The Defense Mechanisms of Type 8

(I’ve really been forward to doing this one ‘cause I think that’s one where the real point largely hasn’t been groked, actually

I also find it interesting how the partial presence of these accounts for the distinct difference in ‘flavor’ between direct adjacents (9w8 & 7w8) and their superego wing cousins. )

counter-repression/ counter-identification

Naranjo actually had to make up a word for this because there was not much literary precedent. This might be because while there’s some debate about Mr. Freud’s enneagram, no one thinks he’s assertive triad, so it wouldn’t have occurred to him despite his considerable gifts of introspection. (For the record, I’m voting 5 on Freud because for better or worse he was very comfortable just making shit up. The biggest criticism of psychoanalysis is that it’s too speculative & not sufficiently grounded in concrete evidence – I don’t think that fucker was even w6. )

Still, if you picture his basic theory of the ego being the interface to reality while trying to reconcile it with the demands of the superego and id, you might picture some flavors of ego as being more aligned with the superego, such as 1. (in terms of the resulting subjective experience, this causes a person who is identified with having to be ‘good’.)

8 is the reverse of that: Out of all the types it’s probably the most aligned and identified with the id – animal impulses, desires, self-interest, lust, anger… all that is ruled to be ‘self’ rather than ‘not-self’, allowed into consciousness and experienced as congruent.

Seeing as loads of types can be violent and indulgent, jury’s out on whether 8s actually have all that much more of it than everyone else, they’re just not hush hush about it and don’t feel the need to hide it beyond strategic considerations.

Also it’s worth noting that while for many people these components are ruled as ‘bad’ or unwanted, they’re there for a reason. The pleasure drive is your will to live, your vitality, energy & libido, the fuel that powers the psychic machine. An inability to experience pleasure is called “depression” and generally considered kind of a bad thing.

However, having little in terms of inhibitions doesn’t mean that reality just yields up whatever the id desires. So the 8 still experiences an occasional frustration of their desires and hence still “needs” an ego and defense mechanisms.

For starters, one thing a freshly minted baby 8 might experience upon realizing that ‘I desire, therefore I am’ and embarking on their epic quest to do whatever the heck they please is people telling them not to do it or bomarding them with various messages about what they ought to be doing instead – the usual flood of environmental messages & expectations that typically results in the formation of a superego, including shame, guilt and taboos targetted at suppressing, inhibiting or modifying your natural desires. Misbehaving children get scolded & punished, basically, and for most this results in incorporating this thing called ‘rules’ into their thinking and somewhat curbing their wildest impulses to adjust to society.

But that adjusting is precisely what the 8 structure doesn’t want. The basic attitude has been characterized as ‘The assertive Opposition to the inhibition of Pleasure’. Or, in simpler terms, ‘you can’t tell me what to do!’. They don’t want to be pushed around, be made to yield to another’s will or dance to another’s pipe, let alone be at another’s mercy, but rather to remain their own masters and keep the autonomy to do as they please.

So what the 8 ego ‘has’ to do is the reverse of what the superego types do (hence, ‘counter-repression’): Rather than disown & repress the ‘animal within’, it’s the social expectations & messages that get the boot. To maintain an overall low level of inhibition & repression, the one thing that does have to get repressed is the superego itself, the very tendency to repress & inhibit things or tell yourself that you ‘should’ do this or that rather than what you please.

One consequence of this is that 8s are among those types that will just plain do the opposite of what you tell them or even escalate in defiance if you try to boss them around or come at them with a litany of ‘shoulds’, which for 8 is compunded by their general quickness to action compared to say, 4s or 5s.

More often than not, especially when going on automatic, the kneejerk response to anything imposing restraints or restrictions is self-assertion.

There isn’t often an experience of critical inner voices (probably far less than most other types), and even when there is, the person’s response will be to see it as goading to do the opposite and endure regardless in defiance. ‘Bet you can’t do X!’ - Yes they can. ‘No one is gonna help you now!’ - who cares, they’ll tough it out on their own. ‘are you going to whine like a little bitch?’ No they won’t. ‘Leeroy, no!’ Leeroy YES. ‘If you quit now nothing will change’ – Good, ‘cause they won’t quit. ‘Everyone hates you’ So what?

In terms of conscious experience this often shows as not tending to believe in grand ideas of justice or objective good or bad in the first place, or, in other individuals, that everyone tends to impose and rely on their own justice.

Pronouncements of virtue are mistrusted and often seen as deceptive hypocrisy, implorements to “be good” as disguised power plays or attempts at control.

And I mean, it’s not as if that isn’t often what these transparently are sometimes.

Besides owning & being aware of their own self-interest, 8s are often on the lookout for the base motivations of others (lest those impose their will on them) and sometimes become quite good at ‘smelling’ those underlying self-interested motivations… and seeing many of those people act like their plainly evident self-interest doesn’t exist certainly doesn’t make those others can seem to reinforce the belief that much of their so-called virtue is just self-serving manipulation.

Meanwhile 8s may see positively many things that others disown, such as anger, lust, assertion, looking to have influence, the excitement of risk and danger.… - the ‘animal within’ is seen not as something to be feared and kept under lock but as holding a natural wisdom from countless years of evolution Naranjo’s impression that ‘they’re trying to prove that what everyone calls ‘bad’ isn’t so’ is of course colored by his own lens, but it paints a picture.

Depending on the situation & degree of self-awareness this can, at best, lead to an attitude of honest no-nonsense realism that isn’t fused by others or bullshit.

But it can also lead to assuming no one is ever genuine & always looking to get the upper hand to the point that it’s basically just trust issues packaged in a way that sounds like a ‘tough truth’, (the common reactive triad ‘whatever hurts must be the truth’ error), or something that blatantly sounds like claiming everyone else is a scoundrel too so that you can feel justified in being a scoundrel yourself while telling yourself you’re some great truth-teller.

What doesn’t help at all is that there are some ppl who are uncomfortable with admitting that most interactions involve some level of self-interest & self-benefit & will bend over backwards to deny that and insist only some separate group of selfish evil manipulators ever look to get the best possible deal out of things. Something we can all learn from 8s is that some extent of self-assertion & looking to get yours is natural & healthy & keeps you from getting bulldozed by others.

Nor does it have to preclude relating somehow, indeed some 8s may tell you that a relationship works better if both know what they want out of it & what the other person wants out of it – this means taking responsibility for your actions and also knowing the other isn’t hiding a more nefarious intention behind sugarcoated professions of altruism.

(in turn what 8s might learn from the rest of us is that over-focussing on the self-interest based transactional picture/ ‘layer’ as if it’s the only thing that exists isn’t the complete picture either. )

A specific case of this is what you might call ‘counter-identification’, which is the 8 variant of the defensive use of negative labels.

This is when someone calls you some kinda name to scold or shame you & generally get you to change your behavior, and you’re just like, ‘yep, correct’ and take on the ‘bad’ label like it’s a badge of honor.

What this does, as a defense mechanism, is to immediately take away the other person’s power over you or ability to control you.

For example, generally when someone calls you a loudmouth, it’s to get you to shut up, to make you change your behavior because they will hurt or shame you by calling you a name.

So when you say, ‘yep I’m a loudmouth & proud of it’, the the power behind the threat immediately falls away. You take away their ‘or else’.

What are they going to do now if you keep being loud, call you a loudmouth? - but that doesn’t bother you. You’d just laugh in their face. (loudly.)

In other words, it’s responding to “If you don’t do what we say, we’ll label you as bad.” by saying “Ok, then I guess I’m bad” so they can’t hold the threat of “badness” over you to control you, manipulate you or make you do anything.

As 8 is an assertive type, this is also done preemptively. Next time the person introduces themselves they might outright say ‘I’m a loudmouth’ to the new group of people, and that instantly lets everyone know that you consider yourself entitled to be as loud as you please and that they can’t hurt you or get to you by criticizing your volume. If you own it & flaunt it, it can’t be used against you as a ‘gotcha’. You control the narrative.

You may view guilt & shame & high standards of how you ‘should’ be as being (very often at least) useless things that you do not need as they just hold people back, lead them to torture themselves or be controlled by others who use the instilling of guilt, shame & expectations to make others dance like puppets. You side instead with the part of you that asserts that you get to exist and others will just have to deal with it, and move to defend and keep that autonomy.

So with this also comes an understanding that it’s your job to assert & look out for your interests & stand up for yourself (& a corresponding expectation that if other want or don’t like something they should say so & enforce it)

So again, for contrast purposes:

Identification with the aggressor (6): “Growing up, my dad said I was a problem child. ” [insert either insecurities about this or defiant angry repudiation of the ones who said it]

Retroflection (4): “They called me a ‘problem child’ because they didn’t understand me, but the reality is that I just wasn’t a fucking conformist...” [an alternate, but still in some way negative interpretation/label that shifts the narrative. Not ‘problem child’, nonconformist.]

Counter-identification (8): “I was something of a problem child as a teen.” [said with a confident ‘so what’ attitude]

So, unlike 4 or 6, the 8 isn’t going for a ‘poor me’ effect here (indeed on average the expectation that anyone would care would tend to be low), but rather taking the part of the villain rather than the victim. If people get offended & respond like ‘wow, they’re an asshole and not even ashamed’, it’s working as intended. If they call the 8 more names or try to guilt or shame them, they laugh it off & don’t care, the point of it is not to care. Being able to be shameless is the point – it’s supposed to keep the scorn bouncing right off without ever touching your heart.

It’s only when/if you see the 8 in question show more tender feelings & complex humanity in a different context that you start to see something masochistic or self-hating about all this & start to wonder why this sentient, complex-ass human is calling themselves a devil. Most ppl probably wouldn’t even wonder they’d be too busy being set off by the latest outrageous statement.

However, while it might be pushed out awareness to some degree, (to varying extents depending on maturity, self-awareness & present levels of confidence & desperation) this does not at all mean that 8s are completely immune to shame, guilt, dissapointment, feeling shitty about themselves or feeling hurt when they’re bad-mouthed (especially when it comes from a loved one that they actually care about & can’t brush off as easily; That’s part of why they’re careful about who to ‘let in’ & give access to their consciousness in that way.)

As with all the reactive types there’s an element of having a sense of control, pre-empting future abandonment by putting the difficult stuff on the table right away & knowing the other’s reaction, and just a sense that it hurts less when it’s coming from your own mouth.

They might believe ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to be meaningless words made up by control-hungry authorities but sometims you hear something slipping out like ‘most people don’t like me’ or ‘if it’s between good & bad I guess I’m bad’ and it’s not phrased as a tragedy, they’ve accepted it, they’re fine with it, but the feeling that goes with it isn’t necessarily a good one either.

Even if it’s dismissed as silly & not believed with or identified with by their conscious mind or considered ‘real’ and certainly not expressed openly for ppl to poke at or make fun of, there can be some underlying sense of ‘badness’ or ‘sinfulness’, or feeling misunderstood and singled out & a corresponding desire for vengeance & punishment upon those who did it to you since they’re all against you.

More introspective individuals sometimes have more of a sense of it – or it can all come out for a bit if a situation really goes sideways & leads to an undesired result.

Individuals who went through seriously traumatic stuff sometimes present with a story about how it ‘turned them into a monster’ – not in the self-flaggellating guilty way you might see with 6s but rather with the implication that it was necessary to survive (and sometimes, to make sure others don’t go through it) and that they’ve accepted it, but still in a way that might be taken to imply that they see themselves as uniquely bereft of innocence, humanity or whatever quality of ‘preciousness’ makes one deserving of protection in a way that doesn’t seem consistent with how you may have seen them express introspection, regret, care or sillyness previously.

Unlike some other types where self-interest or defiance may be pushed out of awareness, for some 8s it can be desire for connection or actually giving a shit that can be hard to admit to, since it can feel like an exploitable weakness by which they may be controlled, dominated or humiliated.

There is a scale ranging from an admirable desire to own what you did and your own contributions to and benefits from your actions as they were, without sugarcoating it blaming others or circumstances all the way to simply preferring a flavor of copium where you put yourself in the driver’s seat no matter what. Saying ‘it was an accident’ or ‘I couldn’t do it’ leaves room for attack; ‘I don’t want to do it’ or ‘yeah that is exactly what I wanted it was all deliberate’ might seem like it lets you get out with your dignity intact….

But often this isn’t conscious at all. (‘revenge’ or ‘punishment’ implies admitting they hurt/wronged you in the first place, after all) – low awareness /immature 8s can actually be pretty touchy people who lash out with disproportionate retribution over any perceived slight short of perfect loyalty, but would deny any subjective sense of feeling personally slighted or attacked at all – they’ll just talk about how the person they’re attacking is a loser or something & how they couldn’t care less & are better of without them – as opposed to an equally immature 6 or 4 who wouldn’t shut up about how the others done them wrong to justify their retaliation – the 6 might turn it into a moral crusade as well. For the 8, the other defense mechanisms desenszitation & denial would also add to this/ make this easier to attack while acting like they didn’t feel hurt or wronged or shamed.

Useful Question:

Do you have some half-repressed sense of ‘sinfulness’, ‘badness’ or self-hate going on? You might not, especially if your life so far was mostly pleasant, but if you did, it would probably worth being aware of & doing something about.

Other things to try to keep on the radar are situations where hostile actions may stem from an unacknowledged sense of being personally slighted/wronged (especially since that can be a source of what would look to others like disproportionate or over-punituve reactions), or if there’s an unacknowledged desire for love at work in a situation where ‘officially’ you don’t care.

Just being aware of it doesn’t mean you need to act on it or let that person play you like a fiddle; The point is to make your decisions with all the information.

desensensitizing

To get desensitized to a possible source of pain or upset is to grow numb to it, to get used to it through exposure until you no longer feel it as much – such as when after the 100th time of seeing a horrible story on the news, you’re no longer quite as shocked or impacted as you would have been the first time.

So this refers to an increasing of pain thresholds or tuning out of pain, which is however different from preventing the actual experience of pain (by means of covering it with positivity and/or intellectual detachment, for example)

So where other types might figuratively put on a glove or slather on some compensatory ointment, the 8 strategy towards pain is more like growing a callus.

They kind of ‘have to’ due to the ‘architecture’ they have – being gut dominant requires you to take in the world in a rather immediate, viscerally felt way. You can’t ‘go away’ into your mind or comfort yourself by intensifying certain feelings, you don’t have the attachment type split attention thing at your disposal and the solution that 1s have of interpreting the adversity as something to ‘fix’ isn’t compatible with the counter-repression strategy to keep from being controlled, so you may feel like you just have to tough it out or suck it up, until it no longer seems like that big a deal.

That said, the 8s have some things going for them that make this easier for them than it might be for others – they’re usually on the lower end of the sensitivity range (or rather, it’s mostly low sensitivity, high-stimulation need people that would tend to develop 8-style defenses) – the high stimulation need is as much of a part of it because excitement can numb pain.

You know how they tell you to check yourself for wounds after you’ve been in an accident even if you don’t think you’ve been hurt because the adrenaline can drown out the pain? This is a survival response that will ensure you remain able to, say, fight off a tiger, and only after you escaped & are safe does the pain fully activate to ‘tell you’ to rest the injured body part.

Other excited physical states that can have such effects are the endophins released from physical activity, sexual arousal (which demonstrably lower disgust, pain & risk-avoidance responses) or just whatever silly state ppl get into when they egg each other on for a while, idk what chemical does it.

So since 8s already have a tendency to escalate & push the limits on everything they do, there is a natural temptation to escape pain via those excited states.

In that way it’s a bit similar to the 9s narcotization except that it involves making yourself calm rather than excited, but both involve making psychological pain ‘go away’ through affecting your physical state.

Another way that the 8s constitutional high stimulation need facilitates this is that, well, negative stimulation is still stimulation. You get a blurring of negative and positive, ironically not unlike what you see with 5 but for the opposite reason (even positive stuff can be unpleasant due to being over-stimulating) – so it’s not that 8s don’t experience fear, frustration or pain just like everyone else, but that up to a certain threshold at least they can tend to parse it as a positive thing, a thrill that makes you feel alive & actually motivates you to persevere.

If you hit a barrier – external like opposition or internal like fear or pain – you just push harder despite it, and if you’ve been doing that a lot ever since you were young, eventually you’d be totally used to disregarding fear or frustration to the point it looks like you barely experience it. (hence why 8s are usually high Cs on the big 5) – but it’s the result of a process & attitude (just like, say, the 7s instant reframing), not an actual absense of the capacity or lack of humanity as stereotypical descriptions sometimes make it seem.

This is also a notable difference to 7 which, while also pleasure-seeking, wouldn’t mind if everything were super easy & pain-free and the stuff they want just flew into their lap as quickly as they think of it. (especially 7w6.)

8 actually thrives on some amound of thrill & challenge and the sense of overcoming or triumphing over some difficulty, the sense of hitting a boundary & feeling one’s limits is welcome & affirms their sense of self.

At this point it’s easy to see how, in moderation and/or combination with self-awareness, this can produce a determined, unstoppable person who presses on without sweating the small stuff.

But if its too pronounced or self-reflection is lacking you might get someone who just kinda feels numbed out and does ever crazier wilder stuff just to feel something – or pulls all manner of short-sighted impulsive stunts that turn out harmful for themselves & their associates because the brakes ain’t working anymore.

You may have heard this news story and/or ted talk about how some ppl devised a bogus ‘psychopath test’ that looked precisely for high risk-taking, low shame, low fear responses etc. but then found that many perfectly functional people in high-risk professions (firemen, emrergency responders, enterpreneurs etc) scored just as high as the criminals (including amusingly the scientist who devised it himself)

So, unless you wanna do something as nonsensical as to call perfectly normal, even socially benefical people who did nothing wrong ‘psychopaths’, the only sane conclusion here imho is that what they devised was really more of a risk-taker test… and this is why you always need to have a well-matched control group, folks!

For most people risk-taking peaks from 15 to 25 and peters out afterwards which kinda makes sense so you explore & join different groups when young but then calm down when you have kids & won some status (as risk taking is good to win things but not so much to preserve them), but clearly there was some evolutionary benefit from having at least some life-long risk takers peppered in here & there.

But going back down to the individual scale now, another way that this style of defense can cause problems is in the expectation that nearly everything (or everything worth paying attention to, at least) is gonna have some adversarial, painful component – the idea that life is supposed to hurt & human interaction will always involve some conflict, basically.

Which, to an extent, is ultimately true, if you live your life packed in bubble wrap you won’t experience anything worh while & lack autonomy in your choices & honesty in your interactions. It’s not completely possible to avoid pain so to some level it must be lived with & accepted.

But it can be overdone to the point of considering way more hurt acceptable than one probably should. Like working yourself to death or taking over all the tough jobs in taking care of your family because ‘you’re tough & you can handle it’, seeing dysfunctional relationships as ok because you’re used to being the scapegoat, or, if you’re the parent or the boss, seeing as ‘tough love’ what to the child or employee feels very much like callous, uncaring or even sadistic behavior.

As with all the defense mechanisms there’s a sliding scare of self-awareness from 100% believing that ‘I can handle it’/’It doesn’t bother me’, to being inwardly aware that the situation hurts like a motherfucker but feeling that you have to keep it together outwardly.

Sometimes the wing also comes in here, with the w7s being more likely to think ‘I have to tough it out because I can’t depend on anybody’ while w9s might think ‘I have to tough it out because if I don’t, others will be affected’.

There’s a natural synergy between this & counter-repression because getting numb to it certainly makes it easier to call yourself a villain & shrug off the badmouthing of others; But counter-repression also gives you the ‘license’ to seek the intense states that keep the desenzitation going. Easier to ‘fuck the pain away’ when you refuse to have too many bogus rules related to your sex life, or to do risky activities when you’ve shut up any would-be annoying little voices telling you to be responsible. One can become desensitized to breaking rules or defying taboos itself, it gets easier when that muscle has been exercised – for better or for worse, depending on how sensible or bogus the rule in question is.

Useful Question:

Does it really not bother you?

Also, consider that just because you can take it doesn’t always mean you should have to – then, apply the same to other people.

denial/ blocking

While I was re-reading C&N in preparation for this, I was left wondering how this got canonized as the ‘main’ one because it seems a fairly secondary part of the whole constellation compared to counter-repression & desensization (and somewhat building on/ made easier by those), and also, Naranjo wasn’t even so sure if ‘denial’ is even the best word for this.

In colloquial speech (such as the ‘stages of grief’ context) what is meant usually meant by ‘denial’ is acting like the problem isn’t there, carrying on for a bit as if you had not gotten the bad news because you can’t begin to process it etc. if you wanted to pin that to some enneagram type it would probably be 9, 7 or 5 long before you’d think of 8. Reactive types generally have the least issues with seeing that there’s a problem & that bad stuff is bad.

The thing that 8s do – idk if ‘blocking’ would be a better word – is much more… particular than that. It’s not to do with ignoring problems, but rather blocking out inconvenient information, especially in the heat of a confrontation, though I suppose it is related to denial in the sense that it involves simply trying not to think about the thing.

It can easily ‘sneak in’ both because 8s already have a short distance between stimulus and response (so they’re not going to be contemplating their navels in mid-argument anyways) and because the combined effects of counter-repression & desensensitizing already make it so that whatever is being shouted at you doesn’t ‘hit’ as hard as it could & isn’t as likely to touch & affect you on a heart level.

Besides, the implicit judgements of the gut center tend to feel pretty ‘solid’ & ‘self-evident’.

When you put all these factors together, it becomes quite possible, even tempting, to just casually blow off criticism or contrary views that come your way without a second thought or a moment of doubt.

In confrontation, the 8 attention pattern already tends to adopt an adversarial mindset, honing on the opponent’s attackable spots & weaknesses.

The role of blocking or ‘defensive denial’ in this is to block out out information that doesn’t fit that pattern, your own doubts and weak spots, reasons why you might be wrong or might lose, softness and sympathy toward the target that might get in the way, until, in the extreme, it feels like you’re invinciple & untouchable whereas your opponent looks like a pushover or a silly cartoon that you needn’t feel fear or sympathy toward.

8s often have a ‘left-handed advantage’ in that there aren’t many 8s and so people aren’t practiced in handling them, & generally speaking people assume that if you confront someone with evidence of their wrongdoing or solid counter-arguments they have to stop & explain it away and at least react to it somehow. So if some 8 is just like ‘nope that’s not true’ & moves on to the next cheap shot at you, people often don’t know how to respond to it.

The 8 is not necessarily concerned with convincing you, themselves or the audience (unlike, say, a 3 doing their negation thing), or even with having a consistent viewpoint, in that moment, but with being the one who’s controlling the conversation, on a lizard brain level. Explaining away some counterargument can look an awful lot like playing defense; Short quippy replies or hammer-like declarations look like winning.

It’s not that there aren’t ways of ‘counterplay’ against this strategy, but some things that don’t work is trying to gotcha the 8 with The Rules/High Ground or (as much as it pains me to say that as a head type) trying to come up with some clever long-winded counter-argument. They’ll have the crowd laughing you down in no time.

This ‘blocking out’ of reason why you’re wrong or might lose is also how you get stories of 8s picking fights with people twice their size as little kids or otherwise fighting & resisting & behaving in ways that would be impossible if they hadn’t completely blocked out the real physical danger they were in.

Looks badass if it works out, but if it doesn’t, it can lead to stupid impulsive actions blowing up in your face or overreactions you’ll seriously regret – sometimes pausing to think or featuring in possible weaknesses in yourself and your plan is actually an advantage…

It’s important to note here, however, that this is usually mostly a survival response that comes out during moments of confrontation.

If there’s a guy with a knife going to attack you, it doesn’t help you to think about how he could totally stab you, to fairly consider his side of the story, or even consider if you might hurt him in your attempts at self-defense. You have to defend yourself now, quickly, or you’re gonna get stabbed.

You can’t afford to be weak when you have to defend yourself or feel sorry for a leopard about to bite your face off. Correspondingly the severity of this ‘contraction’ is going to be proportional to the threat, indeed part of how ‘not thinking about it’ is possible to do in such a situation is that you’re going from one reaction to the next, in an amped-up escalated state etc.

- though of course, immature or entitled individuals may of course have poor judgement of threat severity, and that’s when you might see impulsive and/or callous overreactions that leave others feeling like they just got bulldozed, or even seriously intimidated or scared.

Like most defense mechanisms, blocking/denial tends to come up when there’s something to defend against, that is, a nerve has been struck. For 8s that may be feeling hurt, betrayed, used, manipulared, humiliated or degraded - & the sucky thing about betrayal is it never comes from your enemies. You don’t let enemies get close to you or give them access to your consciousness to the point that you care enough that they can hurt you. Especially when you’re a type that’s generally the most guarded against the ‘outside’.

But in such a situation the first thing that’s gonna be blocked out is how much the thing the other person did just hurt or humiliated you. That’s by design: Can’t let them see they got at your soft underbelly, that’s an invitation to poke there again.

So hurt can get covered with vindictive rage to the point that there’s little trace in the resulting reaction that it came from a place of hurt feelings. In the heat of the moment, you’re seeing red and it doesn’t register how your angry outburst or defensive actions might be hurting those you care about, burning bridges, or, honestly, hurting yourself. Not even just due to short-signed hot-bloodedness but because being relatively tough isn’t the same as being totally immune to or feeling absolutely nothing in a nasty argument. You still get exhausted. You still don’t love the nastiness that may come your way as a result of your actions, and unless we’re talking about an extremly dysfunctional terrible hell-specimen, you probably don’t love to see your loved ones upset either.

Eventually, the situation is over, the adrenaline stops pumping, the ‘fight mode tunnel vision’ fades, and it becomes a lot harder to “not think about it”.

In her book Palmer describes this one guy staring at the wall like ‘don’t think of it, don’t think of it’ – but in the end it all comes rushing back in with all the realization and you have a big mess of shards and debris before your feet.

Maybe you’ll cry in the shower or something, but when you come back out to where people might see and confront/attack you, you’ll probably feel compelled to go back to showing no weakness – but usually, reflexively claiming that you did nothing wrong doesn’t incline your friend or ex partner to take you back. Who cares. You didn’t need them anyway. Or, that’s what you have to tell yourself, because admitting weakness where people can see – to them, or sometimes, even to yourself – can seem like an invitation to get yourself butchered by the descending vultures.

It’s a survival thing. It can feel that way even when it’s objectively not a lethal situation.

Useful Question:

...first let us acknowledge that ‘look before you leap’ is easier said than done and that 8s are probably the type that’s gonna have the hardest time with that. You might have to have some patience/compassion with yourself early in the learning curve if you only have a moment of clarity when the horses have already left the barn.

But if you happen to get in a moment of thought & reflection when you’re right about to escalate some confrontation, ask yourself how it could go sideways & what’s some way that things could go wrong and lead to some outcome that you would regret/ not want.

Even if you still react & some escalation/confrontation happens, you’ll have put on your radar what not to do.

Ovsly not in a ‘guy with a knife in an alley’ type situation, but if it’s not life or death, taking a moment to consider this may save you & those you care about some grief.

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