Anything Can be Co-Opted To Manage One's Experience
The Familiar, the Subtle, and the Adaptive: A Guide to Secondary Defenses
A colleague recently asked me about the secondary management strategies1 I’ve observed over the years — the kinds that emerge when pressing into the edges of a nervous system. I figured it might be helpful to name some of the more common (and less common) strategies I’ve seen across both my private practice and training containers. My intention in listing these isn’t to encourage memorization, but rather to open up the idea that nearly anything can be co-opted to manage one's experience.
Most of the strategies I’ll name here are ones client’s can inhibit once they’re identified. There’s a set of structural management strategies2 that are more subterranean and automated, entrenched within identity & relational patterns to manage/preserve the self & other. Sometimes these strategies can take months to identify/interrupt because the wounds they’re protecting often require significant work before they’re ripe enough to be touched, or needing enough time as a practitioner to recognize a reoccurring pattern in various nightmares — such as those related to the false self3, structural splits4, and character defenses5.
What leads me to run experiments inside the SI container6 with the hopes of discovering a secondary management strategy is stagnation and looping7. There is a rhythm each nervous system will have when moving through their process. If there’s sufficient internalized solution and the capacity to stay inside the container, I expect movement — sequencing, new dissociative layers, affect, sensations/tension, or relational material. If that forward movement stops and a Groundhog Day-like inertia sets in, I begin looking for a strategy that may be operating outside the client’s awareness.
Before diving into the list, it’s crucial to acknowledge a key complexity: sometimes a secondary management strategy won’t pause simply because it can’t — not yet. There are moments when the relational field or the very task of being inside the SI container feels like too much, especially when there’s too much nightmare and not enough solution to accompany it. In some cases, it’s not just the content of the session, but the structure of the container itself that can reawaken dynamics of learned helplessness, lack of control, fawning, or falling back into the false self — leading to a kind of hollow reenactment rather than real-time tracking. When that happens, the system may default to certain well-worn strategies, not because the client is avoiding, but because their capacity to track experience or interrupt these patterns isn’t online yet. Even if a client identifies something as a secondary strategy, their system may not be able to let it go — not out of resistance, but because it isn’t actually within their control. Before we can ask the system to let go of a strategy, we might have to build more internalized solution, or shift something relationally, so there’s enough support to try something new.
I broke down these strategies into several categories. Remember, the reason why it’s important to make the discernment between primary and secondary defenses is because primary defenses are finite if the client leans into it with another solution by it’s side, often relationship, while secondary defenses are mechanical with no expiration date — a system can manage their system with a deep breath till infinity.
Common Secondary Management Strategies: many of these are encouraged and built out in conventional therapy. We want our clients to have access to many of these strategies in their day to day life, outside of the SI container.
Deep self-soothing breath/Yogi Breath
Fidgeting
Swallowing
Intellectualization
Rationalization
Visualization
Resourcing (ex: imagery, grounding, orienting)
Self-soothing
Self-talk
Mental reframing
Fixating on insights and narrative
Quasi PC Management Strategies: more difficult to identify since there’s a PC8 version of these strategies — these behaviors mimic primary completion but serve regulatory or secondary defensive purposes.
Rage outbursts
“Finding” one’s power
Sobbing
Shaking/trembling
Bracing
Chin to the chest
Collapse
Relational Avoidance
Moving head away from the therapist for both sustained eye contact & close eyed sessions
Choking
Dry heaving
Moaning
Screaming
Holding Breath
Laying down
Physical contact
Movement towards closeness & connection or maintaining closeness when PC wants to pull away
Repetitive and/or smooth movement patterns
Spiritual Management Strategies: more common among folks with a spiritual background, meditation practice, or history of medicine/psychedelic work. These contemplative practices hold a lot of value and can be essential for well-being and spiritual fulfillment, but their use within the SI container can potentially bypass affect or relational vulnerability.
Self-compassion/compassion for others
Connecting with the collective pain
Non-dual reality
Meditative Glance
Connecting with spirit, energy, deities, bardos, nature via thought/imagery
Controlling one’s attention to disperse energy
Orienting towards good sensations, contact with chair/sofa, focusing on limbs/extremities
“Pushing” one’s attention into their body to bypass dissociation (common with Vipassana meditators)
Chanting
Other Potential Management Strategies
Yawning
Unraveling/undulating the spine
Hand over the heart
Rocking side to side
Hand over the face
Purging/vomiting
Using a pillow
Fixating on outside stimuli (ex: hearing cars pass by)
Fawning
Pushing hands & arms into the therapist’s hand, pillows, etc. (common in Somatic Experiencing)
IFS Parts Work to keep an arms distance from the direct experience
Describing sensations through a visual avatar of one’s body
Meta-Awareness of one’s process
Controlling the session
Structural Management Strategies: deeply ingrained, identity-level, somatically embodied, often unconscious, and require longer, relational, and somatic work to shift. Theses strategies are often built on top of primary defenses that need to be addressed.
False Self
Character Defenses
Structural Splits
Structural Shame
Structural Fawning
Once again, I think it’s much more helpful to track movement and stagnation rather than memorize a list of management strategies. This approach is far more effective in discerning PC from Quasi PC, knowing when to run experiments, and discovering unique management strategies not listed above. I believe running experiments is essential for a therapist to become more fluid and intuitive, because its those experiments—regardless of their outcome—that deposit the necessary experiences to develop intuition in this work. This perspective is especially useful since the strategies I’ve listed don’t apply universally to every client or situation. What might be exactly what a client needs to support their process in one moment could just as easily be what keeps them stuck in another.
We don’t want to be at war with our clients’ secondary defenses, nor do we want our clients to wage a civil war within themselves. Helping clients understand these strategies as highly adaptive can soften unnecessary mental tension when they arise. As clients experience the healing response of PC and the various solutions you offer in the midst of their nightmares, they will naturally develop greater trust and a willingness to explore experiments, embrace PC, and pause SC9.
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1 Secondary Management Strategies: coping behaviors clients can usually inhibit once recognized. They help regulate distress but may block deeper processing if overused in therapy.
2 Structural Management Strategies: deeply ingrained, identity-level, somatically embodied, often unconscious, and require longer, relational, and somatic work to shift.
3 False Self (Winnicott): A defensive self-structure that develops to comply with external demands and protect the true self, often leading to a sense of emptiness or inauthenticity.
4 Structural Split: A fundamental and stable division within the personality structure, where conflicting self-states are rigidly separated to maintain psychological stability and manage internal conflicts.
5 Character Defenses: Enduring, ingrained patterns of psychological defenses that become embedded within the personality structure, persistently shaping perception, affect, and behavior to protect against internal conflict and maintain stability.
6 SI Container (Selective Inhibition): Inhibiting voluntary secondary management strategies to increase access to our primitive and primal healing response.
7 Looping: A repetitive cycle of sensations, thoughts, emotions, or behaviors that lacks forward movement or resolution within the session. Looping often signals that a secondary management strategy (sometimes a primary defense or structural defense) is in play, maintaining just enough regulation to prevent the system from accessing deeper affective, somatic, or relational layers. It may look like the client circling the same narrative, symptom, or emotion without shift or progression, and can be a cue for the therapist to investigate what’s organizing the stall.
8 Primary Consciousness (Robin Carhart-Harris): A fundamental, immediate mode of awareness involving raw sensory and emotional experiences, without reflective thought or conceptual processing.
9 Secondary Consciousness (Robin Carhart-Harris): A higher-order, reflective state involving self-awareness, abstract thinking, and the capacity to analyze or manipulate experiences mentally.
