<Sound of nail being hit on the head>

If an instructor (or anyone else for that matter) assigns one of the defense mechanisms or one of the dangerous attitudes to you, consider the instructor's comprehension of these things.

The chances are excellent that the CFI's only exposure to these concepts was cramming for his multiple-guess FAA knowledge test on "Fundamentals of Instruction," a very thin book that touches the bear surface of instruction theory as it existed 40 years ago. She's probably as qualified, well, as qualified as the student, to make those assessments. Which is to say, not very qualified at all.

Then consider the instructor's personality type. For example, is she very regimented? Everything must be "just so"? If so, that personality type tends to take stuff like this literally. Anyone who has ever questioned why a rule exists is, for example, "anti-authority."

There's probably a lot of "misdiagnosed" pilots running round.