Yes, coaching clients can get defensive sometimes. The truth is that defensiveness is a natural human response, and it can even arise in coaching clients. It is important for a coach to be aware of this and to be prepared to handle it in a constructive way. The question is, how can you as a Meta-Coach recognize this and how should you react? What should you do if you suspect a client’s statement is a defense or a cover-up?
First, let’s not say that being defensive is a disease. That is neither good nor necessary. We all get defensive at times. People who need therapy are not the only ones who have trouble with being defensive. It’s a trait of people, and it’s a pretty common one. And since that’s the case, the next question is whether the defensive stance is right or not. Is it a true assessment of a threat, something made up, or a mix of both? Why is the person making a fuss?
When there is a real threat and you need to protect yourself from something that is likely to happen, it is okay to be defensive. When would something like this happen? Any kind of physical attack, of course. Then there are the risks that different kinds of losses could happen. Most of the time, we protect ourselves from huge financial costs by getting insurance. That keeps us from losing a lot of money in case of an accident, a serious illness, the loss of property, etc. Even so, it’s better to be aware of your resources and be able to do your due diligence, which is at the heart of smart risk management, than to be defensive.
On the other hand, being defensive as a mental and emotional state is a very different thing. This is because you don’t trust yourself or your ability to handle problems. Again, we have to ask, “Is it right or not?” It’s right for a child or an adult who isn’t fully grown up because they don’t have the personal security of knowing themselves, self-determination, or the personal autonomy of knowing their inner powers.
So, in coaching, there are a few things we do to help a person develop a stronger sense of security within themselves. We help people take ownership of their abilities so that they can learn to use them well. We teach people how to accept and value themselves as people, regardless of what they can or can’t do. We set the frame that whatever is inside is just “human stuff” and is not “the problem.” Every “problem” is caused by a wrong frame. “The problem is with the frame, not with you.”
Once you have set those frames and caused those experiences, you are ready to find, identify, challenge, and replace any and all defense mechanisms. Why? Because you and I are both people, we don’t need to defend any awareness. Everything you know is just a thought or a feeling. It doesn’t mean anything else, unless you make it mean things that aren’t true and make you afraid of yourself.
And yet, we do that. We all do it, but some of us get better at it over time, while others haven’t learned that yet. Bring any negative thought, idea, meaning, definition, feeling, etc. against yourself, and you are likely to create neurotic meanings. Then you start to fear yourself, get mad at yourself, feel ashamed of yourself, look down on yourself, think you’re better than everyone else, etc. Now, the energy of these states has nowhere to go but against your mind and body. Now you have made a world or experience for yourself that is bad, bad for you, bad for others, etc. It makes you feel stressed, and to “fix” that, you come up with different ways to protect yourself. You forbid it. You curse it. You judge it and name it ‘weak,’ ‘selfish,’ ‘egocentric,’ ‘hateful,’ ‘unmanly,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘wasteful,’ and on and on. You suppress the awareness, you repress it. You introject it. You project it onto other people or things. You split yourself into parts. You give yourself to fantasy and magical thinking. You deceive yourself.
We humans are, in a neurotic way, very creative when it comes to all the ways we come up with to avoid being aware. In other words, it’s easy to talk about and promote being mindful, but it’s hard to do. Being aware of what you think and how you feel, as well as what you might do or wish you could do, can make you dislike yourself and judge yourself harshly. So, our “adaptive” ways of trying to “get rid of the thought or feeling” usually start out well. “I don’t want to be like that. I want to be more loving and kind.” Still, it ends up making a frame that stops us from being aware. Because of this, we lose touch with ourselves.
Then, because we’re so far away from ourselves, we can’t talk to ourselves in a real way. We do not know who we are. We only know what we want to know about ourselves. Then, we not only show that persona to other people, but also to ourselves. As we live behind that persona, we become strangers to our real selves. This is what the neurotic process is all about. As we try to trick ourselves, we not only tell ourselves lies, but we also start to believe them. Now, all kinds of things go wrong: we don’t know what we really want, we live more and more from the outside in instead of the inside out, we can’t get excited about what we’re doing, etc.
Coaching, like therapy, is meant to help people get a better understanding of who they are. As a person’s self-awareness grows, so does their ability to live in an honest way. And to do that, we find cognitive distortions, biases, and fallacies, call them out, and try to change them. We do the same thing with people’s defense mechanisms when we ask them to stop hiding behind their personas and be real.
When a client defends or escapes from their reality, or from a challenge—that is the time to mirror that back as feedback. The design of that? To help your client catch how they are selling themselves short via pretense. So back to the question, “What should I do if I think a client’s statement is a defense or cover-up?” Answer: call attention to it by acknowledging it, inquiring about it, and probing it. Find out if it is a defense. Then find out, “a defense against what?” “What are you not wanting to know about yourself?”
Curated by Danielle Tan.
Reference:
- [Certified_meta-coach] 2023 Mropheus #9 WHEN YOUR CLIENT IS DEFENSIVE by L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. Executive Director, ISNS.
