Defenses Up Quotes & Sayings

What we're doing, or, I should say, what you're doing, since no one has taught me any good words, is dropping recipes into people's brains to cause a neurochemical reaction to knock out the filters. Tie them up just long enough to slip an instruction past. And you do that by speaking a string of words crafted for the person's psychographic segment. Probably words that were crafted decades ago and have been strengthened ever since. And it's a string of words because the brain has layers of defenses, and for the instruction to get through, they all have to be disabled at once.'
Jeremy said, 'How do you know this?'
'Do you think I'm smart?'
'I think you're scary,' he said. — Max Barry

Family secrets can go back for generations. They can be about suicides, homicides, incest, abortions, addictions, public loss of face, financial disaster, etc. All the secrets get acted out. This is the power of toxic shame. The pain and suffering of shame generate automatic and unconscious defenses. Freud called these defenses by various names: denial, idealization of parents, repression of emotions and dissociation from emotions. What is important to note is that we can't know what we don't know. Denial, idealization, repression and dissociation are unconscious survival mechanisms. Because they are unconscious, we lose touch with the shame, hurt and pain they cover up. We cannot heal what we cannot feel. So without recovery, our toxic shame gets carried for generations. — John Bradshaw

< ... > the persons who get to the consulting rooms of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts are not a cross-section of the population. By and large they are the ones for whom the conventional pretenses and defenses of the society no longer work. Very often they are the more sensitive and gifted members of the society; they need to get help, broadly speaking, because they are less successful at rationalizing than the "well-adjusted" citizen who is able for the time being to cover up his underlying conflicts. — Rollo May

It's a very unnatural environment to be in, up on a stage. So you put up defenses to hide. Like looking at the ground with your hair in your eyes, or being tightly wound and quite aggressive and uncooperative, as I used to do. — Alex Turner

Ramming it up the middle only works if you soften the defenses up a little first, the coach said. — Constance Daley

If I was mentoring a young fighter, I'd tell him to spend more time on boxing. That doesn't mean I would ignore kickboxing - you still need to learn the defenses - but in stand-up, it's hard to beat good, solid boxing. — Chael Sonnen

We'd both been stripped of all the evasiveness, all the lies, everything we'd ever kept from each other. Layer by layer, we had given up our defenses and our excuses and our demands for whys and hows, and what was left were two broken beings. Clinging to one last shred of hope. Tethered to each other. — Brodi Ashton

When we think we have been hurt by someone in the past, we build up defenses to protect ourselves from being hurt in the future. So the fearful past causes a fearful future and the past and future become one. We cannot love when we feel fear ... When we release the fearful past and forgive everyone, we will experience total love and oneness with all. — Gerald G. Jampolsky

Vila the White,
Built a City up height,
Not in the Heavens, not on the ground,
But on the edge of a Cloud,
Vila the White,
Put defenses the bright:
Gold defends the heights, Sun defends the gate,
Moon defends the City when it's late,
Vila the White,
Stood with Sun at sight,
Watching what comes from the bay,
And saw Lightning and Thunder play,
Vila the White,
Wed her son on Moon at night,
And gave her daughter to Gold, as bride,
They have couple brothers, she's their brother's wife. — Stanislaw Sielicki

Chekhov's stories are about the moment that a life goes off the rails and the price that will be paid - forever. That's a typical Chekhov story for you. Something that you're used to lying in bed worrying about at four in the morning, before you have the psychic defenses to kid yourself and tell yourself to get up and shower and go to the office. — Lorin Stein

If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world. — Henry Miller

We watch so much film, calling up pitch by pitch, count by count in order to spot tendencies. Technology is a big part of how I get ready for a game. What's funny is a lot of the NFL guys say they study the 'Madden' game; that's how they learn to read offenses and defenses. — Carl Crawford

When we feel safe, when we feel we are with someone who basically agrees with us about the symbolic universe, we let down our defenses, confident that our companion understands the symbols that are usually wall up, and will act appropriately. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

If you see a person who's insecure and covers it up, it can be quite a problem. But the person who is insecure and shows you is quite appealing. They give you just the courage to drop your defenses. — Isabella Rossellini

But the true threats to stability and peace are these nations that are not very transparent, that hide behind the-that don't let people in to take a look and see what they're up to. They're very kind of authoritarian regimes. The true threat is whether or not one of these people decide, peak of anger, try to hold us hostage, ourselves; the Israelis, for example, to whom we'll defend, offer our defenses; the South Koreans. — George W. Bush

But when something like Angelina's murder happens," the doctor told him (Decker), "it's human nature to assume a bunker mentality. Let's shore up our defenses and put up our guard so that when something like this happens again -- when, not if -- we won't be blindsided. Problem is, we become so risk averse, we cut ourselves off from the potentially dangerous things that could bring great happiness and joy. We stop taking chances, and without those sometimes risky chances, there's no way we can win big. Our best case scenario become losing not /too/ badly. /At least no one died/ becomes our mantra. Yes, we're trapped here in this prison that we've made, where we can't possibly be happy, but at least we're not devastated by our loss and our grief. — Suzanne Brockmann

You marked up my neck last night with that filthy mouth of yours. And you know what else?" Troy felt his defenses slipping. Against his better judgment, he looked down and immediately got lost in her green eyes. "I like it. Having your marks on me. — Tessa Bailey

Our enemies - whether Shiite or Sunni - are followers of a totalitarian ideology based on Islam, which tells them that Allah wishes to rule the world through them. Israel is a central front in this war. Given the weakness of Western support for the Jews, jihadists see attacking Israel as a strategic tool for eroding the West's ideological defenses and shoring up their supporters throughout the world. — Caroline Glick

I like to think of myself as the running LT. I like to run up the middle and wear defenses down. It's more exciting in between the tackles. — LaDainian Tomlinson

I have to go, Jenna", he whispered, sounding shaky, like he questioned the decision himself. He released the hold and squatted to retrieve his bag, leaving me to sway in the air, ready to collapse any second, as he walked away forever. And it ate me up inside. Forever.
"Evan?"
"Yeah?" he answered, turning back as his hand gripped the door.
"I do love you. And i never gave you anything less than everything i had to give" A solitary tear managed to break through my defenses. "And i'll always regret that it wasn't enough"
"Me, too" And just as he slid out into the hallway, marking the beginning of forever, he quietly added "Because i would've spent my life with you — Devon Ashley

During school age, the bright, shame-based child will attempt to develop inhuman ego defenses or defending scripts, such as perfectionism, blaming, criticizing, righteousness or being judgmental. The character-disordered try to be more than human. Since being grounded in healthy shame is the permission to be human, the toxically shamed become polarized trying to be more than human or giving up and becoming less than human. — John Bradshaw

We generally have methods of "keeping lonely thoughts away," and our anxiety may appear only in occasional dreams of fright which we try to forget as soon as possible in the morning. But these differences in intensity of the fear of loneliness, and the relative success of our defenses against it, do not change the central issue. Our fear of loneliness may not be shown by anxiety as such, but by subtle thoughts which pop up to remind us, when we discover we were not invited to so-and-so's party, that someone else likes us even if the person in question doesn't, or to tell us that we were successful or popular in such-and-such other time in the past. — Rollo May

You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there
the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed. — Frederick Buechner

Life is terrorism, so spare me your indignation. Life is one big infiltration of our secure defenses. Some people put bombs on buses and blow them up: those are terrorists. Some people speak to you and their words blow you up: what would you call those people? Life is a condemned cell ... That's the only way to protect yourself ... to understand that you're always under sentence of death and to try to get a temporary remission. — Matt Rees

How could I remain unyielding? His words penetrated the flimsy barriers I'd set up around my heart. I'd meant to set up a barbed wire fence, but the barbs ended up being covered with marshmallows. He slipped through my defenses easily. He touched his forehead to my hand, and my marshmallow heart melted. — Colleen Houck

But I bet they don't know what I saw." Puller sat down in a chair next to her bed. "So why don't you tell me what that was?" Knox glanced at the glass door to her room and saw a police officer, a man in a suit, and a burly MP standing guard there. "They're not taking any chances with you," he said, following her gaze. "Cops, FBI, and the military." She turned back to Puller and slowly but clearly told him what she had seen. The van, the kid, everything. "So it was a deliberate setup the whole way," Puller concluded. "It appeared to be. But why target Carter?" "Well, he heads up an important part of our nation's defenses. He's a target just by virtue — David Baldacci

At the root of fear is low self-esteem. This explains why angry people have low self-esteem, are argumentative, stubborn, and quick to flare up yet slow to forgive. Those behaviors are defenses against the underlying fear. — David J. Lieberman

Jesus' favorite speech form, the parable, was subversive. Parables sound absolutely ordinary: casual stories about soil and seeds, meals and coins and sheep, bandits and victims, farmers and merchants. And they are wholly secular: of his forty or so parables recorded in the Gospels, only one has its setting in church, and only a couple mention the name God. As people heard Jesus tell these stories, they saw at once that they weren't about God, so there was nothing in them threatening their own sovereignty. They relaxed their defenses. They walked away perplexed, wondering what they meant, the stories lodged in their imagination. And then, like a time bomb, they would explode in their unprotected hearts. An abyss opened up at their very feet. He was talking about God; they had been invaded! — Eugene H. Peterson

Time now to consider the compacts that hold the world together: the compact between ruler and ruled, and that between husband and wife. Both of these arrangements rest on a sedulous devotion the one to the interests of the other. The master and husband protect and provide; the wife and servant obey. Above masters, above husbands, God rules all. He counts up our petty rebellions, our human follies. He reaches out his long arm, hand bunched into a fist.
It is time to say what England is, her scope and boundaries: not to count and measure her harbor defenses and border walls, but to estimate her capacity for self-rule. It is time to say what a king is, and what trust and guardianship he owes his people: what protection from foreign incursions moral or physical, what freedom from the pretensions of those who would like to tell an Englishman how to speak to his God. — Hilary Mantel

When unspeakable violence is enacted upon innocents, say, in a school or movie theatre, and the survivors and the families of the victims, in the throes of pain and anguish, want to ask, "Why did this happen?," "How did this happen?," and "What can we do to prevent this from happening again?," and one of the areas they (still we) focus their scrutiny is that of the highly efficient weapons of warfare that are casually available to us citizens of the United States, then we frightened gun owners have the chance to be human and say, "Okay, this is a horrible tragedy. Let's open up a conversation here." Instead, I'm surmising, out of fear, we throw up our defenses and behave in a very confrontational way toward such a conversation , citing the Second Amendment as the ultimate protection of our rights, no matter how ridiculously murderous the firearm, which, unfortunately, makes us look like dicks. — Nick Offerman

So I'm putting my defenses up, cause I don't wanna fall in love. If I ever did that. I think I'd have a heart attack. — Demi Lovato

What a dolt my father sends me for weaponry," Paul intoned. "This doltish Gurney Halleck has forgotten the first lesson for a fighting man armed and shielded." Paul snapped the force button at his waist, felt the crinkled-skin tingling of the defensive field at his forehead and down his back, heard external sounds take on characteristic shield-filtered flatness. "In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack," Paul said. "Attack has the sole purpose of tricking the opponent into a misstep, setting him up for the attack sinister. The shield turns the fast blow, admits the slow kindjal!" Paul snapped up the rapier, feinted fast and whipped it back for a slow thrust timed to enter a shield's mindless defenses. — Frank Herbert

Pope Francis reminds us of Pope John XXIII because both men share the same lack of self-consciousness, and neither needs to keep his guard up through the use of psychological defenses such as rationalization, projection or intellectualization. — Eugene Kennedy

Movies were America's way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I grew up Catholic, so I have these defenses about listening to anything with too much religiosity; some of the lyrics didn't sit well in my mouth. One of my beefs is the patriarchal setup. Having the 'he, he, he, God, God, God, king, king, king' stuff was hard for me. — Patty Griffin

I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. — Hermann Hesse

Remember every mistreatment experience shows up to give you the opportunity to learn love at a deeper level. You don't need to defend yourself because you cannot be diminished. You must understand that defensiveness doesn't protect you. It actually makes you feel more vulnerable and unsafe. In protecting yourself you are embracing the idea that you can be hurt and this will only create more fear in your life. If you embrace fear and judgment you are choosing to live in fear and judgment.
If you choose to let go of the need to protect and defend yourself and put down your defenses because you understand you cannot be hurt - you will actually feel safer. When you choose to feel bulletproof, infinite and absolute all the time, no defense is ever necessary. — Kimberly Giles

People only speak to get something. If I say, Let me tell you a few things about myself, already your defenses go up; you go, Look, I wonder what he wants from me, because no one ever speaks except to obtain an objective. That's the only reason anyone ever opens their mouth, onstage or offstage. They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it's just coincidence, because what they're trying to do is accomplish an objective. — David Mamet

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses. — Elizabeth Moon