The Unifying Theory of Defensiveness
One of the most destructive human behaviours is also the easiest to fix
If you ask most people how they cope with stress they will tell you what they do to deal with it. “Oh, when I’m stressed I make sure I exercise, eat healthy food, hang out with friends and family to remind me what really matters in life, do meditation maybe” and so on.
This is a great list, I do most myself, but while they may give you a stronger foundation on which to face stressful situations in the future, they are not how you deal with stress in practice.
In practice you actually cope with stressful situations by getting defensive. It doesn’t matter how many ‘good’ things you do you will struggle to prevent yourself ever getting defensive. Its human nature. It’s also incredibly damaging.
If you feel a threat — whether it’s a work situation you’re not sure how to deal with, a deadline, a change in life circumstances, a bill arriving you didn’t expect, a break-up, your partner getting cross with you, your kids behaving badly — you build a wall around yourself for protection. It’s instinct. You get defensive. You throw a bit of anger into the mix to let anyone around you know your draw bridge has been pulled up. It’s your way of saying ‘back off and leave me alone’.
I do it, I see my kids do it and I see people doing it at work when they feel their job is not going the way they hoped.
Defensiveness is one of my favourite human behaviours. Not because I like being defensive or being around people who are defensive — it’s horrible! But because of all the ways we behave it is the most obvious and easiest to deal with. I know that when I’m being defensive it is my mind’s way of trying to protect me from having to deal with something it doesn’t want me to face. If someone around me is acting defensively — I know it is their mind protecting them from something it doesn’t want them to have to face.
If, as we have seen in The Unifying Theory of Work, fear is a compass, then defensiveness marks the spot where your own personal development treasure is to be found. Assuming you have the courage to dig into yourself, or the skills to be able to extract it from someone around you. If you’ll forgive me extending the analogy, a shovel doesn’t do the job. A destructive approach will make the defensive person more defensive. Even if they are behaving in a way that makes you want to shout at them. They will feel attacked.
Your first job when coming up against defensiveness is not to escalate the situation. You have to find a softer approach. Even if you are right you will not prove it by increasing the conflict.
This is because when people who are feeling defensive get attacked they feel entirely justified in being defensive and get more defensive. Even if they were not completely sure about being defensive initially, anything they can interpret as an attack exonerates their sense of justice at being defensive in the first place. This is why if you are defensive at home it will almost certainly culminate in a row with someone you love. The person who feels defensive needs to feel attacked for their defensiveness to be maintained. They create new conflict in the outside world to reflect the conflict they are feeling inside their inner world. It makes them feel better if the physical world matches the way they are feeling inside. It stops them having to deal with the actual problem.
Defensiveness is trouble brewing. It only makes things worse though. It pushes you away from what you need, which is help. Usually from the person you are getting defensive with.
To help us navigate the inevitable ups and downs of life, my wife and I have a safe word. Not for use during creative sexual antics, but for when anger and defensiveness surface. If either of us think the other is acting in a way that is about to escalate into conflict because we are showing signs of defensiveness, we tell them the safe word. Like all safe words it’s a word we would not usually say in any other context. The deal with the safe word is if the other person says it to you then you can’t argue, which is why it can only be deployed in an appropriate situation. It’s like pulling an emergency chord on a train. You have to trust each other never to misuse it.
If one of us says it to the other, they immediately have to walk away for 5 minutes — go to the loo or a quiet place — and engage with the anger and defensiveness they are feeling. You have to look at what’s connected to it. The real reason is always slightly obscured but becomes obvious when you stare it out. You’ve found your treasure chest. This is what you have to open and deal with. If you are able to be completely honest with yourself in this moment, you will find it is very rarely because of another person. It is almost always a fault within yourself. Then at an appropriate moment you have to tell the other person what it was. You have to lower your drawbridge and expose it to a non-judgemental conversation. You have to deal with the actual problem and, if necessary, ask them for help.
In practice, the existence of a safe word to use in this context in your relationship often prevents it being used. You’ll see the facial expression of the person you love changing and in it the mirror of your own behaviour and end up saying it to yourself.
You may have thought you were angry about the fact that someone hasn’t tidied up after themselves, but it’s usually something inside you. Annoying as that may be. It makes sense, right? Your mind is trying to divert you from a problem you can’t see a way out of by finding another problem that is someone else’s fault you can get cross with them about instead. If it can do that then you can let yourself off the bad behaviour you have performed, which is why defensiveness can escalate in your mind into anger and shouting about a whole other range of things that piss you off. The stakes are high. You have to win to spare yourself future guilt, shame and recrimination. So you double down on your anger and defensiveness. But the problem that caused you to be defensive is now sniggering quietly in the back of your mind, ready to pull something else in front of it to prevent you facing it the next time. It will run rings around you if you let it, until you genuinely are all alone.
So how do we spot it in ourselves without going through the exhausting performance of pulling in the people we are closest to, or our work colleagues, into a row or engaging in passive aggression?
By saying the safe word to yourself, or safe phrase in this instance, when you can feel your defensiveness start to run away with you. Defensiveness begins with intense introspection. You will probably be feeling and repeating a thought over and over again in your head. Something that you are convinced is ‘unfair’. You might start blundering around your office or the house. Little things that you wouldn’t normally notice will irritate you. You will be feeling very sorry for yourself. Just at the point where you discover some injustice and you are about to erupt by getting cross with someone else, you need to go and find a quiet corner and say the safe phrase to yourself. The safe phrase is ‘I am good enough’. This is the safe phrase because whatever is stressing you out will be linked to some feeling of inferiority. Defensiveness emerges when we feel we are not good enough to deal with whatever is making us feel afraid.
In those moments when I feel myself getting defensive I take myself away from everyone else and remind myself I am good enough. If it’s really bad I go for a run or a walk and don’t listen to music so my thought processes can unpack the feeling while my body is occupied with something else. I take deep breaths and look at what is actually fuelling the defensive feeling. Not what is obscuring it. It is usually something to do with money, the possibility of an impending disaster of some kind, something you did you are shamed of, a feeling you are embarrassed to admit to, resentment towards someone you feel bad for resenting, or sex or death. It will be something big. And it will be linked to a profound feeling of personal failure you are scared to face.
It will be drawing from a well inside you that is filled with a deep sense of terror anyone might find out the truth about you. That you are a failure. If it’s deep enough and entrenched enough and fuelled by something that has happened to you in your past then you may need to ask for professional help, but even identifying this is a huge step forward. By pondering and engaging with something big and meaty inside yourself you have escaped the treadmill of a pattern of defensive behaviour and are now staring the real problem in the face.
The person you were getting cross with is usually the one best placed to help you with it. Even if they can’t help themselves they will have a different perspective on it. Listen to them. Say sorry. Accept a hug.
This is an extended piece about an idea included in my latest book, The Surfboard.
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