TPI Communication and the Team Toxin of Defensiveness

Research in relationship communication clearly shows that communication style has dramatic impact on Positivity over time. Researcher and author John Gottman identifies four toxic communication styles that corrode relationships over time.
(Team Coaching International – Team Diagnostic Training – 2013 – Team Toxins)

One of the Four Team Toxins is Defensiveness.

Defensive communication and behavior is also a primary barrier to learning for airplane flight instructors to identify and manage with their student pilots, as it is for team coaches.

I am studying for my Certified Flight Instructor license while working with you in the Advanced Learning program with Team Coaching International. I find it interesting to see the domains of Defense Mechanisms for the flight instructor to monitor, similar to “Monitor Many Screens”. I share the flight instructor view with you.

Defense Mechanisms
(Gleim Aviation Excellence in Aviation Training Irvin N. Gleim, Garrett W. Gleim 2017 edition Fundamentals of Instructing)

Certain behavior patterns are called defense mechanisms because they are subconscious defenses against reality of unpleasant situations. People use there defenses to soften feelings of failure, alleviate feeling of guilt, and protect feelings of personal worth and adequacy.

Although defense mechanisms can serve a useful purpose, they can involve some degree of self-deception and distortion of reality. They alleviate symptoms, not causes.

Common defense mechanisms:

Repression – A person places uncomfortable thoughts into inaccessible areas of the unconscious mind. For example, a student pilot may have a repressed fear of flying that inhibits his or her ability to learn how to fly.

Things a person is unable to cope with are present and pushed away to be dealt with at another time, or hopefully, never to be dealt with because they faded away on their own accord.

The level of repression can vary from temporarily forgetting and uncomfortable thought, to amnesia, where the events that triggered the anxiety are deeply buried.

Repressed memories do not disappear and may reappear in dreams or slips of the tongue. (“Freudian slips”)

Denial – Refusal to accept external reality because it is too threatening. It is the refusal to acknowledge what has happened, is happening or will happen.

Denial is a form of repression through which stressful thoughts are banned from memory.

Related to denial is minimization. When a person minimizes something. (s)he accepts what happened, but in a diluted form, usually justifying the event because nothing bad happened.

Compensation – Process of psychologically counterbalancing perceived weaknesses by emphasizing a more positive one.

Students often attempt to disguise the present of a weak or undesirable quality by emphasizing a more positive one.

Compensation involves substituting success in a realm of life other than the realm in which the person suffers a weakness.

Projection – An individual places his or her own unacceptable impulses onto someone else. A person relegates the blame for personal shortcomings, mistakes, and transgressions to others.

The student pilot who fails a flight exam and says, “I failed because I had a poor examiner” believes the failure was not due to a lack of personal skill or knowledge.

The student projects blame onto an “unfair” examiner.

Rationalization – When a person cannot accept the real reasons for his or her won behavior, this device permits the substitution of excuses for reasons. Rationalization is a subconscious technique for justifying actions that otherwise would be unacceptable.

Reaction Formation – A person fakes a belief opposite to his or her true belief because the true belief causes anxiety. The person feels an urge to do or say something and then actually does or says something that is the opposite of what (s)he really wants.

Fantasy – Occurs when a student engages in daydreams about how things should be rather than doing anything about how things are. The student uses his or her imagination to escape the reality into a fictitious world, – a world of success or pleasure.

Fantasy provides a simple and satisfying escape from problems, but if a student gets sufficient satisfaction from daydreaming, (s)he may stop trying to achieve goals altogether.

Lost in a fantasy, the student spends more time dreaming about being a successful pilot than working toward the goal.

When carried to extremes, the worlds of fantasy and reality can become so confused that the dreamer cannot distinguish one from the other.

Displacement – Results in an unconscious shift of emotion, affect, or desire from the original object to a more acceptable, less threatening substitute.

Displacement avoids the risk associated with feeling unpleasant emotions and puts them somewhere other than where they belong, similar to repression.

Defensive behaviors reveal symptoms from a deeper cause. These behaviors may be of service or corrode our relationships. They are tricky as there are several domains we have most likely used at some point of our existence and for us to see as coaches.