Defensiveness And Why It Is Hard To See In Yourself

Defensiveness is easy to identify in a partner and almost impossible to identify in oneself while it is happening. That asymmetry is the reason it survives so many attempts to address it.

From inside it feels like accuracy

Explaining that you were held up, that the instruction was ambiguous, or that the situation was not as described feels like supplying missing information rather than resisting a complaint.

The explanation is frequently true, which reinforces the sense that offering it is reasonable and that objecting to it is unfair.

What is not visible from inside is that the complaint has now gone unanswered, because the response addressed the facts and not the grievance.

From outside it reads as refusal

The partner who raised something hears a reason why they should not have raised it, whatever the content of the explanation.

They then restate the complaint more forcefully in order to get it acknowledged, which prompts a fuller explanation and confirms the impression on both sides.

Each person is behaving sensibly given their own reading, which is why the exchange can repeat several times without either recognising what is happening.

Counter-complaint is the sharpest form

Answering a criticism with a different criticism removes the original from the table entirely, and it does so without ever appearing to refuse it.

The move is usually not calculated. It reflects the fact that being criticised brings one's own grievances readily to mind.

Its effect is to convert a single subject into two, neither of which can now be settled, and to establish that raising anything will produce a charge in return.

The trigger is a claim about character

Most defensiveness responds not to the stated complaint but to an implication about the kind of person the complaint suggests you are.

This is why the intensity so often exceeds the topic, and why complaints framed as patterns produce more of it than complaints framed as incidents.

It is also why an explicit statement that no general judgement is intended can lower the response considerably, even without conceding anything.

Acknowledgement can precede agreement

Saying that you can see why something was annoying does not concede that the complaint was correct, and it removes the pressure that produces the escalation.

The explanation can still follow, and it tends to be received far better once the grievance has been registered rather than answered around.

Couples who reverse the order — acknowledgement first, account second — usually report that the same conversations become substantially shorter without any change in what either of them thinks.