95. A Schema Therapy Take on Defensiveness & How to Reduce it.

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 In today's episode, Gemma explores the impact of Defensiveness on relationships, its root causes, and practical steps to overcome it.

Key Points:

1. Defensive Phrases:
   • Common examples: "It's not my fault," "You always," "You never," "You're overreacting."
   • Recognize these as signs of defensiveness.
2. Impact on Relationships:
   • Defensiveness is a relationship killer, identified by John and Julie Gottman as one of the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."
   • High levels of defensiveness can predict relationship breakup and divorce.
3. Triggers and Responses:
   • Often triggered by low to medium-level criticisms or requests from a partner.
   • Immediate emotional responses include feelings of threat, anger, and injustice.
4. Behavioral Patterns:
   • Refusing to acknowledge wrongdoing.
   • Redirecting blame or overly justifying actions.
   • Counterattacking or withdrawing.
5. Underlying Causes:
   • Common schemas involved: defectiveness, emotional deprivation, mistrust, subjugation.
   • Often stems from childhood experiences with critical or narcissistic parents.
6. Steps to Overcome Defensiveness:
   • Reflect on defensive incidents when calm.
   • Identify triggers and feelings.
   • Recognize the part of yourself you're defending.
   • Acknowledge and validate your vulnerable inner child.
   • Reassure the defensive part of you that you're now an adult and safe.
   • Practice responding calmly and reasonably.
7. Practical Exercise:
   • Sit quietly and recall a recent defensive episode.
   • Identify your reaction and underlying feelings.
   • Visualize a conversation with your inner child and defender.
   • Reassure them and imagine a healthier response in future interactions.

Conclusion: Defensiveness is common but can be managed with self-awareness and compassionate inner dialogue. Reflect, identify triggers, and practice calm responses to improve relationship dynamics.

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Transcript

Today I'm going to be talking about a commonly complained about topic. Do any of these phrases mean anything to you? So if I said to you, it's not my fault, or you always, you never do this, or. No, that's not what I meant. You didn't hear me correctly. Or, gosh, you're overreacting, or I didn't do it because, like, I told you I'd get to it. Why do you keep harassing me about it? Or what about you? You know, you never do this, or you always do that, or what about you're always at me, you don't appreciate anything I do? Well, these could all be examples of defensiveness or defensive comments. 

Gosh, it's a really interesting phenomenon, defensiveness. It is something that we are all guilty of if we really, you know, stopped to think about it. I don't think there's a person on this earth who's never been defensive in their life. I think at times we all have. But it is a relationship killer. And if you know anything about the famous relationship researchers and therapists John and Julie Gottman in the US, you will know that defensiveness is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse that they describe. Defensiveness can be really toxic, and in their research it can, at high levels, certainly be predictive of relationship breakup and divorce. So, defensiveness, let's take a little deep dive into it and see what we can discover. 

And then I also want to give you some step by step tips about how you can reflect and start to be less defensive in your own relationships, in your own life. Now, defensiveness, we know, is a relationship killer. You know, we can all be defensive now and again, but sometimes people tend to fall back on this defence mechanism more than they should, and it's even possibly a daily feature of their interactions. Now, as a therapist and coach, I have had many clients. They're often men, to be honest. And one of their presenting issues, one of the things they want to work on, or they say they want to work on is their defensiveness. And when I ask them, well, what do you mean by that? They usually say, well, I'm having some relationship issues with my partner and one of the complaints my partner has of me is that I am defensive. That's what she says. She says, I'm defensive. I'm defensive at everything. I can't just hear something. I have to react in a defensive manner. 

Now, some of the time they usually say, yep, I know when I'm being defensive, I can see it and I would like to change it. And other times they say, I don't think I am being defensive. Even the times I'm trying really hard not to be defensive, she's still accusing me of being defensive. I don't know what I'm doing and I'm actually experiencing her as really critical. It's like everything I say, she thinks is me being defensive. And they seem to go around and round and round in this kind of dance. So let's have a look at what it is. As the name suggests, defensiveness is probably a really, really primal and commonly used basic defense mechanism. But it's. It is so the thing about defensiveness is that they're so automatic, half the time we don't even know we're doing it. We flip into this kind of mode and it happens really quickly. One of the things I ask my clients to do is, of course, you know, to start to slow down because usually what we can do is we can recognize, if we're honest with ourselves, we can recognize whether we're being a bit defensive or nothing, just to. Just to pad it out. If you're still thinking, yeah, yeah. But can you say more about defensiveness? Because I'm not sure whether I'm defensive or not or if I'm living with a defensive partner or not. Let me explain a little bit more detail. So usually when we're defensive, it's. There's been some kind of trigger. Often more than not, we are. When we're being defensive. The trigger is fairly low to medium level. Our partner, for example, might have a complaint or they might remind us that we haven't done something we promised to do. Or perhaps they may ask us to do something in a different way, for example. And when we hear all this, we have some level of activation, discomfort. And then we find ourselves responding in a certain way. Now, it's usually immediate. We can have a flood of immediate feelings of, you know, emotional intensity. So we might have an immediate emotional response. And if we're honest with ourselves, we could be feeling some level of threat. Usually, you know, it's something to do with threat. Some level of feeling, maybe attacked, feeling judged, accused, wrongly accused. There's often a sense of injustice that's experienced and. But the basic primal feeling, the thing that our amygdala is reacting to is this sort of. There's some sense of threat. Now, often it. Of course it's a perceived threat that's going on. If we have a. A threat and we're perceiving it as a threat, then it's very normal to have some sort of protective response. Right? So the primary aim of defensiveness, we could say, really is to protect oneself. Now we can explore well from what against what. And we can. We're going to get more into that as we go on. But essentially it's immediate response and we feel like we have to protect ourselves. And it happens really pretty quickly. Basically, we might have some behavioral responses, like perhaps we're. We're refusing to acknowledge any wrongdoing or we might be redirecting blame. We might be overly justifying our behaviours to deflect a perceived criticism. We might be downplaying what we did, downplaying the significance of the issue or the feedback that we've just heard. We might be counter attacking. Right. Responding with criticism or hostility as a way to put the focus on them. Or we might be stonewalling or withdrawing, retreating in some way. So it's usually more of an emotional and behavioral response. There could be some thoughts going on, such as feeling like, this is unfair, I'm getting blamed, my partner doesn't do this, or they never do this or that, whatever it might be. And there's usually a certain amount of rigidity in it. Okay, so, but the consequences of defensiveness is not so great because basically when we're being defensive, once we're triggered and once we respond with defensiveness, it's so easy to escalate things. And we normally do, we escalate things because our partner will get even more you know, triggered from us, they may get defensive in return. It's very hard to stay in healthy adult mode once we're hijacked by this, by the sort of emotional triggering, if you like. So we know that defensiveness is common, right? It's a common, well worn, well used defence mechanism. And I think really we can define it as a primitive survival defence mechanism that we use in response to feeling like we're being under attacked or threatened in some way. So it's very subjective. It's a very real feeling. Now, I keep saying perceived, because often when you break this dynamic down, and later on, perhaps when people do calm down, they realize their partner probably wasn't actually attacking them, or that the comment the partner made wasn't really that bad, or that, you know, they really weren't being wrongly accused of. So in other words, the strength of the feeling they feel in the context of that trigger was disproportionate to what actually happened. And that's what I'm talking about today. I'm not talking about legitimate defending oneself when you are actually being really criticized or really verbally attacked. I'm not talking about that kind of thing. I'm talking about defensiveness that is very commonplace, particularly in relationships, and that causes us a lot of trouble. So the common schemas involved in the behavioral response of defensiveness, there is. There could be defectiveness, a deep seated feeling of inadequacy there. Perhaps somewhere there may very often be the emotional deprivation schema, a feeling of never really being totally seen by people and understood. There may be the mistrust abuse schema, right? Very often people who have a lot of defensiveness will come from a home where they have developed this schema. And because there's been someone in the home who hasn't treated them very well or they've been victimized in some way, maybe emotionally or maybe physically, any form, really. And there may be the subjugation schema, the schema that has developed because you've been raised by perhaps an unfair, more powerful figure, such as a narcissistic parent. So these schemas are very, very common. It's very common to feel the emotion of fear and anger in relation to defensiveness. This is not to say that everybody who responds with a lot of defensiveness would of course have the same origins. We can certainly learn defensiveness through modeling. If you had a parent who was always highly defensive, you may align with that parent and you may have mimicked some of their behaviours and internalized some of their behaviors or you just may have learnt coping strategies as an adult, which has meant that you really wanted to push away taking any type of responsibility, and crafted a sense of sort of higher level defensiveness for yourself through doing things like distorting realities like gaslighting techniques. But generally speaking, we can have defensiveness in an otherwise relatively good relationship. So there will be partners who are defensive and they don't actually mean to be that defensive, but they just can't break this habit. And what I'll be walking through today will be things that will be very useful if you fall into that kind of category. A good thing to ask yourself, if you're identifying as a defensive person or person that that sort of seems to get more defensive than you would like, and that you're more than your partner would like, is to ask yourself the question, what happens when I'm being defensive? Like if I was to step back and analyse the chain of events, what happens? Like, for example, you might ask yourself, what normally triggers my defensive behaviour? When does it come up? What type of conversations would trigger it? Is it when I'm being asked to do something? Is it when I'm being asked to change something? Is it when my partner is pointing out something I didn't do? Is it when they're giving me neutral feedback? Or do you always see it as highly critical? How and when does your defensiveness get triggered? And then what does it feel like for yourself? And ultimately, the question that you need to ask yourself if you really want to change this is who am I actually defending when I'm employing defensiveness? And because it's so automatic, this is going to take a little bit of pondering, but the key is to really think about and sit with the idea of who in me, what part of me am I defending? And is this working or is this causing more harm than good? With a lot of the clients I've worked with who bring to the sessions, that one of the things they would like to work on is their defensiveness. When we look back at their family of origin, more times than not I do see a very common pattern. And the common themes are that they were most likely not always, but they were very often raised by someone who was fairly narcissistic and self absorbed. At least one of their parents had this personality profile and this parent had a critical side. And so this child was often criticised and sometimes verbally attacked, but they were criticised in a way that made them feel as though they were not okay. So perhaps they were even in extreme cases, mocked or shamed. Deliberately in the home. Or perhaps they were wrongly accused and blame was put on them more than, say, their siblings, for example. Very often these clients have these experiences of being criticized or being wrongly accused, or being misunderstood and emotionally hurt in that way. Wrongly punished, harshly punished, or in other ways, made to feel ashamed of their thoughts, feelings and behaviours in some way. Perhaps they got into trouble a lot and it really wasn't their fault. Perhaps they got into trouble and they hadn't really done anything wrong. So there is often a sense of injustice in the lives of people who are highly defensive. Well, we can all be defensive to some degree. It's a very much in the human condition. But for people who are highly defensive, or it comes up as a real pattern in their relationships, there is often a history of being this wrongly accused. There's some form of injustice in the family of origin. They were raised by a narcissistic parent or a bully, and this person developed a certain degree of subjugation they had to subjugate and they also, underneath that, developed righteous anger. So what can we start to do about it? I'm going to take you through some steps that I recently took. A male client of mine, whose partner, whose partner's top number one complaint of him was his defensiveness. Now, he admitted that sometimes he was defensive. Yep, he put his hand up for that. But then he also felt like, rightly or wrongly, that sometimes he wasn't being defensive and that he was being still accused of being defensive. So it's a real tough one. First thing I've asked him to start to do is this exercise that I'm going to go through with you now, after the fact, after an incident where all this has been triggered and where you've been accused of being defensive, set some time aside to reflect on it. The first thing you need to do is to find, you know, when you're calm, of course, a quiet space. And in that space, I'd like you to just sit, close your eyes and breathe and start off with getting in touch with the part of you who has this feeling of defensiveness. Try to recall the situation. Notice how does it feel in your body? So you're thinking of this recent time where you can admit to yourself, yeah, I was being over the top there. I was being defensive. Conjure this memory up in your mind and see if you can notice or remember what triggered it, what your reaction exactly was. So you've identified that your reaction was excessive and unreasonable and unnecessarily defensive. Well, describe that. How were you defensive? For example, what did you say? What emotions did you have? Were you angry, for example? And then what was your behavior? How did you act? So get an image of yourself in the situation, behaving in that offensive way. And then the next thing you need to do is see if you can just momentarily step outside of yourself and have a look at yourself and see how you look and how you sound. Just to double check, do you think you're being defensive now, it's important to be able to do this exercise that you think about these set of feelings, these set of behaviours, your responses, which you're calling defensive. I want you to start to see them as a. See that behavior as a form of coping, as a defensive coping response, even though it's really super automatic. Now ask yourself this really important question. If I'm in defensive mode right now, then there must be another part of me underneath that. I wonder who that is. I wonder what part of me that is. Now we know. I know that this part of you is probably a more pure feeling. This part is probably a different part. So we've got the defensive feelings, the defensive behaviors, and we're calling those a coping mode. And we're asking ourselves the question, what is underneath that? This is the tricky part because the defensiveness is so automatic. So we're trying to the pause, we're pausing and we're asking ourselves, what is underneath it? Underneath it? Is there any part, is there any aspect of vulnerability? Is there a feeling part underneath that? Because you need to ask yourself, who am I defending? Because if defensiveness plays a big part in your life, you commonly use it. There must be. And if we assume it is a coping response, then it follows that there must be a part of you who needs defending. Otherwise this defensiveness, in most cases, probably wouldn't have developed. The next step is to see if you can remember a time from childhood where you felt like you needed a defender. You needed a defender, but you didn't have one specifically, perhaps a time where you would have felt judged, or criticised, or made fun of, or misunderstood, or bullied, or wrongly accused. Any of those. All of those. Now the next thing you need to do is get an image, or, if you can, some sense of a representation of that part. Right. This is the younger you who was feeling like this. So this could be a memory that pops into your mind, or just a sense of yourself as a younger person, a child or an adolescent who had all these feelings of being judged, criticised or wrongly accused, or picked on, or made fun of, or bullied or misunderstood, and get some mental sense of that, a representation. Now, once you have that representation of yourself in mind, you can start to develop a deeper awareness. Now, what I want you to do next is to imagine that you're sitting at a table. This could be a round table, like a small dining table. You're sitting in the middle, and on your left is this vulnerable child part that you have imagined. Right? This child part who's sitting on your left and on your right is the defender something, some part of you that developed later on in order to keep the vulnerability safe. Remember, if you have a defender part, it has to have developed for some reason, because it's a coping mode, and coping modes develop for a reason, to cope with something, right? It makes sense. So what I want you to do is to turn to the vulnerable child part who's on your left. And I want you to take a moment to have a very earnest conversation with this young part of you, and to acknowledge all those feelings that you felt. Validate all those feelings of being criticised, of being mistreated or hard done by, or made fun of, or wrongly accused, or picked on. I want you to acknowledge all those feelings and validate them. They're normal, given what you experienced. And I also want you to take a very compassionate stance to that part. Don't just do it intellectually, but really connect with that part of you and really validate those feelings like you would a young child if you were trying to validate the feelings of a young child that you cared about. So what we're doing here is we're recognizing the vulnerability underneath the defectiveness. We're seeing it as a part of you who had these core experiences early in life. They weren't fair, they were unpleasant. They were experiences of being picked on or victimized in some way. And all we're doing here is the healthy part of you. I want to validate all those experiences that sit within that vulnerable part of you. And then I want you to turn your attention to the person on your right, which is this defender part. Now, this could be any type of image you have, right? Maybe it's an angry image of you, or maybe it's somebody else who's looking to defend and get angry, or go on the attack, but it's a representation of you, something that makes sense to you. I want you to turn your attention to that defender part, and I want you to firstly, just acknowledge it. Thank you. I get why you developed, right? You had good reasons to want to defend me. Okay? You did. You had good reasons to want to defend me. I needed defending when I was younger, when I was in those experiences, when I was bullied, when I was made fun of or unfairly picked on or blamed in the home, I needed defending, and I didn't have it. So thank you. You're there for a reason. I get why you developed. I get it. You haven't done the wrong thing. You developed for a good reason. Thank you for that. But what I need to let you know is that things are different now. Okay? I'm an adult, and that means that pretty much, I can choose who comes into my life and who doesn't. I am an adult, and I can protect myself. And very importantly, I need to learn to respond differently. Right? I need a to learn these new, healthy adult skills instead of relying on you. Because sometimes, even though you've got the best of intentions, you're too strong, you're too much. You go over the top. I know you want to help, but you don't need to be on high alert anymore. You don't need to be on high alert when my partner gives me feedback. You don't need to go into attack mode when I'm queried about something I did or didn't do, I'm an adult, and I can look after myself, and my partner really is not out to get me. Things are different now. So you don't need to be on high alert anymore. So these are all the things in your mind that you are saying to the defender. You're saying, I am safe because I get to choose who is in my life now, and you're letting this part know that they can relax. So that's the essence of what you need to communicate to this part now. You also, of course, have to make sure that you've had a similar conversation to little you, right? To the part of you that has all these feelings that had. So this is a part of your vulnerable child or a vulnerable child part who feels really misunderstood and badly. Treat it. And you need to let this part know that you've already validated them, but you need to let them know that they are now, okay? Bring them up to speed with what's happened. You are taking care of them now. You are a healthy adult. You are taking them care of them now. And they're not. They're no longer under attack in these situations that they experienced in the past doesn't happen anymore. They are safe with you now. Always. They always be with you. Safe. And now tell these two parts of you, the vulnerable child part on your left and the defender on your right. Now tell them that you need to be responding differently and that you're going to be responding differently instead of the old worn defensiveness. And you can ask yourself, how do I want to be different? How do I want to respond instead of being overly defensive? Now I want you to make sure that these two parts of you that you've identified and had a conversation with are taken care of. So I want to make sure that this little you that you've been talking to feels that they can just relax and collapse into you. They're with you now, always, okay? They're not being hard done by anymore. They're not being badly treated anymore. They're with you. So I want you to imagine them somewhere safe and calm, even happy and content, if possible. And then I also want you to imagine this defender part that no longer has to be super high and on edge. They can have a more moderate approach if they really need to help you in those situations. That might come up, but essentially they don't need to be doing what they've been doing because it's unnecessary and it's over the top. You've thanked them and you've explained that they don't need to go into this huge defensive and attack mode. Things are not the same anymore. You're a healthy adult. You're not a child anymore who needs defending. So you can even think about what other role can I give them? And that will be for you to figure out. But you can imagine this other part of you may be helping out in another way. Now, the final thing that I'd like you to do in this imagery is to imagine handling this interaction differently in a more reasonable and healthy adult way. How would you respond differently? If you wanted to respond in a more calm and reasonable way? What would you do? What would you say? How could you express yourself in a way that was being heard rather than a way that is not being heard? Because you are being defensive. How can you be curious? How can you be assertive but kind and calm? How can you quickly soothe the vulnerable part of you in the moment and let them know, hey, my partner's not attacking me here. They're just. They're just anxious that, you know, I haven't done this one thing I said I was going to do. They're annoyed about that given, but I don't. I'm not being attacked. You're not being attacked. This isn't the past. This is here and now, and you're safe. So you can imagine how you would respond differently. How would that play out differently if you've attended to these other parts of you that are important in this whole defensiveness piece? So I hope that that approach has helped you. It's a bit different. What we ultimately need to do is we need to stop and recognise what triggers us, and then we need to ask ourselves the question, am I being defensive? And really, if we honestly come up with the answer yes, and then you need to ask yourself, hang on a minute, who am I really? And what am I really defending here? And maybe this isn't necessary. Maybe what I need to do is to soothe and validate the part of me who actually needed defending when I was a child. And maybe I also need to have a chat with that learned coping mode, that defender part who thinks they have to go in gung ho and defend me at all cost. They're a little over the top now. I don't need them to do that for me anymore. Above all, you need to apply to this issue a lot of mindfulness. A lot of interpersonal mindfulness. If things get too much, just take a breath and step away. You can always think about what you'd need to communicate later. Know that defensiveness usually escalates things and makes things worse. How will you feel then? Not very good, I imagine. Usually defensiveness destroys relationships over time. It is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, after all, as identified by the Gottmans. You don't like being on the end of a defensive rant if someone is speaking to you that way, so you know how destructive it can be. So I hope this session today has been really helpful to you. If it has been, send us a line. We'd love to hear from you. We'd also appreciate if this session was relevant for you. We'd love you to share it with friends or family. Best of luck going forward with moderating your defensiveness. If this is an issue for you, you can do it. It just takes time. It takes practice and an awful lot of mindfulness.

Speaker A: Thanks so much for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to share it with others. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get notifications when new shows are released. You can visit us@goodmood.com dot au podcast for more information. You know this podcast is intended for learning and entertainment purposes, and we really hope it achieves that. But because it's not a substitute for personal therapy, we'd like you to consult a qualified mental health professional for tailored support. Bye for now.