008. On Defensiveness

(n): a sense of fluidity between your body and mind, where you are totally absorbed by and deeply focused on something, beyond the point of distraction.

Month 4 of being on the road and sometimes I still can’t believe it. There are ups, there are downs, just like anything in life. And through it all I’m still learning about myself. One of my all time favorite Rumi quotes is “you wander from room to room hunting for the diamond necklace that is already around your neck”. Self-knowledge is not something to be found outside - it already exists within you. The whole process has been a deep remembering of who I am. I sometimes feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface, peeling back the layers of the onion one day at a time. 

I have moments where I feel like a child again, moments of awe and wonder, which are incredible and remind me that of the precious experience I’m having. I’ve also had moments where the child in me is triggered by things and a wave of emotion comes up that I almost can’t control. Things that hadn’t come up to the surface in years but now seem to be on full display. The most jarring one to confront is my defensiveness. The knee jerk reaction I have to almost anything when I feel like I’m being told something I don’t want to hear. The defensiveness can manifest in many ways, placing blame on something outside of myself or coming up with a million and one excuses. But It all boils down to not taking responsibility for your actions. Always being in defense mode is pretty tiring and at some point, I had to sit with myself and tell myself to just stop. Sometimes, things can be your fault, and that’s ok. That doesn’t make you any less of a human being or any less of a person. It’s really hard to take an unfiltered look at myself especially when perfection is the mode I always strive for. 

When I looked deeper, it wasn’t really about perfection at all. I mean I literally don’t care for things to be perfect. It actually comes from wanting to be “good enough” for others. It all goes back to how I’m perceived. From wanting to not make mistakes for fear of rejection. 

My earliest memory of this was when I was 9 years old and I wasn’t doing well in math. I honestly just couldn’t wrap my head around it and I went from being a straight A student to not even wanting to go to school so I didn’t have to confront my lack of understanding on the subject. It was the first time I wasn’t good at something and I was looking for all sorts of excuses on why that was. When my teacher told me she was concerned, my immediate knee jerk reaction was to deflect and to blame my little brother. Yes, my little brother (who was 4 at the time no joke). It’s comical thinking back on it now, it’s like blaming your dog for eating your homework.

My mom used to have to go pick up my sister from school in the afternoon and I would watch my brother. Instead of admitting that I didn’t understand the concepts (and that I wasn’t perfect) I became defensive and blamed the fact that I had to watch my brother in the afternoons as the reason why I wasn’t doing well. I mean my poor little brother, getting blamed for something at 4 😂 My mom called me out and I remember getting so angry and defensive and fully convincing myself that I was right and “they just didn’t understand”. 

This behavior stuck with me, and carried on for years and years. Whenever I didn’t do something to the best of my ability, I was a pro at coming up with reasons why (which always somehow had nothing to do with me). This showed up in instances of being confronted by friends at school about something, or when I got to a work setting, getting very defensive when I was told to do something differently. I could always find a reason to be right. Call it stubbornness or call it deflection, it was a different side to the same coin.

I actually ended up asking ChatGPT (lol I’m not even kidding) why a person would be defensive about something. And lo and behold, the good old people pleasing response. According to ChatGPT (and I obviously agree with what it had to say), being defensive is a key trait of a people pleaser. It might sound counterintuitive at first, because people often think of people pleasers as being agreeable and non-confrontational (which can be true), but beneath the surface, is often a deep sensitivity to criticism, rejection or disapproval which can lead to defensiveness. People pleasers often tie their self worth to how others see them. So when someone critiques or challenges them, it can feel like a threat to their identity as “the good one”, “the nice one”, or “the helper”. Defensiveness actually becomes a shield against shame. 

Ah shame. My absolute favorite low vibrational quality that won’t seem to quit. 

Many people pleasers carry internalized perfectionism. So when someone points out a mistake it can feel like a personal failure. Cue the inner protector stepping in with a defensive tone. This is probably the deflective reaction I had as a kid blaming my brother on my poor math grades. Anything to defend myself from being the reason why something wasn’t perfect. 

People pleasing is a deeply engrained aspect of my personality that I’ve been trying to come to terms with for years. It has led to issues with co-dependency and finding it hard to speak my truth. If you’ve spent a long time pushing your needs down in order to make others happy, you might not get enough practice navigating conflict or being questioned. When someone pushes back, it can trigger overwhelm or reactivity - like a pressure valve being suddenly released. I can remember countless and I mean COUNTLESS times when I was met with conflict and I felt like a kettle that was screaming out. This still happens today. And sometimes it makes it really hard to navigate having tough conversations. I have become a pro at avoidance. Doing anything in my power to distract myself and others.

But looking back, I can see that every time I’ve gone through a tough conversation, something good has come out of it. So there really shouldn’t be anything to fear. But where does this fear come from and why did it show up so early in my childhood? Did i learn this behavior? It’s actually interesting, after doing some more research, this comes from a deep ancestral pattern that we’ve held onto and has been passed down over the years. Back in the day, you would be literally banished from the village if you did something wrong. Shunned from society and left out in the cold to die of starvation. I mean damn, no wonder I subconsciously people please lol. Being banished sounds so intense and it triggers a survival mode response that I sometimes find myself not being able to control.

So where do we go from here? I understand the underlying causes and root of the issue, but what now, what’s the medicine?

• Pausing and breathing - letting myself feel the reaction without acting on it.

• Getting curious, not defensive - instead of “how dare they”, I can ask “what truth (even a small one) might be here for me”.

• Focusing on the inner dialogue - “it’s safe to not be perfect. I can hear this without loosing myself”.

• And finally, reparenting the pleaser - offer that younger approval-seeking part of me the affirmation it craves - from ME.

It’s an ever evolving practice and I know I won’t be perfect and guess what, that’s okay - it doesn’t mean I’ll be rejected or banished from the community. Or at least that’s what I need to remind myself. 

This past month has been all about California dreamin’ in the truest of ways. I mean I get it. I really do. The Golden State shines so bright its hard not to get sucked into its vortex of light. Everything about it, from the desert in Joshua Tree, to the white beaches in Santa Barbara, all the way to the Redwoods in the northern California, this state has pretty much everything you might be looking for. Every ecosystem under the sun can be found in California. From what we’ve seen, it’s the outlier state. It’s not even just the diversity of its nature that wowed me, but the overall energy of its people. The magic of this place is hard to describe, it can be found in every town, city, and National Park we explored.

Honestly, it feels like we barely scratched the surface - there’s still so much more to see. As we make our way up the Oregon coast, I already miss the magic of California (full California Google list here with all National Park towns included) but i know I’ll keep coming back for as long as I can 💓 

One of my all time favorite podcasts is called Know Thyself featuring André Duqum. It dives into deep questions about the nature of reality and its guests can be somewhat thought provoking. He interviews people like Joe Dispenza, Deepak Chopra, and Gabor Maté - all of which I highly recommend listening to.

The latest episode that I wanted to highlight was the one with Veda Austin who unpacks the mysterious intelligence of water which she proves reacts to photos, words, music, and more. If the human body is made up of 60-70% water, with the brain being 95% water - what relationship might exist between the water within us and external energetic influences like sound, emotion, or electromagnetic fields?