Your Defense Mechanism Might Be Blocking the Thing You Want

Someone I work with used to follow up relentlessly with his clients.

It was part of what made him good.

Then enough of those clients had bad outcomes that something changed.

He stopped reaching out as much.

On the surface, that's a sales problem.

Psychologically, it is more interesting than that, because his mind had learned a lesson before he had decided whether the lesson was true.

Something hurt me here, so don't go back there.

That is how a lot of defense mechanisms begin.

Not irrationally.

You get burned, embarrassed, rejected, disappointed, taken advantage of.

Your mind notices, and then it does what minds are very good at doing: it protects you from experiencing the same thing again.

The problem is that protection is usually less precise than reality.

A relationship ends badly, so intimacy becomes dangerous.

You delegate something important and somebody screws it up, so now you need to control everything.

You speak honestly and get punished for it, so silence starts feeling mature.

You take a business risk and lose money, so risk itself becomes irresponsibility.

In his case, some clients had bad outcomes, and somewhere along the way his mind started treating following up as something that might lead to more of the same.

The behavior that once helped him succeed had become associated with an experience he didn't want to repeat.

And this is where I think people get trapped.

We can spend years calling something wisdom when it is actually an old defense mechanism that has become sophisticated enough to explain itself.

I've learned to be careful.

Maybe.

I just don't trust people easily.

Maybe.

I prefer doing it myself.

Maybe.

Or maybe reality taught you one lesson and fear quietly wrote the rest of the curriculum.

I want to be clear: the answer is not to ignore experience.

If somebody burns you, learn.

If an investment goes badly, understand why.

If a relationship exposes something you should never tolerate again, don't tolerate it again.

Responsibility requires memory.

But responsibility also requires precision.

What exactly did the experience prove?

Not what did it make you afraid of.

What did it actually prove?

Those clients having bad outcomes did not prove that following up was a bad sales behavior.

Some deals went badly.

The habit was still useful.

Both things can be true, but his mind had combined them into one.

We don't only learn lessons intellectually.

We learn them through behavior.

Eventually you can stop doing something without remembering when you decided to stop.

The avoidance just starts feeling like your personality.

Years later you say,

I'm not really someone who does that.

Maybe.

Or maybe you're someone who got hurt doing it.

There is a difference, and that distinction matters because one describes you while the other describes something that happened to you.

Maturity isn't removing every defense mechanism.

Reality contains danger and some defenses are useful.

The work is becoming capable of examining them without automatically obeying them.

Does this still protect something that needs protecting, or is it now protecting me from the exact thing I say I want?

That's a hard question because your defense mechanism will usually have an argument prepared.

That's how it survived this long.

So think about something you say you want.

A better relationship.

A bigger business.

More trust.

More freedom.

Then look at the behaviors you've stopped doing, the opportunities you avoid, and the people you keep at a distance.

Some of those boundaries may be completely justified.

But some may be protecting you from a pain that is no longer present.

What are you still refusing to do because of something that happened to you, even though refusing to do it is now costing you the very thing you want?

You don't have to pretend the pain wasn't real.

You do have to decide whether it still deserves to make your decisions.