The seventh and most profound pattern is defense over love. Joe’s test: if someone says the sky is purple when you think it’s blue, you don’t defend—there’s nothing wrong with you. You only defend what you secretly believe is bad about yourself. Called a liar, you bristle precisely because some part of you agrees that lying makes you bad.
“Every time that we defend ourselves, it’s because we think there’s something wrong with us. There’s nothing to defend if we don’t think there’s anything wrong with us.”
So every defense is a confession: a part of yourself you’re unwilling to accept, that you’re cutting off. The more unconditionally you can love all parts of yourself, the more you can love others—and the less there is to defend. Joe answers the fear that open-heartedness gets you exploited by pointing to Gandhi, King, Mother Teresa: deep love requires knowing and loving yourself, which is empowerment, not weakness.
The proof came at Bodega Bay, when a friend called him an asshole and Joe finally agreed instead of fighting it.
“The more that I love that part of myself, the less I was [an asshole]… as I started to be gentle with it, as I started to love it, it transformed.”
Loving yourself isn’t passivity—it’s the most potent transformative agent there is.
Related Concepts
- Your defense feels like an attack to the other person
- Openness to judgment is more comfortable than defense
- Empowerment outlasts power because it can’t be taken away
- Not defending yourself reveals your inherent goodness
- Defensiveness is a breadcrumb back to shame
- Self-compassion is the meta-variable that speeds all transformation
- Negative self-talk reveals how love was wired in childhood