Sophia sat across from me, her hands fidgeting in her lap. “I just can’t believe my boss yelled at me for missing a deadline,” she said, her voice tight with irritation. “It’s not my fault they never give me enough time. And anyway, who cares about their stupid deadlines?”
I nodded, taking note of the defensive tone. “It sounds like you’re really frustrated,” I said gently. “Can you tell me more about how you felt when your boss spoke to you?”
Sophia hesitated, then sighed. “I felt… Embarrassed, I guess. Like I had failed.”
“That’s a tough feeling to sit with. Sometimes, when we feel shame or guilt, we might deflect those feelings onto others to protect ourselves. It’s a way of coping, but it doesn’t always help in the long run.”
Sophia frowned, considering this. “So, you’re saying I’m just deflecting my feelings onto my boss?”
“It appears that way,” I replied. “Acknowledging your feelings can be a first step towards understanding and addressing them. What do you think might happen if you allowed yourself to feel that initial embarrassment?”
—
In therapy, I help clients recognize and understand their defense mechanisms, which protect them from painful feelings but can hinder emotional processing and healing. By exploring these defenses and the underlying mechanisms, clients like Sophia can begin to access deep-seated shame and other issues stemming from unmet needs in early relationships. This process invites greater self-awareness and helps them move forward towards a more integrated, authentic self.
What is happening here is an example of a classic defense mechanism called ‘projection.’ Sophia’s distress wasn’t so much about the workload per se. The distress was about an underlying wound around inadequacy that was being triggered, and she was deflecting her feelings by projecting them outward onto the people around her.
What are defenses, a.k.a. defense mechanisms? I was formally introduced to defense mechanisms during my psychoanalytic fellowship. I learned that defense mechanisms are psychological strategies employed by individuals to cope with reality and maintain the part of the ego that involves our self-image. Sigmund Freud first introduced the concept, emphasizing that these mechanisms help protect the ego from anxiety (around shame) and the perception of social sanctions or judgment. While defense mechanisms can be beneficial in managing stress and navigating complex social landscapes, they can also be maladaptive if overused or relied upon excessively. Defenses are great, until they are not.
In my Compassionate Inquiry training, I was introduced to A. H. Almaas, who, in his ‘Theory of Holes’ posits that we are born with our core selves, our “Essence,” intact. This Essence contains the potential for many characteristics that must be mirrored back in our environment to develop properly, such as clarity, presence, love, and value. An infant does not think of themselves as valueless, unclear, or unloved. These realizations of love and value are not present in the infant; that part of the essence has yet to develop, but it is there. Conditions such as relational safety and an environment that mirrors one’s inherent value back to the child are necessary for the optimal development of the Essence, allowing the child to fully realize their inherent love and value.
What does that look like? It looks like caregivers who are attuned to the child’s needs, who are present and responsive to their emotional world in addition to providing for them materially.
When there are gaps in these areas, “holes” develop. When caregivers fail to mirror the inherent worth of the child, holes in the Essence develop, which then get covered by defenses.
For example, let’s say there’s a nine-month-old baby and the mother breaks eye contact with that child. If this happens repeatedly, over a long period of time, the child will go into a shame state, a response to the separation from the mother’s responsiveness and mutual attunement. If the child isn’t attuned to for a length of time, they enter a shame state. If this continues repeatedly, the child will develop a corrosive shame about themselves—not about what they’ve done, but about who they are as people.
Later on, in that home environment, the child is often told that this break is happening because they are bad, that they did something wrong. Their entire nervous system internalizes this messaging, they come to believe that they must have done something wrong to deserve this. We come to believe that we are ashamed because of all the bad things we’ve done. But really, we are ashamed because our parents broke the contact, and thus their contract, with us.
When we are born, essentially our parents have an implicit contract with us, saying, ‘We are going to bring you into the world and look after you. Looking after you means we are going to be responsive to you. We are going to be synchronously, reciprocally, attuned and in touch with you.’ When the parent is not able to fulfill the contract because of their own limitations and the contract is broken repeatedly, the child experiences shame. This shame then becomes lodged at the very core of the self, and a very deep hole is formed. We then develop defenses against feeling this deep pain.
When working with my clients, I help them to become aware of where they are defended. What are we defending against? Feeling. When we suppress feelings, we cannot process them. As Gabor says, suppression after suppression leads to depression. I invite them to get curious where they are defended, as illustrated above.
I might say to Sophia, “Let’s get curious about your embarrassment.” “What does being embarrassed mean to you?” Or, “Let’s notice the resistance to feeling.” “How is this resistance showing up in your body?” These are examples of invitations to the somatic processes sitting under the defense mechanism. By recognizing and understanding their defenses, clients like Sophia can begin to heal the “holes” in their Essence and move towards a more integrated, authentic self.
