Learn English – How to express ‘teaching something to theself’

Your example is incorrect because your ethics is not the same as yourself, regardless of ownership. Even though values are an integral part of defining a person, they are not the same. An individual might change and is more than their ethics, and the same morals may be held by multiple people. You've suggested this yourself by acknowledging ethics as an external force.

Refrain is a reflexive verb and used intransitively. The definition encapsulates a patient already; the agent always holds back or stops itself. One never refrains something else, and we typically don't say I refrained myself because that's redundant. Note that I refrained myself is not really a transitive usage; it's an explicit statement of the complete reflexive meaning.

Archaically, refrain was used transitively as a synonym for restrain (meaning you could refrain someone else, not just yourself), but this usage has been dropped from modern English and is no longer correct.

I suggest using restrain for transitive cases such as your sample sentence.

The -tion (or -sion) suffix is commonly used to turn a verb into a noun. Some common examples include:

communicate => communication

relax => relaxation

educate => education

It's true that these nouns are not physical, tangible things, but the definition of noun as "person, place, or thing" is woefully incomplete. These nouns are abstract concepts, which are indeed nouns.