Jocko Underground: These Are Your Defense Mechanisms

This is the Jocko Underground podcast number 117, sitting with Echo, Charles E.C. echo, Charlie.

Yeah.

How you doing today?

Good, Jocko, thanks for asking.

Let's be honest, it's kind of a bit of. Is it getting a little rough in here prior to the pressing of record?

No. I think you're in one of your moods, which is cool. And, you know, I'm glad that you're happy and you're being you, but that's it. I don't think. I don't. I wouldn't call it rough.

No. Was I right?

About what?

About the fact that sometimes. Sometimes you spend a lot of time isolated.

You spend a lot of time isolated or you're just with your kids. Which, look, your kids are great. Yep, kids are great. But let's face it, interacting with your kids is not the same as interacting with an adult.

Yes, that's right.

Then you spend a lot of time on your computer because your computer. Doing your computer stuff, right? Editing, whatever.

Yep, sure.

So then you get here, you feel like maybe you have a lot to say, you got a lot, a lot of stuff built up. Right?

I.

Correct.

You're not a hundred percent correct, but there is some truth to that. Yes. I would say to. The part that you might be slightly misguided is, yes, I'm around the same group of people very often. Very often. And what. And there's stuff. And you understand this, where there's only. There's stuff that I can talk with you about that for a bunch of reasons, I can't really talk to the. The fam about. I mean, I can, but they're either going to be like, bro, why are you even talking to me about this? Or might not be appropriate or, you know, just for a bunch of reasons.

So the end state.

Yes.

Is I'm spot on.

Yes, sir, you are.

Never mind. What'd you say, misguided about the end state. There's no misguiding whatsoever.

Yes, you're accurate. Yeah. Or a way to look at it is, hey, look, I come to you for a lot of, you know, a handful of things, you know, that I can't go to other people for, no matter who they are. Right. And look, I got you here. Hey, we're here. See, I'm saying we're going to. We're going to. We're going to get full. Full credit, full advantage, you know, of the scenario. Yes. So in that way.

Yeah, you're correct. Okay. Well, that being said. Yeah. I wanted to talk to you today.

About defense mechanisms. Good thing to discover. Not discover, but good thing to explore.

Yeah.

Because people have defense mechanisms that they use. And I have talked about these defense mechanisms before. Echelon front, like talking to clients, talking to people, talking about leadership. But. And we. We're gonna get into some of those, I think. But they're rooted in the idea of defense mechanisms, which is what everybody has kind of heard of. We have these and they. What a defense mechanism is. Psychological defense mechanism is unconscious psychological.

Operation that a person conducts to protect themselves from anxiety, from stress.

And from those feelings from developing. So There's a website, verywellmind.com and I just grabbed some. Some of these defense mechanisms.

One of them is displacement, which is when you take your feelings out on someone else. And the example of this is being angry at your boss but taking it out on your spouse instead. Does this make sense now, what a defense mechanism is? You've heard this term before, right?

What? Defense?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, Big touch. But. But I'm wondering. And I'm kind of looking at these. I guess it's just real in general because, you know, defense mechanism is like. Sometimes they're viewed as like a bad thing, like misappropriated. Like you. You don't have to use this, but you are.

We'll get into that. There's different levels, too. There's different levels of different types. There's some of them that are extremely bad.

Yeah.

So we'll get to them.

Okay.

But I think first, just going through some of them. Denial. Clearly deny the. Denying that something exists. That's a. That's a defense mechanism. Violent crime happens to you and you deny that even happened. Repression. Unconsciously keeping unpleasant information from your conscious mind. Get abused as a kid and you repress that memory. Or suppression. Consciously keeping unpleasant information from your conscious mind, so you choose to push it out of your mind. Sublimation.

Converting unacceptable impulses into more acceptable outlets. What does this mean? You get into a fight with your spouse, or you get into an argument with your spouse and you start to get angry. But instead of getting in a fight, yelling and screaming, you go for a walk or you go hit the heavy bag or something like that. That's sublimation.

Projection. You hear this one a lot, right? You're projecting.

Yeah.

Do you ever see the movie Wedding Crashers?

Yeah.

Good use of the word projecting in there. You're projecting. You're projecting, which.

I don't remember that part.

I can't remember the context of it. I just remember it being funny.

Yeah.

Assigning your own unacceptable feelings or qualities to Others.

So if you're feeling the example that they give, you're feeling attracted to someone other than your spouse, but then you get mad at your spouse thinking that they're cheating on you. So you're projecting your own inadequacies onto someone else.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Intellectual. Intellectual toolization. God, butchered that one. Intellectualization. This is thinking about a stressful thing in a super clinical way. Kind of an interesting one. Right. And the example here is losing a close family member and staying busy with making necessary arrangements instead of feeling sad.

Rationalization. Justifying an unacceptable feeling or behavior with logic. And they give a good example for this one. Being denied a loan for your dream house than saying it's a good thing because the house is too big anyways. You're just rational rationalizing. Regression. Reverting to earlier behaviors. Hugging a teddy bear when you're feeling stressed like you did when you're a child.

Reaction formation. Replacing an unwanted impulse with its opposite. So being sad about a recent break breakup, but acting happy about it.

So those are just some, some examples. And there's a lot more. But to your point earlier, your suspicion was these can have a negative connotation. You are correct. So there's the. I think these were level one pathologies. These, these are pathological defense mechanisms. So these are as. These are bad. These are as bad as it gets. One is delusional projection.

These are where you are projecting on someone a complete delusion.

Total denial. Like, this did not happen. As opposed to like, no, I don't think it was that bad.

Right, right.

But no, that didn't happen. Total denial. And then, and then one is distortion. This is a gross reshaping of reality. So these things are pathological. Like these are going to be extremely problematic for the person that is experiencing these things. And then the next level they have is.

It'S not going to be a pathology that's going to cause you significant duress or issues, but it's definitely a problem. These, they just called them immature. So acting out.

Hypochondria.

Passive aggressive projection. And then they had one term which I hadn't actually never heard before, which was splitting, which was seeing everything as black and white. You know when someone flies off the handle and like, you can't, you can't have a rational conversation with them because everything is black and white to them. Yeah, that's that. And it's kind of, it's kind of immature. Yeah, it's like when, you know your kids are. I don't even want to go then yeah. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

They're taking like, we could have gone to the birthday party, but you didn't want to clean your room. I don't even want to go. Then it's like black or white.

Yeah. Okay.

You know, like that type of thing. At least that's the way I understood it. My very novice way of reading through these things.

Yep. It seems like, like, that splitting has, like, similar to false dichotomy. I know it's like a different way of conceptualizing, but false dichotomy is the kind where you do it as a joke to me sometimes when I was like, oh, you're a pain. We're talking about the taste of certain things. Where I was like, oh, it doesn't. It's not very hardcore. The making it taste all delicious. And you're like, well, yeah, what else am I gonna do? Make it taste like complete crap, you know? And I'm like, bruh, that's false dichotomy. You know, there's a bunch of different steps that you could have took besides the, you know, the extreme kind of a thing. But in a way, splitting kind of follows that same rule book in a way where it's like they go extreme in the other direction.

Yeah. And I may have to deal. When I was reading my Splitting Ice, kind of. I. There's more to it. There's more to it. We'll probably dive into these things more. But the general idea that I got from it was it's like, hey, this is either black or white. And you end up sort of doing that in an immature way.

Yeah. Like, you know, the idea of you're either with me or against me kind of a thing, you know, like, that seems like real black and white.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, like, with me.

Then the next level towards a healthy. Which is kind of weird because the. To me, immature sounds worse than. Or sounds better than neurotic, but the next level, which is less bad. So the worst is pathological. The next one is immature. The next one is neurotic.

Which was. The first one is displacement, shifting impulses or emotions to a safer outlet, which means it's sort of like. It's very similar to the first one. I said, like, oh, you're in a fight with your wife, so you. Or you're. You're mad at your boss, so you take it out on your wife. That's displacement. But the. This one is a little bit more positive, where you're taking an emotion that you have that's bad and you're gonna put it onto something that is a little bit more acceptable. So, you know, and they, they actually, in the definition, well, they were talking about like having a, like a sexual urge and instead putting it towards something that's a little bit more acceptable.

Working out.

Yeah, yeah, like working out or. Yeah, something along those lines.

Dissociation. This one again, this one sounded pretty bad where you have a drastic change of your personal identity. Like you start acting like a different person. And then this is the one we covered already. Intellectualization, Excessive analytical thought. So as you pointed out, look, I've given people this advice before. Hey, something really bad happens, give people tasks to do where they can kind of get distracted, for lack of a better word on, for example, planning for the funeral. Like that to me is not a horrible thing. And that brings us to the last of these levels, which is just mature, which is using these defense mechanisms, but almost in a positive way. It's like, yeah, it's just a defense mechanism. For instance, one of them is altruism. So what can I do that's positive that will kind of make me feel better about something that went wrong? Oh, you had to.

You had to. You had to take your kid to the doctor and they were mad about it. You know what? We're gonna take you to the ice cream store too. You know what I'm saying? Like doing something nice. And on a, like, I guess on a more extreme way, let's say you owned a company and you were, you did something went bad with your product and so you donated a bunch of money. Kind of altruistically. Humor, right? Humor is a good little defense mechanism that we use. Sometimes somebody picks on you, you kind of make fun of yourself. A little self deprecation. I think that's cool. We already talked about sublimation like you mentioned. Oh, we're going to work out. Instead of getting mad, we're going to work out. Instead of getting angry and frustrated and maybe lashing out at a person in a violent way, you go train jiu Jitsu instead. Yeah, and then suppression in a positive way. What suppression means is not. I'm suppressing the fact that I was abused as a child. No, it's. Hey, you know what? I'm gonna consciously decide that I'm not gonna get emotional right now because I've gotta deal with the situation at hand. So that's actually a mature thing to do. Hey, I can't freak out right now. I'm mad, but I have to deal with the scenario that I'm presently in. So These defense mechanisms are present, and just if you take them to an extreme, they can be really, really bad. If you use them correctly, then they're not necessarily bad. But if you can understand them and understand that other people might be doing these things, it can help you get through some sticky situations. Now, I. When I think about defense mechanisms, I think about them, and I'm not sure. I don't. I need to study them more. But there's some defense mechanisms that people have that they utilize from a leadership perspective. I'll give you an example. Brow beating. You heard the term browbeating. You've heard me talk about it, but is that a normal term for people to hear, brow beating?

No, I only heard it from you.

Okay, so brow beating is, for me, a defense mechanism that echo when you question me about, you know, hey, what can we record at 11 instead of 10? And you kind of question my authority. So what do I do? I browbeat you. You don't even understand why we got to be there at 10. Because all you have to do is go in there and press record this ridiculous. You be there at 10 like I said. So you see what I'm saying? It makes you, like, throws you off. You don't even want to. You don't want to. You don't want to question me anymore. So I use, as a defense mechanism, I use this brow beating. I kind of use this hyper aggression, not overly aggressive, where. So that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground podcast. So if you want to continue to listen.

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