- The session discusses human vulnerability and defense mechanisms against vulnerability.
- The primary literature on vulnerability comes from depth psychology and classic psychology.
- Freud's theory initially focused on defense mechanisms before shifting to sex.
- With the advancement of neuroscience, there is now a better understanding of how defense mechanisms work.
- The speaker combines knowledge from depth psychology and neuroscience to make sense of human vulnerability.
- The unfolding of human potential is the central topic, with vulnerability being a part of it.
- The brain is equipped to tune out distressing experiences and shut out pain.
- Humans have the potential to repress bad memories, numb discomfort, and protect against mortality.
- Defense mechanisms also include turning a blind eye to rejection, suppressing alarming feelings, and denying vulnerability.
- These defense mechanisms are not disorders, but rather a way to protect against overwhelming vulnerability.
- The story of human vulnerability involves getting hurt and wounded, leading to the erection of defense mechanisms.
- The first line of defense is usually numbing feelings, followed by deeper defenses.
- Defenses are necessary for coping with life, but problems arise when they become stuck.

- The brain numbs out certain feelings to be equipped for a wounding environment
- This is not a problem as long as the defenses do not get stuck
- Numbing out allows individuals to do their work and function in a wounding environment
- When the defenses get stuck, there can be a significant cost to mental health and human potential
- Defenses are meant to come down at the end of the day, allowing feelings to return
- The brain's mechanisms of defense protect against vulnerability that is too much to bear
- Defenses work best when employed situationally and temporarily
- Defenses are automatic and cannot be controlled volitionally
- There are three basic mechanisms of defense: emotional defense, loss of vulnerable feelings, and resulting impulses to action.

- Defense mechanisms can lead to a loss of vulnerable feelings and impulses to action
- Defense mechanisms can also numb sensations and restrict the sensorium
- Children who are numbed out may not feel tiredness, hunger, pain, or bladder pressure
- Loss of feelings and emotions is common in children with defense mechanisms
- Research shows that children who don't feel embarrassment lack empathy
- The brain defends against vulnerability by causing blindness and memory loss
- Perceptual defense directs attention away from things that give rise to vulnerable feelings
- Perceptual defense can cause difficulties in attention and lead to false self-esteem

- High self-esteem is often a result of denial and an inability to admit shortcomings
- Many people have a flight from vulnerability and cannot handle rejection or negative emotions
- This can lead to a lack of self-awareness and an inability to see trouble coming
- Children who are blind to rejection or lack of invitation often walk into trouble and struggle socially
- Some individuals are unable to read social cues and continue talking even when the conversation is over
- Vulnerability can also impact focus and attention, leading to attentional deficits
- Attachment can be reversed as a defense mechanism to avoid potential hurt or rejection
- Defensive detachment occurs when someone rejects or hates someone they had a fantasy attachment with, as a way to protect themselves
- The instinct to depend on others can also be defended against, as it sets one up for potential disappointment or hurt.

- Attachment instincts can make individuals vulnerable to hurt and disappointment when they depend on others.
- Some children appear independent but are actually defending themselves against depending on others.
- Sensitivity and the amount of wounding in the environment contribute to a child's likelihood of becoming defended.
- Highly sensitive children are more vulnerable and may develop defenses quickly.
- Genetics and prenatal/birth experiences can influence sensitivity levels.
- More sensitive children are being born, leading to increased allergies and diagnoses like autism and ADHD.
- Separation, shame, and alarm are highly wounding experiences for children.
- Discipline practices often revolve around fear, shame, and separation, despite separation being the most damaging.
- When defenses get stuck and the wounding environment persists, there is a problem.
- Resilience can be developed through sadness and tears.
- Peer interaction is a major source of wounding in children's lives.
- Placing children together at younger ages increases their vulnerability to hurt.

- Peer orientation and flight from vulnerability are connected and concerning issues
- Research shows that today's youth have 40% less empathy than previous generations
- Children are becoming equipped to function in wounding environments, leading to a flight from vulnerability
- Mental health centers and research are alarmed by this flight from vulnerability
- Resilience research misinterprets the functioning of children in wounding environments
- Children need to feel their emotions and vulnerability to realize their full potential
- Spoiling children comes from standing in the way of the adaptive process
- Slow route to defendedness occurs when children fail to experience futility and become fragile
- Defendedness impacts learning and behavior, leading to resistance to attending and a reluctance to take risks
- Children should be noisy and talk about what distresses them, but when they become quiet, it is a sign that something is wrong

- The deficits in children include a reluctance to take risks, a reticence to seek assistance, a blindness to rejection, and a denial of shortcomings and inadequacies.
- Children may experience a proneness to boredom and a need for constant stimulation to fill a hole inside.
- A deadening of alarm and a loss of caution can occur, leading to a reckless and careless attitude.
- Some children may become attracted to alarming situations and may engage in self-harm as a way to feel an adrenaline rush and a sense of invincibility.
- The flight from vulnerability can lead to a predisposition to prescription and non-prescription drugs.
- Pills do not help in the process of maturation and realizing our potential as human beings.
- The ultimate cost of getting stuck in defenses is a hindrance to maturation.

- The session discusses human vulnerability and defense mechanisms against vulnerability.
- The speaker combines knowledge from depth psychology and neuroscience to understand human vulnerability.
- Defense mechanisms include numbing feelings, repressing memories, and denying vulnerability.
- These defense mechanisms are not disorders but a way to protect against overwhelming vulnerability.
- Problems arise when defense mechanisms become stuck, leading to mental health issues.
- Defense mechanisms are automatic and cannot be controlled voluntarily.
- Three basic mechanisms of defense are emotional defense, loss of vulnerable feelings, and resulting impulses to action.
- Defense mechanisms can lead to a loss of empathy and restrict attention and self-awareness.
- Attachment instincts can be defended against to avoid potential hurt or rejection.
- Highly sensitive children are more vulnerable and may develop defenses quickly.
- Separation, shame, and alarm are highly wounding experiences for children.
- Peer interaction and flight from vulnerability are concerning issues.
- Today's youth have 40% less empathy than previous generations.
- Children need to feel their emotions and vulnerability to realize their full potential.
- Defendedness impacts learning and behavior, leading to resistance to attending and a reluctance to take risks.
- The flight from vulnerability can lead to a predisposition to drug use.
- The ultimate cost of getting stuck in defenses is a hindrance to maturation.

This is the first of 2 sessions on human vulnerability.

A huge topic, a huge topic, and 2 sessions will not do justice to it.

But again, My role is to try to distill this to the essence for you so that it makes sense.

There's many, many theories of human vulnerability.

The primary literature here comes from depth psychology, classic psychology.

In fact, Freud's theory was initially called a theory of defense until he got distracted by sex.

But initially it was that, and that still is his primary contribution to really the understanding of humans and human dynamics is the role of vulnerability and of defenses against vulnerability.

Now unfortunately he could only guess at these things, and so it was about the defense of mind.

Now we have neuroscience and can take pictures of the brain, can investigate, and Now neuroscience brings us with much more of a picture of how these mechanisms of defense actually work.

And so I have the advantage of being able to put the 2 together.

Most neuroscientists have no background in depth psychology and of course depth psychologists had no background in neuroscience.

And so I stand at a particular time of a juxtaposition of scientific knowledge in which I can piggyback on the brilliant minds of many in depth psychology and then still have at my fingertips the neuroscience literature on this.

So hopefully I can make sense of this material to you and how it fits with our topic, our topic of the unfolding of human potential.

And for those of you that like to see where we are on the theoretical map, I've basically drawn this picture.

So at the center, we have the unfolding of human potential.

We've spent the last 6 sessions unfolding the maturation factor and looking at the 3 basic dynamics walking around it, circumnavigating the maturation factor, and in particular the emergent, the adaptive, and the integrative processes.

And so now we go across to another side to this, to vulnerability, which is all about defense.

Defense against a vulnerability, too much to bear, its cost, the way it works, how it happens, and so on.

So we'll start our story again with another kind of diagram.

It struck me that there was some kind of parallel here about potential to the maturation processes.

So I decided that I would do this just for illustration, that every human brain is equipped to, every human brain is equipped to tune out what distresses.

This is not, Our brains are equipped to do this.

So often this is considered that there's something wrong with the brain to tune out what distresses.

For a child never to talk about what distresses.

For there to be a lack of memory about what distresses.

All our brains are capable of doing this.

This is part of our, this is what we have as humans is the potential to tune out what distress is.

Every human brain is equipped to shut out what hurts.

If the wounds are too great to shut out the pain, our human brains are equipped to do this.

To repress bad memories, to dull the pain, to numb out discomfort, to protect against a sense of mortality.

Hardest thing to see is our ultimate separation from all things that we are attached to.

And is, or the book that is written on his theory, the denial of death.

It is so hard to look our mortality right straight in the eye, and to look separation in the eye, in fact.

And this is 1 of the large problems around anxiety is that is that facing separation?

Blinds us it's a vulnerability too much to bear Every human brain is equipped to turn the blind eye to rejection to not see the lack of invitation to exist in someone's eyes.

You can sense their rejection that they're experiencing, that they want so much to be accepted and yet they're with somebody who doesn't extend to them that very basic invitation to exist in their presence.

You all know children who gravitate towards those very individuals that reject them.

And you'd think that run the other way, and yet are in those.

Every single human brain is equipped to turn a blind eye to rejection, to shield against a sense of insecurity, to suppress alarming feelings, to extinguish feelings of shame and embarrassment.

In fact, There is evidence that our children are feeling less shame, that they blush less, that they're feeling less embarrassment.

And so there's indication that they're feeling less of these emotions.

Every human brain is equipped to divest of caring and responsibility.

I don't care, it doesn't matter, whatever.

Every human brain is equipped to do this, to deny shortcomings and to filter out vulnerable feelings as well as feelings of vulnerability.

Again, the point of this is simply to bring out the point that this is not disorder.

It causes a lot of dysfunction, But this in itself is not, there is nothing wrong with a brain that does this.

This is the way it was meant to be, to protect against a vulnerability too much to bear.

So when individuals don't understand this, they don't come from the right place.

It is part of our potential, our capacity to do this.

And what it is all about is a flight from vulnerability.

It is to defend against a place of vulnerability that is too much to bear.

And so the story of human vulnerability is, and I'm using the heart here as a metaphor for this, because the heart is both a symbol of human vulnerability, and it is also a symbol of emotion, and it's in our emotion in which our vulnerability is felt.

If we didn't have feelings, our feelings wouldn't get hurt.

It's in the fact that we have feelings that our feelings get hurt.

And so we feel our wounds, and that's very important, and I'll say that again.

If we didn't have feelings, we wouldn't feel hurt, we wouldn't get hurt.

That's important to understand because that's the brain's basic defense.

The basic defense is actually the back out of the very basic human potential to feel.

This is a potential we all have as human beings to feel our emotions, something that is distinctly different than all other mammals, all other creatures with the limbic system.

But going back to this story, so we get hurt, we get wounded.

The story of us as humans is that we're fragile creatures.

This is not a disorder, this is part, part of who we are.

And when the wounds are too much, when our feelings get hurt too much, when the sense of vulnerability is too much to bear, defenses are erected.

And the first line of defense is generally around feelings, and we'll talk about this, the numbing of feelings, and there's backup defenses, deeper defenses, perceptual defenses, we'll talk about those and so on.

But there's, and this is all relative of course and all a matter of continuum.

And these defenses play a very, very important part.

There's none of us that could live without defenses.

We can't bear to see the rejection in the eyes of individuals that are important to us.

We can't bear to live out our full vulnerability, to look mortality in the eye.

And so what happens is to be able to be equipped for a wounding environment, the brain numbs out certain feelings, it numbs out the more vulnerable feelings and this is fine, this allows us to do our work, to be equipped for a wounding environment this is not a problem, The problem is if these defenses get stuck.

Happily so, because I've been a therapist for years.

I can sense the expectations you come here with.

I can sense the suffering in individuals' lives.

I automatically want to make things better.

And I can't possibly deal with all the appraisals and the judgments or sometimes the lack of invitation that I see and that I sense.

And so the brain thankfully numbs me out.

And when it numbs me out, I don't feel my tiredness.

I don't feel my hunger I don't feel a lot of things because I'm equipped to work in this environment But at the end of the day at the end of the week when I get to go home My guard comes down my feelings come back Many of you know this the School for some of you is a wounding environment.

You go there, your feelings are numbed out so that you can do your work.

You come home and all your feelings come back.

They're meant to come back and as long as they come back it's fine.

There's no cost as long as this is it allows you to work in a wounding environment.

When our soldiers go to Afghanistan and they're in a wounding environment and their brain numbs them out because they can't afford to look.

Their buddies have got wounded and they don't know if they'll be coming home.

The problem is, is when they come back, those defenses are stuck.

They haven't come down at the end of the day.

And we all know that literature coming out and the great cost of this.

And we've known this for a long time since we began to study this in Vietnam and the legacy of this.

But now we realize that this is commonplace.

Some of you, I can remember that experience, of the very first time going back into the halls of the high school where I went.

I was actually going back to do professional development for the teachers there.

Little did I know, did they know, that I was a graduate of that school and I went in and said, oh my goodness how did I handle this?

I could just feel the woundedness, the wounding environment there.

I said, oh, I had to be numbed out to be coming here.

I had to be numbed out to walk these halls.

Thank goodness I don't have to walk here anymore.

And some of you will have had the same experience.

The point is here is our brain equips us to work in a wounding environment.

I had a client who I had worked to for some time.

An unfortunate accident, their house caught fire in the middle of the night and she woke up and she saved all the kids, the dogs, she got them all out into safety and then I didn't know about this, her children came to me about 2 weeks later and say, something has happened to mom.

It's just that she can't afford to look at it.

Her brain numbed her to be able to do what she had to do.

She had work to do and her brain was phenomenal.

It's just gonna take a while for her to get her memories and her feelings back.

I wasn't concerned because I knew the defense did not go deep I had worked with her sometimes so I knew that it would be restored But the point is she had work to do there's no time you can face your mortality when there's fire raging in the house You've got work to do and so again you look at it in many many ways in many examples There's no problem when it ebbs back and forth.

Every 1 of us needs defenses to live in our life.

The issue is not that defenses exist and it's a good thing they do.

And we'll look at the cost, especially in the next session, on cost maturation to the realization of human potential because we can't both be defended against our feelings and experience being able to come into our potential as human beings.

So this was a discovery of depth psychology.

It has been affirmed by neuroscience of these defenses.

How absolutely the brain is wired to do this.

So to review here in terms of the defenses, the brain's mechanisms of defense.

The brain is designed to protect its host from a vulnerability too much to bear.

Again, this is not disorder, not disorder.

The purpose of these defenses is to enable us to function in a wounding environment where a sense of vulnerability could backfire.

We're all a little bit vulnerable for the world we find ourselves in.

And so to be able to be equipped to work in it, to be able to sleep, to be able to do basic functioning, the kids that I worked with in prison, that is a wounding environment.

That is an incredibly wounding environment.

The insults, the sarcasm, the put-downs, the thing, and they were all defended in a sense just to be there.

Now it protected their basic functioning.

They could sleep, they could eat, and they could focus on what was important to them not was important to the rest of us but they could focus on what was important to them I couldn't sleep I couldn't eat and I couldn't focus on what was important to me.

The whole point of working with individuals deeply as a therapist did not prepare me for that environment.

And that's the point where my guard could come down.

But you see that they needed to be equipped.

There was no end of the day, there was no end of the week.

And there's no coming home for many adolescents, especially those that are peer-oriented.

It used to be that they came home at the end of the day, now it just moves from school to the internet and social media.

They're in a continual flight from vulnerability.

And that's 1 of the problems that we have and 1 of the things I talk about in Hold On To Your Kids is the flight from vulnerability that is happening with our children.

There are so many signs of this and it has incredible implications for the unfolding of human potential.

The defenses work best, as we said, when employed situationally and temporarily.

They're meant to come down at the end of the day.

They're meant to come down where we feel safe.

And finally, the final point here, these defenses are automatic, they're mechanistic, they cannot be controlled volitionally.

It's not as if somebody's doing it on purpose.

That doesn't mean that we can't align our will with our defenses, try not to feel, try not to think.

But it itself is mechanistic, it's non-volitional.

I would ask routinely the kids that I would work with here, are you the type of person who tries not to think and feel?

And almost 19 out of 20 answered, absolutely.

They were aligning their own self with their defenses but their defenses were high.

They tried not to think, they tried not to feel, they were being protected against the vulnerability too much to bear.

There appears to be 3 basic mechanisms of defense, 3 basic defenses.

The first and most direct is the emotional defense.

This is also part of the function of the limbic system, the emotional brain, and so there are filters that it can filter out the feelings that are getting hurt, the feelings that hurt too much, the feelings that give us too much of a sense of a vulnerability or we anticipate getting hurt.

And so again if the defense is more than situational it leads to a loss of vulnerable feelings and the resulting impulses to action.

Now this can actually extend even more so to sensations.

If there's some defense against this, also 1 doesn't feel.

And you know exactly what it is, that when you're in a wounding environment, you lose your sense of tiredness.

You don't know that you're tired until your guard comes down and all of a sudden you're exhausted.

You lose your hunger, you don't know that you're hungry the kids I worked with again in prison didn't know they were tired, didn't know they were hungry many of them never even felt such things and many of them didn't even feel pain and if you don't feel pain you also can't feel bladder pressure and so most of them suffered from inuresis, bed wetting, because the bladder pressure didn't wake them up at night.

And so again this is a very common, simply the senses are numb, The sensorium is restricted.

I had 1 client who, when she was under stress, lost all her color vision.

So when it goes to that, and you can see why, as Some kids have absolutely lost their feelings of pain.

These kids will go out in the middle of a Canadian winter with T-shirts on.

They are meant to feel all of these things.

Now again, the problem is not, and I repeat, the problem is not when this is for a day.

The problem is not even when it's for a week.

As long as the guard comes down and this doesn't get stuck but when the defenses get stuck or the circumstances don't change or there is a situation a deep situation that is there in which the vulnerability is too much to bear.

And the first level, again as I say, is in terms of sensations, in terms of feelings, that we can't feel our emotions.

That doesn't mean the emotions aren't there.

It makes the math a lot easier to do, but nevertheless for some reason in my mind I thought 99 was a symbolic number and I created it on just using my my own adolescents and their friends to see the the kinds of feelings.

So what I judged to put a feeling in that list was whether or not they could access that feeling at least once every 2 weeks.

And I got 99 feelings of this that the average adolescent, or what I would say a well-functioning adolescent would feel.

And then I took that test to the kids that I worked with, who were stuck, who were numbed out, and so on.

And on average, there was 80% less feeling.

On 2 of these kids, they could only recognize 2 of the 99 emotions.

We were so busy trying to diagnose these children, so busy to try and find a syndrome that they fit into, so busy trying to focus on their behavior, we didn't see the thing that was right before our eyes.

And again, when you start looking at this, you say, oh my goodness, all the evidence is coming in that our children are using it.

Their language says, when I say I don't care, doesn't matter.

When they no longer admit to being scared or afraid when they lose their embarrassment they no longer blush when they lose their shame you no longer see that there is timidity there they're no longer trying to hide or conceal when feeling ashamed they're they're a brazen and their appearance We say there is a loss of human feeling.

Now some of these feelings are not very comfortable to feel at all, but they're part of our humanity.

To be fully human is to be able to feel shame, embarrassment, alarm, It's all part of it, to feel guilt, to feel responsibility.

It's the capability, we must be able to feel those things.

That is where our humanity lies, to be both humane and human.

And so we shouldn't be surprised when the research comes out, for instance, a recent bit of research that said that if you don't feel embarrassment, children who don't feel embarrassment lack empathy.

We shouldn't be surprised because it all comes from the same place.

Of course if you're going to lose your blush, you're also losing the capacity to care deeply.

But a blush is because your woundedness is right there and when you're protected against it, then also there's a deeper defense and so it makes sense that it is there.

Unfortunately most researchers don't have a theory in which to interpret their material and so it's isolated bits of information that you read in your newspaper.

But when you have a theory to make sense of it now you'll be able to fit it in.

Oh this is that piece, this is where it comes from because when you see this it becomes self-evident to you and there's a great concern about the flight from vulnerability.

So again the heart moves us, our limbic system moves us.

It moves us to caution when we're alarmed.

It moves us to care when attached to someone or something.

It moves us to hope when we're attached to outcomes, to draw near when we're attached to a person, to trust when we're attached in a dependent mode, and we'll talk about it later on in attachment and so on and so on and so on.

We need to be easily moved, easily moved.

The answer to not being impulsive is for there to be opposite movements at the same time, but were meant to be easily moved.

The problem is when the brain defends us against the vulnerability, when these feelings get hurt and they're hurt too much and the vulnerability is too much to bear, the brain can't both defend us and move us simultaneously.

And that was the basic, basic understanding and conclusion of depth psychology.

We have lost that basic understanding and insight.

When we turn to a behavioral approach, when we turn to the rational approach, we lost the understanding of our emotional fragility and how that works.

And again, the hope is that neuroscience will bring us back although it's fairly a theoretical in its presentation but the hope is that it can bring us back when we lose these feelings we lose that again that which is absolutely necessary to become fully human.

The brain goes, what the child won't see won't hurt him.

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Intensive I - session 8