How Defensiveness Harms Relationships

Does your spouse or partner constantly tell you, “stop being so defensive”? It’s hard to hear because, well, it makes you feel like you need to defend yourself!

When we’re defensive, we become fixated on proving our innocence or that we’re right, which squashes connection and is a dead-end for communication and conflict resolution.

What is defensiveness?

Defensiveness is usually brought on by feeling attacked, misunderstood or mischaracterized by our partner. We often feel like the things we do right aren’t acknowledged so when our partner has a need we often feel like we have to prove to them why they aren’t right or that we have done what they’ve been asking of us.

Defensiveness, while normal and completely understandable if criticism is being used, makes our partner feel invalidated and hopeless. This can lead to them shutting down or getting louder and becoming more aggressive which we will talk about in contempt.

What’s the antidote to defensiveness?

The antidote to defensiveness is accepting responsibility.

Accepting responsibility can be both verbal and non-verbal when our partner is sharing their feelings and needs. The important thing is to be quiet about your thoughts and feelings until you can acknowledge your partner’s feelings first if they are the one bringing up the issue.

Accepting responsibility can look like:

• nodding your head

• asking an open-ended question

• saying “okay”

• providing a summary to your partner based on what you’re hearing

Let’s practice a few of these using the same example of Sidney and Steve from the previous post on criticism.

“I can understand why you feel lonely. I’ve felt that way too and it doesn’t feel good. What can we do about it?”

“Okay, if I need help planning those dates, would you be willing to sit down and do that with me?”

If your partner is struggling to use a softened startup and you’re finding yourself feeling defensive, you can try requesting kindly that they please soften their tone or try utilizing the softened startup to express their needs without blame. 

When you start noticing defensiveness and take a moment to check in with yourself and correct it, your relationship and connection can really strengthen!