Jocko Underground: These Are Your Defense Mechanisms

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is the Jocko Underground Podcast number 117, sitting with Echo Charles, EC, Echo Charles.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  How you doing today?

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Good, Jocko. Thanks for asking.

• 0:13Jocko Willink?

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

• 0:19Speaker 01

  No, I, 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.

• 0:29Jocko Willink?

  Was I right?

• 0:31Speaker 01

  About what?

• 0:31Jocko Willink?

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

• 0:41Jocko Willink?

  You spend a lot of time isolated, or you're just with your kids, which look, your kids are great.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:46Jocko Willink?

  Kids are great. But let's face it, interacting with your kids is not the same as interacting with an adult.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Yes, that's true.

• 0:54Jocko Willink?

  Then you spend a lot of time on your computer because your computer, uh, doing your computer stuff, right?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 0:59Jocko Willink?

  Editing, whatever.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Yep, sure.

• 1:02Jocko Willink?

  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?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  I, you're

• 1:13Jocko Willink?

  Is this correct?

• 1:13Speaker 01

  You're not a hundred percent correct, but there is some truth to that. Yes. I would say to the, the part that you might be slightly misguided is, yes, I'm, 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 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.

• 1:49Jocko Willink?

  So, so the end state

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:52Jocko Willink?

  Is, I'm spot on.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Yes, sir, you are.

• 1:55Jocko Willink?

  Never mind, what'd you say misguided about? The end state, there's no misguiding whatsoever.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  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 gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna get full, full credit, full advantage, you know? Of the scenario. Yes. So in that way, yeah, you're correct.

• 2:25Jocko Willink?

  Well, that being said,

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  I wanted to talk to you today

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  about defense mechanisms. Good thing to discover, not discover, but good thing to explore.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39Jocko Willink?

  Cause 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, and 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.

• 3:21Jocko Willink?

  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?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  What, defense mechanism? Oh, yeah, big time, but, but I'm wondering, I'm kind of looking at these, I guess it's just real in general. Cause 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.

• 4:03Jocko Willink?

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

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:13Jocko Willink?

  So we'll get to them.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:14Jocko Willink?

  But I, I think first just going through some of them. Denial, clearly, denying that something exists, that's a, that's a defense mechanism. Violent crime happens to you and you deny that it even happened. Uh, 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.

• 4:51Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 5:15Jocko Willink?

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

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:21Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever see the movie Wedding Crashers?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

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

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Which I don't remember that part.

• 5:29Jocko Willink?

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

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:35Jocko Willink?

  Assigning your own unacceptable feelings or qualities to others.

• 5:42Jocko Willink?

  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 inadequacies onto someone else.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, okay.

• 5:57Jocko Willink?

  Intellectual, 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.

• 6:22Jocko Willink?

  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, then saying it's a good thing because the house is too big anyways. Right? You're just rationalizing. Regression. Reverting to earlier behaviors, hugging a teddy bear when you're feeling stressed like you did when you were a child. Reaction formation, replacing an unwanted impulse with its opposite. So being sad about a recent breakup, but acting happy about it.

• 7:00Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 7:27Jocko Willink?

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

• 7:36Jocko Willink?

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

• 7:43Jocko Willink?

  But no, that didn't happen. Total denial. And then, and then one is distortion. This is a gross reshaping of reality. So, 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, it's, 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.

• 8:19Jocko Willink?

  Uh, hypochondria, uh, 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.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:41Jocko Willink?

  That's that. And it's kind of, it's kind of immature.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:45Jocko Willink?

  It's like when, you know, your kids are, I don't even want to go then.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:50Jocko Willink?

  You know what I mean?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:51Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay.

• 8:58Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yep. It seems like, um, like the splitting has like, similar to a 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 paying, we're talking about the taste of certain things. So 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 going to do? Make it taste like complete crap, you know, like, bro, that's false. Like, 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.

• 9:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I may have to dealt when I was reading about splitting as kind of, there's more to it. There's more to it. We'll, 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.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  You know, like with my.

• 10:09Jocko Willink?

  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. It, which was, the first one is displacement, shifting impulses or emotions to a safer outlet. Which means, and 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.

• 10:53Jocko Willink?

  And you're going to 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, a, like a sexual urge. And instead putting it towards something that's a little bit more acceptable.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Working out.

• 11:12Jocko Willink?

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

• 11:18Jocko Willink?

  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, uh, well, 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, that brings us to the, the last of these levels. Which is just mature.

• 12:03Jocko Willink?

  Which is using these defense mechanisms, but as a, 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.

• 12:24Jocko Willink?

  Uh. You had to.

• 12:28Jocko Willink?

  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 in 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, you mentioned, oh, we're gonna work out. Instead of getting mad, we're gonna work out. Instead of. Getting angry and frustrated and maybe lashing out at a person. In a violent way, you go train jujitsu instead.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:14Jocko Willink?

  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. Cause 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.

• 13:56Jocko Willink?

  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

• 14:13Jocko Willink?

  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 brow beating is for me, a defense mechanism that echo when you question me about, you know, hey, what can we record at

• 14:40Jocko Willink?

  11 instead of 10? And you kind of question my authority? So what do I do? I brow beat you. You don't even understand why we gotta be there at 10? Cause 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? I'm, it makes you like throws you off. You don't even wanna, you don't wanna, you don't wanna 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, go to JacoUnderground.com and subscribe.

• 15:21Jocko Willink?

  And we're doing this, we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms. So we are not subject to their control. And we're doing this so that we can support the Jocko Podcast, which will remain as is free for all, as long as we can keep it that way. But we, but we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors. And we're doing it so we can give you. More control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now where we'll be able to utilize to

• 16:02Jocko Willink?

  strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So, thank you. It's jocko underground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. And if you can't afford to support us, we can still support you. Just email [email protected] and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized underground.