Jocko Podcast - Jocko Underground: These Are Your Defense Mechanisms

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

These Are Your Defense Mechanisms. Financial advice for kids. How to become the person you need to be. When your boss or partner is lashing out under the pressure. How to become "Unbotherable."Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is the Janko Underground Podcast, number 117, sitting with Echo Charles, EC, Echo Charlie. Yeah. How you doing today? Good, Jocko. Thanks for asking. Let's be honest. It's kind of a bit of 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 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 true. Then you spend a lot of time on your computer because you're a computer doing your computer stuff, right? Sure.

Editing, whatever. Yep, sure. So then you get here, you feel like maybe you have a lot to say. You got a lot of, a lot of stuff built up. Right. Is this correct? You're not 100% 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'll understand this, where there's stuff that I can talk with you about that for a bunch of reasons I can't really talk to the fam about.

I mean, I can, but they're either going to be like, by why are you even talking to me about this? Or it 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 did you say, misguided about? the end state there's no misguiding whatsoever. Yes, you're correct. 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 what I'm saying? We're going to, we're going to get full credit, full advantage, you know, of the scenario. Yes. So in that way, yeah, you're correct. 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 Eschon front like talking to clients talking to people talking about leadership but and we we're going to 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 and and what a defense mechanism is, psychological defense mechanism, it's 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, very well mind.com, and I just grab some, some, of these defense mechanisms. One of them is displacement, which is when you take your feelings out of 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? Yeah, you've heard this term before, right? What, defense mechanism? Yeah, oh yeah, big time. 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

you don't have to use this but you are we'll get into that okay 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. Assigning your own unacceptable feelings or qualities to others. So if you're feeling the example that they give you, 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 inadequate. onto someone else. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Intellectualization. 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.

Then they give a good example for this one. Being denied alone for your dream house, then saying it's a good thing because the house is too big anyways. Right. You're just rationalizing. Rgression. 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. it. So being sad about a recent breakup, but acting happy about it. So those are just 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 are pathological defense mechanisms. So 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 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 is 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 a, um, like that splitting has like similar to, uh, 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 were paying, we're talking about the taste of certain things where I was like, oh, it doesn't, it's not very hardcore, though making it taste.

all delicious and you're like well yeah what else I'm gonna do make it taste like complete crap you know like bro that's false type 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 doubt when I was reading about splitting it's kind of there's more to it there's more to it's 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 um you're either with me or against me kind of a thing you know like that seems like real black and white yeah yeah you know 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 mad at your boss. So you take it out on your wife. That's displacement. But this one is a little bit more positive where you're taking an emotion that you have that's bad. and you're going to put it onto something that is a little bit more acceptable.

So, you know, and they actually, in the definition, 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. 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 a 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 the last of these levels which is just mature which is using these defense mechanisms but as 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 Uh, you had to, you had to take your kid to the doctor and they were mad about it. You know what? We're going to 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. If 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 is a child. No, it's, hey, you know what?

I'm going to consciously decide that I'm not going to get emotional right now because I've got to 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, when I think about defense mechanisms, I think about them, and I'm not sure, 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 brow beating? 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 browbeating is for me a defense mechanism that echo when you question me about, you know, hey, 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 is 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 browbeating. I kind of use this hyperaggression, 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, go to jaco underground.com and subscribe. and we're doing this. We're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms so we are not subject to their control.

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