Honor Before Release: The 5 Character Defenses and Why You Can't Just Drop Yours

I was in a sea of the exact people I cannot stand. Crystals, wide-brimmed hats, chanting “love and light,” dancing like the hippies of old with bejeweled faces and that distant look that comes from whatever they'd been imbibing. I've said plenty about my disdain for spiritual bypassing. Now I was standing in the heart of it.

I love music. I don't love how humanity behaves at festivals, so my wife and I chose one with a little more conscientiousness: Imagine Festival, on Orcas Island off the coast of Washington. I knew the people there would be a bit more concerned about how they behave and protecting the planet, I didn't know that means full on new-age required.

Your Defense Pattern Runs Your Life

The Rigid defense had run my whole life. It makes me efficient and practical. My wife and stepdaughter have both voted me the one most likely to survive the apocalypse, and the one they'd want with them when it comes. I mean, look at these mimes, how could you not trust us.

Rigid does not compromise. Rigid does not concern itself with anyone else's feelings. Rigid focuses on one thing: execution.

There is safety in holding every card. That was my defense. I am only safe when I control everything around me.

A festival meant I controlled nothing.

The whole thing opened as a shit-show. A mass of volunteers who had no idea what was happening, each one giving different instructions than the last. I'd come out of my first Root Initiation forty days earlier, the one where I dropped the role of the Stabilizer, so I had more patience than usual. I put myself in their shoes. Amassing that many volunteers and getting them good information inside twenty-four hours is genuinely hard.

That didn't stop it from being a shit-show. It was.

A shit-show by my standards may be the tightest run ship in the navy to someone else. That's what the defense does. It runs through your entire being, affecting how you think, perceive, judge, and act.

Yours does the same. Have you identified yours yet?

The Walls Go Up

At that Root, forty days before, I'd already honored the Rigid defense in full: spoken the invocation, moved the breath, brought in the sound. A release like that doesn't end the moment it's spoken. Life hands you an opportunity afterward to prove whether it took, or whether the old walls go straight back up the first time you're uncomfortable.

Imagine Festival was mine.

I was already uncomfortable because I wasn't safe, and now I had a crowd of new-age characters to deal with, some of my least favorite people on earth. I felt like an outsider. An imposter. I did not belong here, with these people. Every set of eyes felt like judgment. “We don't like your kind here.”

My wife runs the Merging defense. She gets along with everyone and always reaches to connect. She noted how different we were from the crowd we were standing in as well. So if she feels slightly out of place...I'm on another planet.

This threw me. At the Root I had released the Stabilizer. I had accepted what was beneficial in the Rigid defense and seen clearly that it was also holding me back. Rigid puts four walls around you, and those same walls become a prison, because you can't connect to anyone through them.

And now here I was, terrified of catching the “love-and-light” disease.

Walls up. Protect yourself.

What Are You Afraid Of

Second night. I was dancing in the sea of hippie, still a sore thumb, but in the middle of it all. I looked around and recognized the plain fact: I am here. I am one of these people.

I didn't feel like one of these people. So I asked my Higher Self what I was doing here and why I was so uncomfortable around them.

They answered with a question. “What are you afraid of?”

I was afraid. I was afraid of all of them. I didn't want their attitudes, their values, their work ethic, their lack of common sense, their thought processes, their opinions, any of it wearing off on me.

Then I remembered. I am of Source. I am sovereign. I choose all of those things and I am not swayed by others unless I hand them the power to sway me. I follow the Law of One. And so is everyone else here. All of us, the same mess trying to figure it out. Some farther along than others, all of us brothers and sisters in arms, moving forward.

I did not need the walls up to remain sovereign.

Warmth came flooding into and out of my fourth chakra. The same faces that had carried admonishment and scorn now carried joy. Smiles from every direction.

The festival didn't change. Nobody put the crystals away. Nobody stopped chanting “love and light” or explaining how their chakras were aligning. If anything, they leaned further into all of it that night. The only thing that moved was how I was perceiving it, and that shift was so complete it might as well have transformed the entire festival, because as far as my own experience went, it did.

I changed. Then everything I was perceiving changed with me.

I danced the rest of the night and had nothing but a fantastic time from there forward.

The 5 Defense Patterns

Steven Kessler wrote a book called The 5 Personality Patterns that gives the thorough background on my brief summary below. There are five of these defenses underneath everything, and you're very likely running more than one.

Rigid holds everything together through control. Calm on the surface, structured, allergic to unpredictability, safest when every card is accounted for.

Merging blends with whoever it's caring for. Generous to a fault, boundaries dissolve on contact, safest when needed by someone.

Enduring plants its feet and doesn't move. Steady, the one everyone leans on, safest when it's the one holding the weight, even the weight that's no longer necessary to hold.

Aggressive meets the world head-on. Confrontational when it has to be, quick to temper, safest when it's the one in control of the room.

Leaving steps back before it can be left. Detached, restless, hard to pin down, safest with one foot already out the door.

Mine is Rigid. My wife's is Merging. Neither one is wrong. Each one kept us safe.

The Only Way Out Is Through

The honoring is what allows us to move forward.

Honor means looking back and understanding there was value in who you were and in what happened to you. It turned you into who you are today. It is what lets you see who you want to become. Without honoring our roles, our contracts, and our defenses, we remain ignorant of all that we are. We remain lost in the shadows.

In shamanic terms, clearing goes far deeper than recognition in the psychological sense. We clear through Invocation. You recognize the role. You honor it. You understand it was there to help you move forward and you accept that it made you who you are today. Invocation requires voice: speaking what you recognize and affirming your intentions. It requires breathwork, to bring in the energetic frequencies that clear the old and bring in the new. Often it requires sound frequencies to further solidify the new direction.

Invocation allows release. And honoring is what makes invocation possible.

If you're repelling something you never wanted, releasing it is easy. I hate Brussels sprouts. I release Brussels sprouts from ever being part of my system. Done. You found no value there, so you don't care that it's gone.

The things that kept you alive are different. My Rigid defense kept me safe, secure, competent, and admired by others. I loved my Rigid defense. And through shadow work I learned it was holding me back. So I had to honor it. I had to recognize it played a crucial role in keeping me alive, that it shaped who I was, and that it brought me to where I am today.

I ask clients one question often: if you let go, what happens?

That question finds what you're holding. And the only way to open your hand is to honor what it has been carrying. Nietzsche arrived at part of this and called it “amor fati,” love of fate. In Ecce Homo he wrote “that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.”

None of this work happens in the past or in some imagined future. It happens now, in the only place change has ever actually occurred.

Honor what was.

Act from where you stand.

This is why the only way out is through.

Relapse: Why We Go Backwards

I've cleared things with clients and then watched them repeat the same mistake. One thing is apparent every time I trace it back. They never fully understood the role, the contract, the vow, or the defense. Some shadow stayed unlit. Because they never saw it clearly, they never honored it, and because they never honored it, the pattern came right back.

A client running the Merging defense tells me she's done helping people. She's over it. The next time someone needs a favor she forgets every boundary and offers before the request is finished. Within a couple of days she's full of contempt and resentment, because she chose automatically, violating her own words, without ever honoring what the merging did for her in the past.

Another swears he's done with drama, sick of it. Then a piece of juicy gossip lands and he's on his phone telling his friends what so-and-so said. Sucked right back in.

In both cases, what they needed to recognize was the deep-seated need underneath: to be accepted by others. That need isn't wrong. It got them real things once: attention, connection, a place in the room. It also, eventually, became the thing stunting them. Once they can see that clearly and honor what it once did for them, the release finally holds.

Honor it, and the release holds.

Something real happens when this lands. Holding a defense, a grudge, an old role, takes real effort, sustained over years, whether you notice the cost or not. Release it and that effort becomes available for something else entirely.

Your frequency shifts. The same experience lands differently. Joy shows up in places that used to hold nothing. Consciousness expands, because there's finally room for it to.

That's exactly what happened on that dance floor. One recognition, and everything I was perceiving changed with it.

Source Always Gives Us a Test

What's happening in all of these examples, and in your life, is that Source is constantly cheering for you. Always on your side. Source wants you to succeed.

When you release a defense, a contract, or a role, Source is going to give you the opportunity to choose a new path.

That's what Imagine Festival was for me. It took me over twenty-four hours to pass the test, so I gave myself a B+. I could have done better. I could have done far worse.

Name the defense that has run your life. Then think back to the last time it was tested. Did you honor it, or did you just fight it?

© 2026 Domenic Weber. All rights reserved

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