By Monty De La Torre, Ph.D.
In this reflection, I will examine a set of defense mechanisms that I have found to be common among Catholic intellectuals – myself included. These mechanisms typically manifest in the following ways: 1) an overemphasis on the role of the intellect in the day-to-day governance of our interior life to the exclusion of our affective life, or 2) an outright repression of our affective life.
My intention is not to condemn anyone, since we inevitably engage in these defenses at some point. Rather, I seek to bring awareness to a kind of interior roadblock that can hinder our path toward greater interior integration -- along with a solution.
Reason, a tool for managers
Reason is meant to guide or order our affective life, analogous to a kind of benevolent political rule (See St. Thomas in the Summa First Part, Question 81). Like a king who guides his subjects toward the common good, likewise does reason guide our thoughts and feelings – in Internal Family System (IFS) terms, reason leads our inner family or parts toward the objective good and away from evil.
One of the purposes of reason is to defend us from what is harmful, both physically and psychologically. For example, if I experience a great amount of anxiety, which leads to agoraphobia, I might consider my behavior to be “irrational” and problematic and, in response to that realization, begin to feel ashamed of myself for such behavior.
I might even attempt to resolve the malady by telling myself that I need to practice greater virtue, or that I need to reflect on the lives of the saints, or simply gaze upon the cross, or tell myself that I just need to “Get over it!” or simply to “Offer it up!” These sorts of approaches, although well-intentioned, often yield little fruit and are examples of spiritual bypassing. I sense in resolutions such as these, the intellect functioning more along the lines of a despot rather than a benevolent king – a typical example of a manager part’s impulse to pursue an agenda.
Befriending problematic emotions
From an IFS perspective, and one that is not intuitive to the Catholic intellectual (or, perhaps, anyone not already familiar with IFS or parts work) the rational thing to do is to befriend the emotion or thought that is causing you pain!
The irony is delicious. You mean to say that if I turn my attention to the negative thought or emotion and begin a rational conversation with part generating the negative thought or emotion and attempt to develop a “friendship” with that part, that the depression, anxiety, addiction, etc., might lessen in intensity, duration, frequency, or, perhaps, even stop? YES!
Again, this approach may not register as an intuitive option, but it is, in my opinion, a great option given the effectiveness of constraint-release IFS model. The negative emotions and irrational thoughts that we experience can place serious constraints on our pursuit of virtue and holiness. What if having a conversation with those emotions and thoughts, instead of intellectualizing, suppressing, or repressing them away, is the path toward sanctity? Gerry Crete, Ph.D. has made the argument. Let us turn, then, to these defense mechanisms.
Defense mechanisms
It was illuminating to discover, while reading Nancy McWilliams, that our psychological defenses are fundamentally a good thing. As she describes them, defenses are “…global, inevitable, adaptive ways of experiencing the world.” (pg. 100) Perhaps in Thomistic terms, we could say that defense mechanisms are potencies meant to help us navigate the world away from threats that undermine our psychological well-being and toward interior peace and integration. McWilliams explains further:
“The phenomena that we refer to as defenses have many benign functions. They begin as healthy, creative adaptations, and they continue to work adaptively throughout life. When they are operating to protect the self against threat, they are discernible as ‘defenses,’ a label that seems under those circumstances to fit. The person using a defense is generally trying unconsciously to accomplish one or both of the following: (1) the avoidance or management of some powerful, threatening feeling, usually anxiety but sometimes overwhelming grief, shame, envy, and other disorganizing emotional experiences; and (2) the maintenance of self-esteem.”
The maintenance of self-esteem, i.e., proper self-love, and the avoidance of emotional overwhelm, are actions worth pursuing. Perhaps we can understand such actions as the pursuit of basic psychological goods alongside other basic goods that I have mentioned before.
Nevertheless, with any act, be it defensive or not, we can fall into extremes. In the context of such extremities, defense mechanisms are typically understood as harmful. According to McWilliams, we have lower and higher order defense mechanisms. We are born with the former and mature into the latter:
“The so-called primitive defenses are ways we believe the infant naturally perceives the world. These ways of experiencing live on in all of us, whether or not we have significant psychopathology; we all deny, we all split, we all have omnipotent strivings. Such processes pose a problem only if we lack more mature psychological skills or if these defenses are used to the exclusion of possible others. Most of us also supplement them with more sophisticated means of processing anxiety and assimilating a complex and disturbing reality. It is the absence of mature defenses, not the presence of primitive ones, that characterizes borderline or psychotic structure.” (McWilliams, p. 103)
Below is a brief review of four defense mechanisms that everyone, not just the Catholic intellectual, should understand.
Splitting of the ego
Splitting of the ego, or “splitting,” is the defense where a person labels some reality as either good or bad for the sake of avoiding the pain that the nuance and complexity of life brings.
The APA Dictionary defines splitting as follows:
“in Kleinian analysis and Fairbairnian theory, a primitive defense mechanism used to protect oneself from conflict, in which objects provoking anxiety and ambivalence are dichotomized into extreme representations (part-objects) with either positive or negative qualities, resulting in polarized viewpoints that fluctuate in extremes of seeing the self or others as either all good or all bad. This mechanism is used not only by infants and young children, who are not yet capable of integrating these polarized viewpoints, but also by adults with dysfunctional patterns of dealing with ambivalence; it is often associated with borderline personality disorder. Also called splitting of the object.”
For example, it is easier to hate your enemy, rather than to love your enemy as Christ commanded us. Attitudes such as “All or Nothing” or “Work Hard, Play Hard” or “Extreme Ownership” seem to embrace such a mechanism. Absolutizing can create distortion and an inability to digest the sophistication and murkiness that the pursuit of truth often entails.
“In everyday adult life, splitting remains a powerful and appealing way to make sense of complex experiences, especially when they are confusing or threatening. Political scientists can attest to how attractive it is for any unhappy group to develop a sense of a clearly evil enemy, against which the good insiders must struggle…Of course, splitting always involves distortion, and therein lies its danger.” (McWilliams, p. 116).
I find that splitting, or black-or-white thinking rampant within conversations dealing with aesthetics. Instead of degrees of beauty, nestled within a hierarchy of being, we must relegate some article of clothing, movie, or work of art to the abyss of ugliness or praise it as the Platonic form of beauty.
Isolation of affect
The role of this mechanism is to dissociate the intellect from the passions.
“One way in which people may deal with anxieties and other painful states of mind is by isolating feeling from knowing.” (McWilliams, p. 131)
If I can separate “feeling from knowing,” then I can avoid the pain or the “emotional meaning” that comes with feeling.
“We all know people who claim that they have no emotional responses to things about which the rest of us have powerful feelings; such people sometimes make a virtue out of the defense of isolation and idealize the condition of expressing only rational concerns…When one’s primary defense is isolation, and the pattern of one’s life reflects the overvaluation of thinking and the underappreciation of feeling, one’s character structure is considered obsessive.” (Pg. 132)
Hurtful events in our lives go together with painful emotions. A desire to suppress the pain of the past is understandable. An intellectual can use their great capacity for reason and what St. Thomas has to say about reason, as noted above, to avoid their past.
Intellectualization
This defense is an extension of or builds on the isolation of affect.
“The person using isolation typically reports that he or she has no feelings, whereas the one who intellectualizes talks about feelings in a way that strikes the listener as emotionless. For example, the comment, ‘Well, naturally I have some anger about that,’ delivered in a casual, detached tone, suggests that while the idea of feeling anger is theoretically acceptable to the person, the actual expression of it is still inhibited…When someone seems unable to leave a defensively cognitive, anti-emotional position, however, even when provoked, others tend intuitively to consider him or her emotionally dishonest. Sex, banter, artistic expression, and other gratifying adult forms of play may be unnecessarily truncated in the person who has learned to depend on intellectualization to cope with life.” (McWilliams, pp. 132-133)
With intellectualization, we allow ourselves to converse about our feelings without expressing them – it’s as if the intellectual’s feelings become an untouchable Platonic form of sorts. Given a propensity for academic work and the natural flow of discussing ideas and such, for a turn in the discussion to something personal that would agitate an exile, is too much for the intellectual with strong protectors. I think the temptation is to convey a sense of control over one’s feelings by being able to talk about them without simultaneously experiencing them with another or, even, themselves.
Rationalization
In rationalization, broadly speaking, we conjure “reasons” to avoid the truth, which include our feelings about the truth.
“The more intelligent and creative a person is, the more likely it is that he or she is a good rationalizer. The defense operates benignly when it allows someone to make the best of a difficult situation with minimal resentment, but its drawback as a defensive strategy is that virtually anything can be-and has been-rationalized. People rarely admit to doing something just because it feels good; they prefer to surround their decisions with good reasons. Thus, the parent who hits a child rationalizes aggression by allegedly doing it for the youngster’s ‘own good’; the therapist who insensitively raises a patient’s fee rationalizes greed by deciding that paying more will benefit the person’s self-esteem; the serial dieter rationalizes vanity with an appeal to health.” (McWilliams, pp.33-134)
A Catholic suffering from depression may rationalize their mental state away as a “dark night of the soul.” A Catholic may “offer it up” to protect themselves from experiencing shame for accurately acknowledging their suffering to others and themselves.
Freedom from defense
Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics made numerous keen insights into the nature of friendship that assimilate beautifully with the IFS protocol to befriend our parts. A desire for friendship is a reciprocal desire for love and communion with another.
IFS has shown that there are parts of us that are reaching out to us like a friend in need. When a friend is angry, sad, or in dire straits, we turn to, and not away, from them. We don’t defend ourselves from them. Instead, we embrace them. This embrace, this mutual exchange of love between friends, is healing.
If the Catholic intellectual can turn toward the negative thought or feeling and view it like a friend in need, then they will be in a better position to discover the love and friendship of their internal family. And, where there is love, friendship, and vulnerability, there is freedom from defense.
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Only six more days until the Resilient Catholics Community re-opens!
The Resilient Catholic Community (RCC), a group of nearly 300 faithful Catholics journeying together in their human formation work, is about to open its 12th cohort. The RCC is at the core of Souls and Hearts – where our RCC members do so much beautiful personal human formation work, leading to interior integration, transformation, and flourishing.
If you are interested in working with your own parts, bring them into greater harmony within you, under the leadership and guidance of your innermost self, journeying toward flourishing, consider applying for the St. Luke cohort, which opens for registration on February 1.
Learn more on our RCC landing page and join RCC staff Bridget Adams, David Saunders and Dr. Peter for a live information meeting later this week. Learn how to apply for the St. Luke cohort and ask any questions you may have about the application process, the PartsFinder Pro and community membership. Join us from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM Eastern Time on Saturday, January 31. Here is the link to register. If you cannot make it, we will post a recording here the following day. The RCC reopens for new members every February, June, and October.
Final weeks to register for our spring FEGs
Formators new to IFS can learn more from our recent IFS Basics for Catholic Formators – here are links to the video and audio recordings, and downloadable PDFs of the transcript, outline with links, and resource sheet from that meeting.
If you are a Catholic therapist, spiritual director, priest, coach or someone who is professionally responsible for the formation of others, you may be interested in our Spring Foundational Experiential Groups (FEGs). No IFS training is necessary, and we have three groups at different days and times, led by IFS-trained professionals. Learn more here, but in brief, we have FEGs with:
- David Edwards on Monday evenings from 6:15 PM to 7:45 PM Eastern time, starting on March 2, 2026
- Bridget Adams on Wednesday mornings from 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM Eastern time, starting on March 11, 2026
- Dr. Peter Malinoski on Friday afternoons from 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM Eastern time, starting on February 27, 2026
Several advanced groups are also available for IFS Level 1 trained individuals or for those who have completed an FEG or the Stepping Stones program. Learn more here.
Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts
Today's Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts episode is by Kasey Kimball on how perfect love casts out all fear, and our need to reach out and love exiled parts who carry fear. You can also check out yesterday's episode from the Third Sunday of Ordinary time as Dr. Peter and Dr. Gerry describe how parts who have walked in darkness can see a great light.
Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts, to our knowledge, is the only podcast specifically for parts of us who are exiled and who feel alone, bringing light, love, and hope to our exiled parts. Check it out every day on our landing page or wherever you get your podcasts.