Defensiveness is a very destructive behavior in relationships. It can look like this: you go to your partner with some feedback, and you say, “Hey, the other day you were in the kitchen and you did this and you said this, and it really hurt my feelings.” And instantly you’re met with: “What are you talking about? What do you mean? Why are you so sensitive? Why have you got to bring it up now? Why are you constantly bringing up the past?”
That is such a block to relationship.
What defensiveness really means.
Defensiveness is literally saying: everything you bring to me is going to affect me personally. I’m taking it as a personal attack. Your feelings don’t matter about it. You are now going to have to reassure me that I didn’t in fact do anything to cause any impact to you.
I link it to a kind of attachment strategy, which is withdrawing or avoiding. Often people who avoid struggle to connect with anything other than the present moment. They don’t like to labor over the past, they don’t like to plan for the future. They remain very much in the present.
This kind of response comes from low self-reflection, low curiosity about their internal world, low tolerance of the feelings that they have, and low interest in the impact they have on others.
The capacity problem.
If you are going to your partner with an appropriate expression of hurt and they are meeting you with defense, it is not on you in that moment to work harder to be understood. You cannot be understood by somebody who is walled off to understanding.
If you keep trying and you keep pushing, you’ll enter into a dance where the more you try to be heard, the more your partner shuts down. The more they shut down, the harder you work to be heard. And the harder you work to be heard, the more likely they are to just completely withdraw or explode.
Understanding is a two-way street. If you want to be understood by somebody, they have to have a will to understand you. They have to want to understand you. That means they have to have capacity. They have to have the internal space to be able to incorporate and integrate your worldview and your experience alongside theirs.
Some people with defensiveness actually don’t have capacity. Going to therapy is one way that they can work on developing more capacity. But they don’t have capacity because their internal experience is already quite overwhelming—and it’s all about them. That’s what defensiveness is: literally saying, “I don’t wanna hear it. What about me? What about you doing to me right now?”
That’s why it can feel so lonely being with somebody who is largely defensive.
What to do instead.
As hard as it may sound, your role in relationship with people who are very defensive is not to work harder, but to say: “Look, the impact of you shutting down when I make a bid for connection, when I want to give you some feedback, which may not land positively—your role in that moment is to try to hear me and to try to understand me. But the impact of you shutting down is that I feel lonely, I feel unheard, and I am learning that I cannot bring problems to you. We cannot problem solve.”
Which means, inevitably, it’s death by a thousand cuts. Relationships will die—not overnight, but slowly, by a kind of erasure of one person’s feelings through defensiveness.
