In Understanding Defensive Parts Through An IFS Lens, Part 1, we unpacked the various immature defenses that can get in the way of holding ourselves accountable when we’ve made a mistake or done something hurtful. These defenses are often used when trauma causes us to lose touch with the impact of natural remorse. We’re supposed to feel bad when we hurt someone else.
We focused on defensive parts- and my partner Jeff was willing to be the IFS demo for defensive parts- in our last LOVE SCHOOL, which you can join now if you want to watch the recording.
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Whether you call that guilt, healthy shame, or remorse, it’s a very uncomfortable feeling to know that you’ve hurt someone you care about. That discomfort we’re supposed to feel is there for a reason. As Karla McLaren teaches in The Language of Emotions, every emotion is an “action-requiring neurological program.” The action required when we feel guilt, healthy shame, and remorse is relational repair. Those emotions are intended to motivate us to help the person we’ve hurt feel better, to heal the rift, to initiate instant repair, to try to restore the other person to being okay, to reconnect the disconnection caused by the hurtful behavior, to save the relationship. When our trauma burdens are relatively light, or after we’ve done a lot of therapy to heal our traumas, we develop shame resilience. We can handle feeling healthy guilt, shame, and remorse without collapsing into feeling like a complete loser who doesn’t deserve to exist.
The problem is that people who were shamed when they were innocent, who carried the shame of their perpetrators when they had done nothing wrong, develop an intense aversion to feeling even the healthiest of shame, the kind that’s meant to motivate repair. We lack shame resilience and are extremely fragile when it comes to feeling ashamed of what we’ve done, in the way we’re supposed to feel when we hurt someone. We may even become shameless, such that we don’t feel the least bit bad when we do hurtful things.
We’re supposed to feel bad when do bad. We’re not meant to collapse into a pit of self-loathing. We’re not meant to feel so burdened by shame that we make it all about ourselves and how bad we are. We’re not meant to believe that we’re bad to the bone. We’re meant to feel bad about an isolated incident or a pattern of behavior (like defensiveness after we’ve hurt someone), and that bad feeling is supposed to motivate us to apologize and make amends with the person we hurt, to change, and to stop that behavior and hopefully never do it again.
But when someone is shameless, when we don’t feel bad when we hurt someone, but instead respond with righteous indignation and defensiveness, we’re likely to keep making the same mistake countless times, while shirking accountability, squirming out of any attempt to be held to account.
Shame attacks, also called “projected shame,” “reactive shame” or “toxic shame,” often drive defensive parts. Shame attacks stem from the inner belief that if we are seen as flawed, if we’re anything less than perfect, even if we just make a small mistake, we will be rejected, abandoned, beaten, or annihilated. Grandiosity is one way to ward off feeling not good enough, puffing ourselves up, one-upping anyone who tries to hold us to account, shutting down and stonewalling, lashing out, attacking, and blaming anyone who protests bad behavior, using every tactic possible to shut up the person who is protesting hurtful behavior.
At the other end of the spectrum, when we get busted for doing something hurtful, we might collapse into a pit of reactive shame, which often causes us to demand narcissistic supply (praise, approval, validation, sex, attention) to combat the deep feelings of unworthiness. When a shame attack hits, it’s not the same as the healthy bad feeling we get when we realize we’ve done something to hurt someone else. In the throes of a shame attack, the message echoing in our heads is “I’m not just bad—I’m a completely worthless piece of unlovable, disgusting trash.” If we feel that worthless, it’s really hard to own up to our mistakes and simply admit when we do something that might harm others, scare people we care about, or let others down.
If we’re on the other side of someone else’s shame attack, it can feel very frustrating and self-absorbed. When we’re upset because someone has done something hurtful, the last thing we want to do is pull someone up by their bootstraps out of the pit of a shame attack. We want apologies. We want repair attempts. We want accountability. We want someone to try to help soothe us and make us feel better. But when someone is in a shame spiral because of past trauma, those valid expectations often go unmet. This can activate hopeless parts in the one who’s been hurt.
That’s why we have to take responsibility for doing our own guilt and shame work. It’s not fair to others to withhold accountability, apologies, and repair just because we feel not good enough when we mess up. We can’t expect the people we’ve hurt to help us feel better when we collapse into that pit after a shame attack. That’s what therapists are for.
What we can do is do the Internal Family Systems (IFS) work to reparent the parts that feel worthless, defective, broken, damaged, and not good enough. If we lack shame resilience because a perpetrator in childhood projected their shame onto us, when we were innocent, we can toss that shame back where it belongs- onto the perpetrator. We can refuse to carry that burden any longer and demand justice. Once we hand a perpetrator’s shame back to them, we open up space inside so we can feel our own pro-social, healthy guilt and shame, without collapsing into the pit.
Projected shame can only heal in the light of compassion. When we stand in Self, or if a good therapist models that Self energy with us, we can meet the parts that were shamed by our perpetrators, or the parts that feel healthy guilt, shame, and remorse because we’ve hurt others- with the unconditional love of Self. Without dismissing it, avoiding it, or collapsing into it, we can hold our parts with tenderness and permission to be imperfectly perfectly human. We can allow ourselves to feel the bad feelings of having hurt someone we care about without escalating into a totalizing belief like “I am bad.” Then, and only then, can defensive parts begin to relax, step back, and loosen their grip on our behaviors, allowing us to be more accountable when we inevitably mess up.
Why Narcissistic Defenses Are Not the Enemy
Too often in spiritual and psychological spaces, we demonize these immature defenses—labeling people as “toxic” or “narcissist. We might be understandably tempted to cut them off, diagnose them (or ourselves) with pathological diagnoses, and deem anyone who acts defensive after they’ve done something hurtful as untreatable. While it’s true that it’s difficult to treat someone who employs these defenses, defensiveness is never the root problem. Defensive behavior is a symptom of unhealed wounds and unmet needs, or in IFS language, defensive parts are protectors, doing their best to avoid feeling the utter worthlessness and unlovability of the untreated “exiles,” who carry projected shame from their perpetrators to such a strong degree that they can’t tolerate feeling their own healthy guilt, shame, and remorse.
They’re the psyche’s attempt to protect something precious: our worth, our belonging, our right to exist. Instead of shaming our hurt inner children and the protector parts that try to prevent us from feeling their hurt, we can thank our defensive parts. Instead of letting them run the show, we can see them like a school bus full of young, unruly kids. We can get just enough space from them to see them as the survival strategies that they are. We can even name them as their impulses surface in our consciousness. Before we let them drive the bus, we can contain them- but this isn’t usually possible until we heal the parts that feel worthless underneath.
Once we bear compassionate witness and unburden the parts that carry past shame, we can say: “Thank you, protectors, for trying to keep me safe. But I don’t need you to drive the bus anymore.” From that place, we can bring curiosity to our reactions, courage to our self-examination, and compassion to the parts of us that are still learning how to love and be loved. Then, the next time someone approaches us with their upset, we can turn our care towards them, instead of being so self-absorbed and focused on our own unhealed parts.
The Path To Healing
Healing doesn’t mean erasing all defenses. It means recognizing them when they arise, pausing before acting on them, and choosing a more relational, more conscious, less reflexive and automatic response. It means building the emotional capacity to stay present with the discomfort of knowing we hurt people sometimes. We mess up. We’re not perfect. We let people down. Rather than outsourcing our inner discomfort through projection, rationalization, righteous indignation, or blame-shifting, we have to temper our nervous systems to be capable of being with those feelings. We have to increase our window of tolerance so we have more shame resilience when we do something wrong. Then we can have more empathy for the people we hurt, rather than making it all about ourselves. This can open us up to the possibility of healthy repair.
When we get defensive when someone else is trying to hold us to account, or when we can’t even face what we’re doing, this is a signal that something is unresolved in us. That doesn’t make us broken; it makes us human. And it’s okay to be human, as long as we own up to our imperfect humanness when it’s safe to do so.
To the part of you that’s armored up: Thank you. You did your best to help me survive.
To the part of you that wants to be free: You are ready.
To the part of you that is afraid to look within: You are not alone.
To the part of you that has hurt others: You can handle holding yourself accountable. The people you love deserve it.
Let this be your invitation to meet yourself—with clarity, humility, and grace. Because you are not the sum of your defenses. You are the spacious love that exists beneath them, waiting to be reclaimed.
In our next gathering of LOVE SCHOOL, we’ll be focusing on other relational trauma symptoms, including withholding affection or sex, idealizing someone, then devaluing them, regressing and becoming emotionally or logistically incompetent in the presence of the intimate other, recklessly offering yourself up for exploitation because you can’t imagine someone would stay unless they’re getting used, and testing their partner with provocative behaviors. And I suspect we’d have stirred up some juicy Q&A after diving into defensiveness. So please join us if this would help you, or refer clients, friends, and loved ones to join us if it feels right.
Join the IFS Community Of Practice & Relational Recovery Program LOVE SCHOOL here.
If you’re brand new to IFS, you might want to start with joining us for the live six week Zoom course IFS For Self-Healing, which starts June 25. LOVE SCHOOL is built upon a foundation of IFS, so it’s a great place to start if you think LOVE SCHOOL might be right for you. We just announced that the wonderfully compassionate and brilliant IFS trainer and therapist Laura Schmidt will be joining us.
Join IFS For Self-Healing here.