for, whatever you were accused of (“I didn’t do it—she did it!). Or denial, which would “undo” in your mind what you just did that precipitated your parents’ jarringly attacking you. And so on.

How Your Defenses Become Increasingly Maladaptive—and in Over Their Heads

It can’t be over-emphasized that your “inner defenders” embody parts of you that, while they once may have been indispensable to adapting to your environment, were never really ideal. In his latest book, No Bad Parts (2021), Richard Schwartz—the founder of Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)—identifies these protective parts as “parentified inner children.”

That is, when neither your caretakers nor anyone else was there for you, you had to find a way to be there for yourself—to become your own (substitute) parent. And that’s when an innocent, spontaneous, even awe-inspiring part of you volunteered to take on the onerous task of safeguarding your vulnerability.

Inasmuch as a parentified child is still a child, they’re really pseudo-parents, taking on much more than they—lacking maturity—know how to handle (the reason they can be viewed as “in over their heads”). The age of these defensive, self-protective parts, because it’s pretty much the same age as the child they stepped forward to make feel safe, doesn’t really allow them to act with wisdom, or to consider the broader ramifications of their immediately fear-reducing tactics. Rather, their “solutions” are strictly short-term, their sole aim being to prevent external stressors from overwhelming your (fragile) psyche.

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Moreover, similar to the frozen-in-time, wounded child parts of you, these defenses are also stuck in childhood, unable to self-monitor or grow up. And since defenses can’t actually heal your inner children but only protect them, autonomous self-healing isn’t possible. Although your defenses would certainly like to heal your wounded child parts, all they can do is put them “in exile,” so the psychic disturbances they ameliorated don’t return to haunt you.

So imagine (as the adult you are today) how one of your defenses could make you really angry in order to invalidate someone who, through their hurtful criticism, led you to feel invalidated. Your emotional outburst could then best be understood as helping you distance yourself from them when, to your rejection-fearing inner child, their words felt like a wholesale repudiation of your worth.

Typically your defenses lead you to believe (as you probably did as a child) that you're definable on the basis of what your caretakers characterized as wrong or bad. That’s why it may not matter how many obstacles or negative impulses you’ve overcome since then, or how successful you’ve been subsequent to these defenses “offering their services” to you. Fixated in childhood and still viewing you as a child, they wouldn't take note of anything you’d accomplished later on.

Beyond this, they’d feel compelled to continue counseling avoidance about anything that might result in failure or rejection. So let’s say your defenses are endeavoring to prevent you from tackling something you might not succeed at. Because failure to them is forever linked to harsh parental disapproval, they may make you prematurely abort the project you’re working on. For in their exaggerated and (juvenilely) distorted thinking not succeeding is tantamount to abandonment.

All this helps explain why you may not update—and upgrade—your self-image even after you’ve matured and demonstrated yourself quite capable of dealing with things that surpassed your grade level earlier.

You may well be cognizant that you’re much more resourceful than you were growing up. Yet on an emotional level, you may not feel this way, since it’s your “guardian” defenses that have taken control of your emotions. Consequently, you can’t give yourself permission to live according to the well-known maxim: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

In short, your defenses don’t—can’t—automatically update themselves; can’t alter their once adaptive strategies to conform with your age.

As pointed out earlier, both they and the hurt, fearful child parts they protect can remain firmly in place despite your later having disconfirmed their now anachronistic viewpoint. This isn’t true if you’ve been able to internalize your successes. But unless you had empathic, understanding, and supportive parents (or others) able and willing to steadily back you up, you may not be capable of this self-validation. So you’d see your achievements as flukes and your defeats alone as proclaiming the “real you.”

Learning to Talk to—and Override—Your Archaic Defenses

Once you recognize which beliefs about yourself and the world are simplistic, outdated, or self-defeating, you can set about changing them. For if these outmoded perceptions have become entrenched, to realize your full human potential you’ll need to transform them.

As is true for everyone, your mind literally creates the unique cosmos you inhabit. So by reevaluating the erroneous conclusions you arrived at earlier, you can begin to construct your world anew. And in your expanded awareness, you’ll no longer view yourself as a victim but as an individual granted choices that originally had no practical reality to you.

And if in the past you came to think you didn’t deserve the supportive caring and respect your parents appeared to deny you, with the authority that, hopefully, you can now offer yourself, you can transcend these so-disadvantageous beliefs.

Finally, if you can get yourself to believe that your parents actually did the best they could, given the parenting deficits “bestowed” upon them by their caretakers, you can also begin to resolve whatever unrectified resentful feelings you may still harbor toward them.

© 2021 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.