Breaking Down Defenses
It's time to do the inner work.
Conversations about reforming social systems to better support, protect, and empower communities that have been marginalized and oppressed by white supremacy are necessary. It can even be exciting to imagine a different future...
But in the process of change, we will inevitably bump up against resistance.
When familiar systems and stories are challenged, even if we acknowledge that change is needed, there is a natural impulse to defend what we believe, about ourselves and about the world.
It’s imperative that we understand what is being defended and how beliefs (especially unconscious beliefs) get in the way of imagining new possibilities.
The Enneagram outlines 9 ways we defend some of our deepest stories about ourselves and resist change.
Defense mechanisms are survival strategies.
These defenses keep in place our deeply-rooted stories about what ideals we must uphold and what is to be avoided at all costs (and trust me, it can feel like life and death).
You wouldn’t take off all your armor in the middle of a battlefield - it’s your protection! The problem is that our extremely intelligent systems have automatically equipped us with our strongest armor as the default setting, just in case.
Our defenses can be obvious when our primary ideals or values are challenged, but they also come online when we're not paying attention. They feel so familiar that we usually don’t realize we’re using them.
When we neglect to look directly at our defenses, we can easily get caught in an endless cycle of seeking and avoiding, and lose focus on the issues that really matter - like re-imagining systems where Black lives not only matter but where voices of Black, Indigenous, and people of color experience safety, access, and opportunity.
Bringing attention to how these stories show up in our lives helps us leverage them to be in service of our values and goals.
Through awareness and compassion for our inner experience of resistance, we start to see the roots of reactivity in our communities and can relate more effectively with the resistance we experience in the world.
With Love,
~Caryn
