Defensiveness or good boundaries?

“Someone told me to ‘stop being so defensive,’ but I told them, no, I’ve just got good boundaries.”

In this article, I reflect on how defence systems and boundaries can look the same, but are actually quite different.

I’m moved to write about this because my teenage daughters have asked me about a TikTok reel they’d seen about defences being “just good boundaries.” 

If we confuse the two, we might inadvertently get in the way of our own healing and growth.

Boundaries and defences can look the same on the surface

Having a boundary in place and putting our psychological shields up can manifest as the same behaviour.  For example: 

• Saying no.
• Avoiding someone who’s “too triggering today.” 
•  Keeping a part of our own story to ourselves in a certain context.

These are all examples of holding a boundary; and examples of operating from behind our defences. So what’s the difference? 

Put simply, what’s going on inside is different.

When we are holding a boundary, it’s a considered response where we know what we are feeling.

• I am saying ‘no’ because I’m in touch with how I feel and I don’t want what you are suggesting.
• I am staying out of your way/keeping it light today, because my body tells me you are looking for a fight and I’m protecting my energies.
• I am holding some of the story back because I don’t want to load it all onto you – I can carry it, I’m OK.

These are all consciously boundaried ways of relating.

But when we are relating from behind our defence system, we are disconnected from the feelings that are being stirred up in us. 

People pleasing

Here’s an example using that well-known defence of people pleasing:

My client worked for a boss and a secretary. They appeared to hate each other, constantly back-stabbing one another, but they continued to work together. 

Their relationship was confusing and unpredictable, and unsuspecting team members often got caught in the crossfire. 

My client’s work situation would come up in therapy sometimes. She knew that she was holding effective work boundaries:

• Show respect.
• Be positive.
• Delight the boss with good work.
• Actively follow the secretary’s administrative rules.
• Notice the dynamic and stay neutral/out of it.

But she also felt deeply anxious at work and thought about it too much. My client began to see that when the boss didn’t stand up for herself or her team, my client felt afraid.

My client’s mother had been very frightened of her father’s bullying nature, and had been unable to stand up to him. 

My client had kept herself safe by ‘keeping it nice’ with her parents, but had always felt afraid. She had repressed this feeling of fear, hiding it behind the defence of people-pleasing, to allow herself to believe she was safe.

So she came to understand the difference between people pleasing (to avoid feeling afraid in a relationship) and holding good boundaries (to consciously manage relationships effectively). 

Our boundaries are consciously held, where we know how we feel.

Our defences are activated when our hidden feelings are activated. 

In this case above, my client would people-please to avoid the feelings she had about each parent, and with them as a couple. This defence strategy served to stop her feeling afraid. 

Of course, the difficulty is that our defensive behaviours become habits! Then we say we are “being boundaried” when we are actually behaving without awareness of our feelings. That’s why therapists are interested in repeating relational patterns.

We repeat relational patterns

We’ll remain blind to our unconscious feelings until we feel safe enough to process them. 

We might be lucky enough to do so carefully with a therapist. 

We might also find it very hard to sit with uncomfortable feelings, so we might unconsciously drive/create a situation, with the intention to feel our feelings in order to master them.

This is how repeating relational patterns come about. We keep getting into the same scrapes because we want relief! 

We want to face the feelings that create dis-equilibrium. These are feelings that disturb our dreams and make us unwell. We are, after all, chemical bodies that need to feel in balance.

So we keep on trying to get our own attention until someone helps us to put this heavy burden down. We can only do that when another mind helps us to turn our feelings into thoughts.

Let’s look at some common defence systems. I prefer to say ‘protection systems,’ but the term ‘defence’ is widely used, and originally coined by Freud.

Defence systems

Defences are psychological strategies for dealing with anxiety and stress by reducing feelings of internal disturbance or dis-equilibrium. 

Now isn’t that just wonderfully adaptive! I’ll return to this below.

Freud’s view was that a defence mechanism is something we do in order to protect our sense of self (ego) from thoughts or impulses and feelings that we just can’t deal with right now.

As humans, we rely on all sorts of defence mechanisms in order to cope or indeed survive. They are pretty universal (which is why therapists can spot them!)

Here are some of the better-known defences:

Repression

When our reaction to something generates feelings that we can’t cope with, we’ll just… not feel our feels! 

The amazing work on trauma in recent years helps us to understand that we actually push our feelings (just chemicals after all) into our body.  

We can also then disassociate from our body in moments of intense overwhelm. Again, this is an adaptive strategy, as it helps us to cope in a crisis. 

That said, disassociating from repressed feelings becomes a problem when it becomes our ‘go-to’ as the feelings are left in the body, instead of being worked through. 

As you can imagine, or maybe you know, repressed feelings can make us sick.

This belief has become a research-based understanding thanks to years of clinical research by trauma gurus such as Gabor Mate and Bessel Van de Kolk. Below are some resources:

• Gabor Mate talking about ‘The Body Says No,’ which is how stress and trauma are linked with physical illness.
• Bessel van der Kolk on how trauma manifests in our bodies.

Let’s look at some more common defences.

Rationalisation

I find that most people are rather good at rationalising in order to tell a logical story about their/others' behaviour or a situation. 

And at risk of sounding curmudgeonly, the danger of having to be so blinking positive and nice all the time is that we can lose touch with our own feelings of hate and rage, which need to be expressed (with grace!) if we are to be healthy.

I’ve come to name this defence of rationalisation The Grandmother Defence. This is because in our lives, it is usually older women who cut through it and call us out when we are rationalising!

The healthy psychological process is to feel, think about what we are feeling, put our sensations into words and THEN decide how to respond.

Why does it matter?

When we too quickly race for rational explanations, we are not only avoiding how we feel; we are avoiding seeing the patterns in our relationships that will tell us about our hidden wounds.

One good antidote to rationalisation is to slow down in order to connect to the emotion in our body. That’s also why journaling is so useful! Journaling helps us process how we are feeling ‘offline’ without the need to be socially “upbeat and positive.”

Here’s an example of rationalisation: 

My client hated dating because whenever he went out with someone, for example, for dinner, they would always break his gaze, sit back and look around the room. My client found this infuriating, and this situation would often make dating very short-lived. 

When we explored this, he said, "his date didn’t show him any respect." This is a good example of rationalising our more vulnerable feelings. 

A deeper dive helped us to see that when my client’s date broke contact with him, he (my client) began to feel that he was worth nothing and the "other men were more attractive."

Deeper in, and we began to explore how his mother’s affairs had affected his sense of himself as a loved son, so when his date looked around, my client felt worthless and terrified of not being man enough; but he rationalised the hurt he couldn’t get to by saying, "he felt disrespected."

Denial

In therapy, when we discover that we’re avoiding feeling, by denying that an experience or a memory has meaning, that is a pretty big ‘aha’ moment.

That’s why many psychotherapists love symbolism and will often ask, “what does this particular experience or situation mean to you?’  Here’s an example of denial in action:

My married client explained that her husband had had an affair, moved out of their home and was now living with his new partner, who was pregnant with his child. 

Despite this, my client could not agree to a divorce and could not understand why. 

As we explored her own family story, it emerged that she had not talked to anyone about the time her own father had left the family home when she was a child. 

Her mother had refused to discuss the break-up and acted as if nothing had changed. My client’s only memory of that time was curling up in the dog basket to cry and looking at the walls where her beloved father’s favourite pictures used to be.

Slowly, my client’s emotions about that time when she was younger began to surface. We sat together through many weeks of her grieving the loss she had not allowed herself to put into words - because there had been no opportunity to do so with anyone.

Now her unwillingness to agree to divorce made more sense to her. She had words for the sadness she felt in the present, but the unprocessed sadness from the past was keeping her stuck. Freud called this melancholy.

Can we change our defences?

There are different theories about this. I like the one that says, our defence organisation is the ‘core code’, and we can constantly upgrade the app. 

The core code doesn’t go away, but we can adapt how we protect ourselves, as we process more and more of the feelings we couldn’t handle before.

So we can (with age and feedback) become more conscious of the existence of our defensive systems. That means we can observe ourselves in action, or take feedback about our behaviours. 

But hearing feedback is never easy, because our defence systems are serving a purpose. They are protecting us from being overwhelmed by feelings we haven’t yet been able to turn into thoughts.

Often these feelings are those of shame, which comes about because our feelings are belittled or our reality ridiculed. 

This is how our defence systems are adaptive – they help us to survive.

That’s what we mean when we talk about ‘breaking down.’ The feelings come back, crashing through the defence system we’ve spent years setting up. 

In therapy, we try to avoid breakdown if we can, and work very gently with people’s defences. Upgrading a defence organisation can take a little while, and people with childhood trauma really need to see therapy as a marathon, not a sprint. 

It takes time to get to a place where we feel triggered to repeat a pattern, but we are conscious enough of our feelings about the situation to take a breath. Until we can get to that place of conscious awareness, we’ll continue to put up our shields to avoid feeling our feels. 

And if we don’t turn our feelings into thoughts and words, then the feelings will remain in our body, trying to get our attention by making us repeat relational patterns.

So if you are using defence strategies to not feel, or you are repeating a pattern in your relationships, chances are, you are holding unprocessed feelings. Therapy can help.