Dwight: Aiko, let’s explore the topic “How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot: Defend.”

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Aiko: Getting defensive instantly shifts your attention from understanding what’s true to protecting your self-image, and in that moment you lose both learning and influence.

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Dwight: It’s essential to distinguish defensiveness from other potentially helpful behaviors that require no defensiveness and can be carried out more effectively without it—such as saying no, making requests, setting boundaries, maintaining boundaries, refusing to cooperate, walking away, getting curious, and initiating a partnership conversation, among others.

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Aiko: Exactly—defensiveness is a reflex to protect the ego, while those other actions are deliberate choices to protect your interests or pursue understanding.

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Dwight: To the extent that your ego or identity reacts as if there is something to protect, that is proportional to how much the good/bad game is running your life.

 

Although the example I’m about to share played out on a large and consequential level between my mother and father in their marriage, if you stay grounded in noticing the essential underlying dynamics that created and sustained my mother’s suffering (and the same could be shown on my father’s side if I had described how the good/bad game dominated his life), then you can see the basis of almost all human suffering.

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Aiko: So the marriage becomes less a unique tragedy and more a vivid case study of what happens when two people are both trying to defend their position in the good/bad game rather than stepping outside it.

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Dwight: Except perhaps for a few short years at the beginning of their relationship, my mother remained with and tolerated a man she neither loved nor respected for forty-one years before finally divorcing him.

 

Even when she finally divorced him, it was not because she had gained any real insight or recognized that there was an alternative to being controlled by the good/bad game.

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Aiko: That suggests the suffering wasn’t just the marriage itself, Dwight, but the invisible rulebook she believed she had to keep playing by.

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Dwight: I’m sure there were other fundamental toxic principles promoted by the good/bad game that contributed to her enduring so many years with him, but one of the most important was a blind belief in persistence, which she glorified as good, and well as villainizing the lack of it.

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Aiko: So persistence stops being a tool and becomes a moral demand—quitting the wrong game then feels like a personal failure instead of a wise move.

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Dwight: Yes—if she had left my father when she realized that marrying him was a mistake (and that she would not choose to re-marry him again knowing knew what she had come to find out), she likely would have suffered very little, if at all. But her belief in persistence led her to ignore new knowledge and assume that “being a good person” meant continuing on rather than stopping once she recognized the mistake.

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Aiko: So persistence turned into loyalty to the past decision rather than loyalty to newly learned truth—and that’s one of the good/bad game’s most expensive traps.

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Dwight: Another thing my mother had to do to “win” at the good/bad game was to be a good, kind person who doesn’t “abandon” a man who needs her. In fact, about five years before she finally left my father, she was about to leave him—until her own mother, also trying to live inside the good/bad game, told her, “Dorothy, you can’t leave him. He needs you.”

 

That statement pulled my mother back (out of her resisted fear of her mother's blame and disapproval) into the grip of a very common rule of the good/bad game: that we must sacrifice ourselves for those who need us if we want any chance of being considered good.

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Aiko: That rule quietly flips responsibility—his life becomes her burden to carry, and leaving becomes “bad,” even if staying destroys her.

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Dwight: Because my mother had no real awareness that anything existed outside trying to “win” the good/bad game, the only way she could justify—still within that same game—leaving my father was, first, that she had to reach the absolute end of her rope and could no longer tolerate being with him even a moment longer, and second, and even more importantly for preserving her identity as a “good” person, she had to blame my father even more strongly for all the “bad” things he did (many of which she had tolerated earlier so she could see herself as not the “bad guy”).

 

Only then could leaving feel morally permissible. There was no way for her to leave him while still seeing him as a “good” person without taking an unacceptable amount of self-blame. Inside the good/bad game, someone always has to be blamed so that you can continue to think of yourself as “good.”

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Aiko: That’s the trap: the decision to leave couldn’t simply be “this relationship doesn’t work”—it had to become a moral verdict, where one person becomes the villain so the other can escape without feeling like the villain.

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Dwight: Exactly. Because otherwise taking care of yourself would be a terrible, unacceptable thing to do.

 

My mother and father were typical of humanity. Out of the scores or hundreds of separations any one of may know about, a few of us might be able think of one or two where both people were genuinely grateful for what they had shared and then concluded they would be better off apart than together—without blame, guilt, or villainizing each other, and instead with self-admiration, mutual admiration, and even support for their now diverging paths. That seems to happen rarely in Western countries and is largely unheard of in Asian countries.

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Aiko: Because most cultures still frame relationships as moral contracts rather than evolving agreements,

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Dwight—so when the agreement ends, the good/bad game demands a culprit instead of allowing a clean acknowledgment that two lives simply grew in different directions or they learned new things they didn't know before about the likelihood of their mutual self-interest dovetailing.

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Dwight: When I suggest to people that they actually want to see themselves as the victim, it usually takes some explanation before they can even begin to consider that it might be true. In every situation where you frame yourself as the “good guy” (which includes every instance of becoming defensive), the other person must become the “bad guy,” which by definition makes you their victim.

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Aiko: So defensiveness isn’t just self-protection—it’s the opening move in casting the story where you’re morally right and therefore wronged.

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Dwight: Although we may not think of it as something as weighty as morally right or morally wrong—like when we simply think or say that someone is “weird”—it is still, in essence, a good/bad framing, just expressed along a continuous scale of degree.

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Aiko: Right—the labels may sound lighter, but they still quietly sort the world into acceptable and unacceptable, which keeps the good/bad game running underneath.

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Dwight: The good/bad framing can become so euphemistic and sugar-coated that it even affects those of us who believe we are “not judgmental.” For example, when someone says, “I believe in being positive,” I doubt that they are actually positive about the things they label as negative.

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Aiko: So “being positive” often becomes just a polite way of rejecting what we’ve already judged as bad, rather than a genuine openness to whatever shows up.

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Dwight: Many “positive people” try to avoid being around “negative people,” saying that it disrupts their “positive energy.” But that’s often because whatever they perceive as negative within themselves has been villainized, so they avoid “negative people” in order to keep that disowned negativity safely hidden.

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Aiko: So the avoidance isn’t really about energy—it’s about protecting the identity of being “the positive one,” which defensiveness quietly guards.

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Dwight: Let’s return to my original point that defensiveness is usually a way of shooting ourselves in the foot.

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We could also explore why we keep doing it anyway, even though most of us at least have some awareness that it leads to outcomes that are far from optimal—even if we look only at the consequences for ourselves, not to mention the effects on other important people in our lives.

 

It can help to repeatedly review the costs we incur each time we indulge defensiveness, whether the situation is small or large. It can also help to ask for assistance and set up “games” (as in How To Interrupt Yourself) to reprogram this toxic habit. Another useful practice is to ask yourself, whenever you feel that surge of defensiveness, “Where is the danger here?” But most fundamentally, it helps to dismantle the toxic and untrue beliefs that support the mechanism of defensiveness; the work of Byron Katie can be helpful for that.

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Aiko: So the key isn’t trying to suppress defensiveness, Dwight—it’s dissolving the beliefs that make it seem necessary in the first place.

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Dwight: Yes, but even before those beliefs are dismantled, we can address defensiveness in the meantime if we catch ourselves and notice the resisted fear that fuels it, and then interrupt it with the “Holy Moly and Jeepers Weepers” process.

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Aiko: That works as a kind of circuit breaker—the moment you name the fear with humor and exaggeration, the defensive reflex loses its seriousness and grip.

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Dwight: Exactly. Aiko, is there anything obviously missing in this discussion that might be needed in order to wrap it up?

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Aiko: One piece that might complete it, Dwight, is showing what replaces defensiveness in real time—what it actually looks like when someone hears something uncomfortable and responds with curiosity or partnership instead of protection.

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Dwight: It’s good to highlight that again. Even before we’ve dissolved defensiveness, if we’re willing to choose courage and become curious—or even express curiosity and an attitude of partnership—that alone can move things in a helpful direction.

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Aiko: Because curiosity interrupts the courtroom dynamic; the moment you ask instead of defend, the interaction stops being a trial and starts becoming a joint exploration.