When ‘Self-Defense’ Becomes Self-Destruction | (#044) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

What if you could respond to conflict without losing your center? What if you can handle criticism without tensing your jaw, protect what matters without closing your heart, and hold power without needing to prove it all the time?

That’s what this episode is all about, because when you understand what true self-defense means, legally, morally and psychologically, you can access a way of living and leading that doesn’t come from fear. You stop reacting to every challenge like it’s a threat. You start seeing clearly, and you learn to respond from a deeper place, one that doesn’t need to shout or strike to be strong. But when you don’t get this right, when you fall into the trap of weaponizing self-defense, you end up hurting the very things you’re trying to protect. [01:00.5]

Leaders lose trust this way. They burn out teams, damage relationships, and isolate themselves, not because they’re bad people, but because they confuse their emotional reactions with wisdom. They use strength to avoid vulnerability, and they end up alone, walled up and stuck.

This isn’t about countries or laws. It’s about you, your career, your reputation, your sense of self. In this episode, we’re going to unpack how the language of self-defense gets used to justify offensive aggression on the world stage and in your own life, and once you can see it, you can choose something better, something stronger, something higher. Let’s begin.

I’m David Tian. For almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, meaning and success in their personal and professional lives—and in this episode, I’ve got three main points. But, first, I want to clarify that this isn’t about being pro- or anti-Israel. It’s about a principle that matters deeply, one that’s often repeated but rarely examined. It’s the principle of self-defense. [02:02.2]

My first point is that self-defense is an important and real right, but it’s not without limits in both law and morality. It’s meant to protect life, not to excuse domination. Under international law, especially Article 51 of the UN Charter, a nation may use force in self-defense, but only if there is an actual armed attack, not just out of fear or not just a suspicion, but a true, real, immediate threat—and even then, the response must be necessary and the force must be proportional. If someone throws a stone at your house, that doesn’t give you the legal or moral right to burn their entire village to the ground.

Preemptive violence, the kind that says, “We struck first because we thought they might attack us someday,” is not self-defense. Preemptive violence is aggression wrapped in the language of fear, and when that kind of force targets not only fighters, but also civilians and hospitals and schools and civilian homes, it breaks the very rules that it claims to defend. [03:09.4]

International law forbids collective punishment. It forbids the use of starvation as a weapon. It forbids targeting civilian infrastructure in ways that lead to widespread civilian suffering. These aren’t soft suggestions. They’re the lines drawn after humanity’s darkest chapters. The United Nations and the International Criminal Court have raised serious accusations against Israel, not because they deny its right to safety, but because certain actions like siege tactics or forced displacement or indiscriminate bombing go far beyond what self-defense allows—and this matters, because once a powerful state or a powerful person can stretch the meaning of threat to cover anything they dislike, then the idea of justice starts to fall apart. The word “defense” becomes a disguise, a way to silence questions, a way to hurt others, while still claiming the moral high ground. [04:09.8]

In your own personal life, this isn’t just a geopolitical issue, of course, it’s about how you define danger, how you decide what justifies your actions. If you allow fear to define everything that challenges you as a threat, then you will always feel and be at war, and you will call it safety. But true safety, true strength, begins with clarity, and clarity begins with knowing the limits of what self-defense means.

Now let’s get to the second point and this is going to go a bit deeper, because this next point isn’t about laws. It’s not about treaties or charters, or what a UN resolution says. This one cuts into the psyche, into the emotional machinery behind why people and nations hurt in the name of protection. [04:57.0]

When someone lashes out in rage and says, “I had no choice. I was defending myself,” your first instinct might be to believe them. They sound certain, maybe even righteous, but if you pause long enough and look a little closer, it’s often not defense at all. It’s fear dressed up as power, and fear, when it doesn’t know how to sit still, turns violent. Any decisions made primarily out of fear are bad, unwise decisions.

Let’s go a level deeper with this concept of projection. Projection in psychoanalysis is what happens when we displace what we find unacceptable in ourselves and then exile or disown in ourselves, and then throw it or thrust it or locate it instead in others. It’s not always deliberate. In fact, it’s often unconscious. But that doesn’t make it any less powerful or any less dangerous.

For example, you complain that your colleague is arrogant, always needing to be the smartest person in the room—but might it be that you fear not being smart enough that their confidence touches something in you, some old insecurity that you haven’t yet made peace with? [06:07.0]

Or maybe a more personal case—you accuse your spouse of being emotionally unavailable, but might it be that you struggle to stay present in vulnerable moments, and that when they reach out for you, you withdraw, and when they stop reaching out, you blame them for the very distance you created in the first place?

Or maybe this—you’re quick to judge a junior colleague as entitled, too eager for recognition, but might it be that part of you resents not having asked for more earlier in your career that you once silenced your own ambition, and now seeing it in someone else, you scorn it, look down on it instead of mourning what you gave up?

We can even find projection at the level of nation states, of ideologies. A country that’s uneasy with its own past aggression may brand its critics as disloyal rather than reckoning with its own missteps. A political party that’s unsure of its moral authority may accuse the other side of corruption to deflect attention from its own compromises. [07:09.2]

The question projection raises is not “Are they the problem?” It’s “What might their behavior be stirring in me, triggering in me that I’ve not yet dared to face or to fully come to terms with?” and that is not an easy question, but it is a necessary one if we want to live, not only more honestly, but more justly with ourselves and with one another.

Now, it’s not always projection, but it often is, and it gets worse when power is involved, because the more power you have, the more easily you can justify your reactions. If you’re a state, you’ve got armies. If you’re a CEO, you’ve got teams. If you’re a parent, you’ve got authority over your kids. You don’t have to reflect. You can just act and you can call it defense, self-defense. [07:56.2]

You can say, “They made me do it,” as you beat your kid, and this is where it starts to get really dangerous, obviously. That sentence, “Look what you made me do,” might be the most toxic phrase a parent can speak. It sounds like self-defense, but it’s really deflection. It’s the refusal to take responsibility for what you’re actually responsible for. It’s the refusal to face your own emotional world, so you blame someone else for triggering it in you.

It’s the classic move of the abusive parent, the one who screams at the child, hits the child, maybe even abandons the child, and then says, “This is your fault, kid. You pushed me too far.” Obviously, this isn’t love. This isn’t care. This isn’t self-defense. It’s an inability to hold one’s own pain and a refusal to take on proper responsibility, and it passes that pain on to someone else in the most damaging way. [08:51.3]

Now stretch that pattern outward. A state bombs a civilian population and says, “They made us do this.” A government imposes a siege and says, “It’s the only way.” A leader fires people in a panic and calls it decisiveness. A husband shuts down in silence and calls it strength. The behaviors look different, but the pattern is the same. It’s all projection, and underneath projection is toxic shame. Unacknowledged shame doesn’t stay quiet. It festers. It turns into contempt, often for the very people who expose it. A nation that carries a legacy of injustice or abuse, but won’t fully come to terms with it, will lash out at the group that reminds it of that wound. [09:42.1]

Many high-achievers struggle when it comes to managing their emotions or navigating their relationships, and they hit a wall when it comes to emotional mastery. Maybe you’ve noticed that stress, frustration or anger is seeping into your personal or professional life, or you feel disconnected from those you care about.

That’s where David Tian’s “Emotional Mastery” program comes in. It’s based on peer-reviewed, evidence-backed therapeutic methods to help you find happiness, love and real fulfillment. Learn how to break free from the emotional roller-coaster and start thriving in every area of your life. You can find out more at DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery. That’s D-A-V-I-D-T-I-A-N-P-H-D [dot] com [slash] emotional mastery.

Just as a person who’s terrified of being found out will go to extremes to control the narrative. Sigmund Freud talked a lot about this, I believe Carl Jung went even deeper. Jung saw the Shadow, those parts of ourselves that we reject, as not evil but forgotten. The Shadow is abandoned, denied, but the longer we exile the Shadow, the more likely it is to erupt, and when it does, it rarely comes out quietly. [11:03.2]

The stronger the image you’re trying to project into the world, the more pressure you will feel to defend it, and that pressure doesn’t make you safer, it makes you more fragile and more sensitive to triggering. Here’s what’s really going on—the need to defend your self-image becomes stronger than the need to defend your actual safety. You’re not protecting your body or your community or even your future anymore. You’re protecting your story, the story of who you think you are, the myth that you’ve built around yourself, often unconsciously.

That’s why feedback can feel like betrayal, why correction can feel like humiliation, why being called out as wrong or having made a mistake can feel like being erased, and when that story gets threatened, the reaction can be overwhelming for you—and that’s not strength. It’s panic. So, you justify it. “I had to do it. They crossed a line. They made me do it.” [12:02.6]

But all that energy, that fury, the withdrawal, the retaliation, it’s not about what just happened. It’s about what’s unresolved inside you, the parts you’ve pushed away, the shame you won’t name, the fear that you’ve wrapped up in armor and called justice.

That’s why it’s so important to look inward, to be able to say, “I reacted because I felt small,” or “I lashed out because I couldn’t bear the thought of being wrong, because that would mean that I’m not good enough.” That kind of honesty isn’t weak. It’s the start of true clarity. When leaders, nations or even parents lose this clarity, they end up causing deep harm. They become the very danger they claim to fear, and they pass down that same pattern of blame, denial and violence to those below them. [13:03.5]

This isn’t about becoming soft or weak. It’s about becoming whole. It’s not about losing your edge. It’s about knowing what you’re actually defending and what’s really, truly worth defending. If your defense comes from fear of being found out or facing what’s in your shadows, then it will always be extreme, always messy, always harmful and dangerous.

But if it comes from truth, if it comes from knowing what’s yours to hold and what’s not, then it doesn’t have to be loud or angry or cruel. It can be calm, clean, direct, because real defense, real self-defense, doesn’t need to prove anything. It just protects what’s essential, and the rest can fall away. [13:51.0]

Let’s bring this even closer to home now, because this isn’t just about countries or political language. This one is about you. If you’re in any kind of leadership position, running a company, managing a team, building a family, you’ve probably told yourself at some point, “I’m just setting boundaries,” or “I’m protecting my values,” or “I don’t tolerate disrespect.” Maybe that’s true or maybe it’s not, or maybe what you’re calling a boundary is actually fear lashing out in disguise. Maybe what you’re defending isn’t your actual values, but your ego or an old wound, or a story about who you need to be so you’re enough or so you don’t fall apart.

Internal Family Systems therapy, IFS therapy, has a name for the parts of you that do this. They’re called managers and firefighters. They show up to keep you safe. Managers try to control everything, and firefighters crash in and blow things up so you don’t have to feel the pain underneath. [14:53.3]

They’re not intrinsically bad. They’re just trying to help in their own ways, but they’re working off bad information, usually from childhood. They think you’re still under threat. They think if you don’t act fast, if you don’t shut someone down or pull away or get louder, then you lose everything. So, you lash out at your spouse during a quiet dinner or you micromanage your team into silence, or you freeze out a friend who said something you didn’t like and then you call it discipline or you call it leadership, but it’s not leadership. It’s just panic out of fear.

You’re not responding to what’s actually in front of you. You’re reacting to a ghost, an old memory, a part of you that once needed protection and never got the chance to heal. This is what happens when your identity gets shaky, when your sense of self is tied too tightly to how others see you, or to what you achieve or accomplish, or to always being the one in control. Any pushback feels like danger, any disagreement feels like betrayal, so you don’t check your response. You justify it. You say, “They crossed the line,” but really they stepped on a bruise that you didn’t want to admit was still there. [16:11.6]

Here’s the truth. Strength isn’t about how forcefully you respond. It’s about how clearly you can see. Can you tell the difference between someone attacking your true value and someone revealing your insecurities? If you can’t, then your leadership becomes more about protecting your own self-image than actually truly leading. You’ll think you’re defending the mission, when really you’re just defending your mask. You’ll double down on control and call it discipline. You’ll demand more loyalty and call it trust, and over time, you’ll erode the very connection that makes leadership worth it. [16:55.5]

You don’t lose power in one blow. You leak it slowly every time you react instead of reflect, every time you blame instead of take responsibility for yourself, every time you guard your role instead of reveal your truth. People stop coming to you with honest feedback. They give you what they feel is safe for you instead. Your team plays small around you. Your family walks on eggshells, not because you’re bad or evil, but because you’ve confused protection with reactivity, and that costs you a lot more than you think.

The leaders in their lives who have the most power over time aren’t the ones who strike hardest. They’re the ones who can hold discomfort without needing to strike out at all, the ones who can say, “That hurt,” without turning it into a war, the ones who can sit in the heat of uncertainty without burning everyone else down just to feel safe. That’s what actual, true protection looks like. It’s calm. It’s steady, and it’s honest. [18:05.2]

So, if you really want to lead, start by asking, “What am I truly protecting here? My values? My people, or just my pride?” because the answer to that question changes and dictates everything else.

Let’s bring this together. First, we talked about self-defense, not as a free pass to do whatever you want, but as something that comes with clear moral and legal limits. True self-defense is about protection, not punishment. It requires restraint. It demands clarity.

Then we looked at how people and nation states often use the word “defense” to hide something else, shame, fear or the refusal to face fully what’s going on inside. When you can’t fully face your own insecurity, you will end up projecting it, and when you do that from a place of power, you end up hurting the people closest to you, while calling it leadership or discipline. [19:04.2]

Finally, we got personal, because as a leader, it’s easy to confuse your emotional reaction for strength. You think you’re setting a boundary, but really you’re just protecting an old wound. You lash out or you shut down, and you tell yourself it’s a strategy, but it’s not—it’s fear. Fear in a nice suit.

I worked with a client a while back, let’s call him Jason. Jason was in charge of a pretty successful company. He was always hitting his targets or exceeding them. He had a strong vision for his future, but his team hated working with him, not because he yelled or bullied them, but because he always had to be right, every disagreement turned into a defense of his own identity. Every suggestion felt like an attack.

One day in session, he finally admitted it. “If I admit I’m wrong, then I feel like I will disappear,” and that was the truth for him. That was the part of him he’d been defending all along, not the company, not the product, but his sense of worth. [20:03.3]

Once we started working with that, not shutting it down, but understanding it, his leadership completely changed. He didn’t lose power. He just stopped wasting energy on fear, and that’s what I want for you, not to fight harder, but to see more clearly what’s actually truly worth protecting.

Thank you so much for listening. If this has helped you in any way, please share it with anyone else you think could benefit from it. If you liked it, hit a like or give it a good rating on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. If you have any feedback whatsoever, I’d love to get it. Leave a comment or send me a message. I’d love to hear your feedback.Thank you again so much for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [20:43.7]