Why you get defensive (and how it's ruining your relationships)

Why do we get defensive during conflict even when we’re self-aware? 

In Episode 20 of Things We Say in Therapy, we break down defensiveness as a nervous system response rather than a personality flaw, and explore why feedback can feel like a personal attack.

This episode covers:

• What defensiveness actually is and why it shows up during conflict
• The role of the nervous system, amygdala, and fight-flight-freeze responses
• How childhood attachment, shame, and fear of abandonment shape defensiveness
• Why over-explaining, sarcasm, shutting down, and “brutal honesty” are often self-protection
• The difference between being misunderstood and being wronged
• How to separate intent from impact in difficult conversations
• The hidden cost of defensiveness on relationships and emotional safety
• How to notice defensiveness in real time and respond without self-abandonment
• When defensiveness is actually a signal of being shamed or manipulated

If you struggle with accountability, conflict, emotional regulation, people-pleasing, or feeling unsafe receiving feedback, this episode offers honest self-reflection, psychology insights, and practical tools to help you build healthier, more authentic relationships.

Discomfort isn’t a threat, it’s information. Sit with it. 

Transcript

[00:00:00] My most people don't want self-awareness or honest truths because it's uncomfortable. Most people just want reassurance. Hello everyone. Welcome back to your regularly scheduled self-reflection. I am Tash, and this is things we say in therapy. A place to feel seen, to learn some psychology, and to self-reflect on some hard truths to improve your mental health. If you resonate with anything in this episode, the discomfort you feel is a signal to address something not a threat. I'm not here to shame anybody. I'm here to help people become more comfortable with discomfort and to stop being scared of accountability. Now you will have seen from the title that this episode is about being defensive. We all do it. It's very common. Even mental health professionals, people who are trained in mental health and psychology still get [00:01:00] defensive about things they feel threatened by. It's a natural reaction and we all do it. Even people who are self-aware. This episode is of people who shut down during conflict over overexplain themselves, get sarcastic in uncomfortable situations, feel like they're consistently misunderstood, or people who just insist that they're brutally honest. A lot of those people can also just be disguising defensiveness. When we feel hurt or threatened by something, it's uncomfortable. Yeah, you get that physical hurt feeling in your chest or your stomach, and you immediately want to hurt them back or defend yourself. Most of the time, this defensiveness reaction just ruins relationships and connections. This is uncomfortable on purpose, so let's call it like it is. So let's further define what defensiveness is. Being defensive is a nervous system response, not a personality flaw. [00:02:00] It's a response to a threat to your identity. And people jump to defend themselves when they've got a fragile identity, when they've got low self-worth, low self-esteem. Because a lot more things will scare you into thinking that people are misunderstanding who you are, and so you jump to defend yourself instead of being able to stay mentally strong in the fact that you are who you are. The defensiveness is your brain saying, this is a threat to my identity and my safety. Defensiveness is commonly misconstrued or misunderstood as just explaining yourself. Taking things the wrong way. The brutal truth here is that over explanation, it's often a self-protection technique. It's not done for clarity. In the moment, you think that you are explaining yourself or defending yourself because you feel an attack on your [00:03:00] character. But what you are actually doing is you are explaining yourself in the hopes that the other person will agree with you, so that you can get reassurance for your ego's sake so that you can get the external validation required know who you are. The thing that people who get defensive need to understand is that being misunderstood for who you are is not the same as being wronged. Someone misunderstanding you is not an attack. If this feels uncomfortable to listen, to, sit with it, don't run from it, because people who get defensive are going to struggle hearing these things. Just like all of my other topics, but specifically this one because we are specifically talking about a reaction that comes out under discomfort and when your self-perception is threatened. So let's dive a little bit more into the psychology of defensiveness and why it's a survival technique. People who are defensive are [00:04:00] often seen as emotionally immature because it can seem quite childish to always be jumping to defend yourself without any attempt to understand where the other person is coming from. It starts a lot of arguments. It creates drama where it's unnecessary and it can be difficult to be around when it's excessive. It's also not narcissism. I know that that word is thrown around a lot these days. It's not a character flaw, it's not a failure. It's simply your learned nervous system response, thinking that any perception that someone else has of your identity that doesn't match your own as an attack. The reason that people who get defensive learned this response, this nervous system response, is because at some point in your life, that technique was necessary for your survival. At some point in your life you needed to defend yourself [00:05:00] in order to feel seen and sane because someone actually was attacking your character and you, and making you feel small or belittled or unworthy. But now because you've been trained to feel like you are being attacked because at some point in your life you were now, you are seeing things that aren't an attack as an attack. Your body was learning to keep you safe long before you learned how to self-reflect. This taught you defensiveness. So now let's land some self-reflection. A significant little part of biology that is important here is the amygdala in your brain, which is essentially the emotions center, and it causes feedback about you from others to feel like danger, to feel like a threat. As well as being the emotion center. The amygdala is also the center for fear detection. It's not partial to seeing the truth. It's that [00:06:00] emotional reactive side of you. The amygdala won't understand when someone is coming to you with feedback that is honorable and worthy to be having a conversation about for the sake of the relationship or whatever it may be. If someone comes to you saying, can I be honest? Can I speak to you about something? And it's you know about something that's been bothering them, about your behavior, about something you did that upset them. When you've got this learned nervous system response, your brain doesn't care about that. Your brain won't understand that this is happening in your best interest. It will just feel like an attack. It will just feel like danger. I've spoken about this in previous episodes, but when emotions are fired up, when the, when there's blood flow to the amygdala and you are having an emotional reaction to something rational thinking depletes. It is very difficult to think rationally if not [00:07:00] impossible to think rationally when you have that immediate emotional reaction. This is why it's very important to take a minute before reacting to something. With defensiveness, it's very difficult to control this because it is that immediate reaction. You are not responsible for that immediate reaction, that immediate thought process of feeling attacked or feeling in danger, but you are responsible for how you verbally or physically express that reaction. When the amygdala is fired up, your capacity to listen to other people also depletes. And so you are not thinking about what they're saying. You are thinking about your reaction. Your stress responses are triggered and you go into fight, flight, freeze. None of these are gonna be helpful. Going into fight mode can cause arguments. Um, it can cause you to attack that [00:08:00] person back. Going into flight could include completely shutting down, just getting out of there, or disassociating from the situation to avoid the emotional discomfort. Or freeze slash fawn, which could include going numb, going blank, not understanding what's happening, or even being compliant and appeasing the other person without really trying to understand the nuance of what they're saying and really take it in. You jump to making sure they no longer feel that way about you and just go going along with whatever they say. I can't even count the amount of times where what someone was saying to me logically made sense. And you can understand where they're coming from, but you can't help that emotional hurt reaction that you have on the inside. your body still reacts like it's under attack, like you are in danger and that is [00:09:00] completely normal and it's not your fault. You have learned to react that way because of past environments you've lived in, past experiences. But you are able to reduce it. You are able to learn how to control that reaction and focus on listening and understanding rather than defending yourself and attacking. So let's get into a few of the possible reasons why you may have learnt this nervous system reaction. The first and probably most common one that causes most of our adult behaviors is early attachments. Many people who had emotionally reactive parents themselves or emotionally avoidant, emotionally unavailable, or immature parents didn't learn that their feelings were valid, didn't learn that their feelings were safe and made sense, and that you were allowed to feel uncomfortable, feel upset, feel disheartened by things. A lot of children were taught that they had [00:10:00] to explain themselves or get over it, or that they're too sensitive, that they're dramatic, that they had to rationalize to their parents why they were feeling the way they were feeling. So the nervous system learns that being misunderstood is a dangerous place to be. It learns that conflict equals loss of connection. It equals abandonment, it equals losing someone you care about. You also learn that emotional expression is risky, and that feedback about your behavior is a personal attack. Under these circumstances, you essentially learn that your connection with somebody else is conditional upon being understood by them. So being defensive, rushing to explain yourself, to try and make someone else understand you or to defend yourself, defend your Honor, was a way to keep people close, was a way [00:11:00] to stop them from leaving. As an adult, being defensive, it's just seen as you trying to win arguments, being argumentative and disagreeable, and you are seen as a chaotic, messy person, but you're just trying to not be abandoned. Another experience that could cause defensiveness is shame-based learning. This essentially means that at some point in your life when you made mistakes, you were made to feel like this is a threat to your identity. Let me further explain. when you were a kid or when you were growing up and you did something wrong, if you were made to feel like you were stupid or I, you were humiliated for making these mistakes, you don't then associate making mistakes with doing something wrong. You associate it with being wrong. That you are wrong. For people who were raised in shame heavy environments, being shamed for making [00:12:00] mistakes, you then learn that getting feedback from people is a humiliation ritual. That being corrected in something is someone calling you stupid. So this is where defensiveness steps in so that you can feel like you're defending yourself, your sense of self. You feel like you're preserving your dignity. If getting criticism once felt like losing the love of someone you care about, when you feel attacked, you will automatically fight like it's life or death. Something else to note is developing the need to perform being a good person in order to stay safe. So if you grew up in environments where you had to be agreeable, you had to be compliant, you were that easygoing kid who wanted to stay perfect not cause trouble If you had to be mature early on in your life to avoid the wrath of your parents or to just survive. [00:13:00] Then most likely anger wasn't allowed. Messiness wasn't allowed. Having complexity of emotions and having nuance to your character most likely wasn't allowed. This is where black and white thinking enters the chat. So now as an adult, any kind of feedback threatens your identity as a good person. So in this circumstance, the defensiveness isn't about what the other person is saying. You're not listening to what the other person is saying. It's about the fear of your true identity being revealed because you feel the need to perform, you need everyone to view you as a good person in order to stay safe and feel stable. I have done a whole episode on this, on the performance of being good. So scroll back through my episodes to go and find it. I will definitely tag it in the YouTube video. There is so much more nuance to this performance of needing to look like a good person. But when your self-worth is [00:14:00] tied to being seen as a good person, any kind of tiny little perceived threat to that identity that you're portraying to the world, it feels unbearable and you have to jump to defend it to make sure that no one is viewing you in a different light. It is so important to be aware of this and to work on it because being your authentic self will always, always beat, trying to please everybody. Trying to constantly portray this fake persona to the world. It's never doing what you think it's doing. Something else you may have experienced if you get defensive is you had to justify your feelings growing up. If you had to prove why you were hurt by something, if you had to make your pain logical make sense to someone else, or if you had to argue your way into being taken seriously, then your nervous system learns that your [00:15:00] emotions, your feelings require defense and require hard evidence in order to be true or understood. So now when someone challenges you. You don't feel heard, you don't feel understood, and so you rush to explain. Some other reasons for defensiveness are avoiding punishment or emotional withdrawal. If you had parents who gave you the silent treatment or were cold, distant, or made their disappointment extremely known. Later on in life, when you feel a threat, you preempt someone doing this, and so you rush to try to stop that happening, which causes defensiveness. The thing to learn here is that defensiveness is usually about preventing loss, not about winning an argument or being argumentative, but it always comes across as aggressive and unnecessary to people who aren't you because they don't know what's going on in your head. Defensiveness is a signal to address something, address an emotional [00:16:00] wound. It doesn't mean that you're a bad person. It doesn't mean that you want to cause problems with the people you love, but there are definitely unhealed parts of you that need a dressing. Ask yourself, when was the first time that you that being questioned wasn't safe? Because what once protected you might be sabotaging you now. So let's talk about how defensiveness shows up in your life. There might be some things here that you don't realize you're doing, so make sure to listen to understand without clicking off or trying to avoid. There's nothing wrong with taking accountability. So common defensive behaviors are interrupting Overtalking, overexplaining. Correcting small details instead of addressing the main problem using sarcasm or humor to deflect emotional shutdown, or going quiet, flipping the script onto the other person saying things like, will you do that too? Or beginning to [00:17:00] address another issue you have with that person instead of listening to what they've said first. And playing the victim instead of listening. Defensiveness is an attempt at control because when you feel attacked, you feel emotionally unstable. And so you try to control the situation by reframing the narrative because you can't control what someone else is gonna say. You take over. I used to have a friend who thought that every time they felt discomfort or felt hurt by something that someone else had brought to their attention about their behavior, that this automatically made the person that was coming to them mean or disrespectful. There was no consideration that the other person was coming to them in an attempt to repair the relationship because if someone didn't care about you, there's no way they would want to have a difficult conversation with you. They were lacking accountability and self-awareness [00:18:00] and jumped immediately into defensiveness, which involved them calling that other person mean or disrespectful, because if they can feel like they're being attacked, that takes away the need for accountability of their behavior. So why does defensiveness feel so justified in the moment? The common internal experience is, I'm being attacked. This isn't fair on me. They don't see me for who I am. They don't understand me, and the need to clarify so that they don't feel misunderstood forever. Defensiveness is often grief for the version of yourself that you think you are. If you have this perception of yourself and it's fragile, It is so easy to think that someone is wronging you, you think. If this is true, what does that say about me? And you're so scared of thinking of yourself as doing something wrong [00:19:00] or as hurting somebody. It's so difficult to deal with that you then jump to deflect in order to save yourself, in order to protect yourself from feeling the discomfort of maybe hurting somebody or whatever it is. What people who get defensive don't understand is that feedback is not a verdict on who you are. It's information. You don't have to accept it all as someone else sees it in order to sit with it. You are allowed to have your own opinion of the situation, but that also needs to come with the nuances of how it's being perceived. How someone else sees you is not fact, and most often than not, how you see yourself isn't fact either, because we all have our biases. We all see things in different lights. Not taking things personally is so key because what you think of yourself matters the most, but understanding and listening [00:20:00] and prioritizing the relationships and the wellness of the people you care about is also important. And in order to truly know yourself, you have to sit with discomfort. You have to sit with the things that you've done wrong, the ways that you've fucked up. And that will allow you to be able to see things better from other people's perspectives as well, because you don't automatically just jump to being defensive and therefore completely ignoring how things are being perceived. It's all just information. So the cost of defensiveness, this is where it's really gonna sting. Um, if you struggle with defensiveness, please stay with it. It doesn't make you a bad person. Being defensive. It teaches people that you are not an emotionally safe person, that you can't go to them with things that have upset you or bothered you. It completely ends any kind of vulnerability connection between you. [00:21:00] People will stop telling you the truth. People walk on eggshells. They avoid anything that could potentially send you into that reaction, which creates fake relationships that are not authentic. It turns small issues into chronic resentment because things build up if they're not spoken about. Obviously, you do need to pick your battles at times. However, over time, if you can't go to somebody with something that's bothering you, it niggles and it grows into something that it didn't need to be. Being defensive and causing other people to tiptoe around you allows you to continue having this false sense of control and safety within yourself. That false sense of control and safety will keep sending you down a path of destruction. You are likely to not know yourself very well because you're continuing this fake persona. When something really bothers you, you'll continue to keep [00:22:00] having emotional reactions instead of being able to actually deal with it. Your whole life becomes a fragile performance of who you want other people to think you are versus your authentic self. It affects your relationships, including your relationship with yourself, and the reality is that people won't walk away from you because of conflict. People leave because of unresolved conflict and the resulting lack of connection. If multiple people come to you with the same issue or someone comes to you with the same issue multiple times, it's data, not coincidence. Don't focus on defending yourself, focus on aligning with that person again. Focus on coming to a conclusion where you both can come out stronger rather than just focusing on yourself and trying to defend, your Honor. Someone coming to you to have a difficult conversation. They're not coming to [00:23:00] attack you. People don't want to have uncomfortable conversations with people they don't care about. So how do you catch yourself in real time, being defensive? As always, doing the real practical work will require you to be honest with yourself. It's hard at first, but it is so liberating to be honest with yourself and learn to take accountability. So firstly, you need to learn your body's warning signs, heat jaw, clenching the urge to interrupt somebody or shut them down, or forming a mental argument as someone is talking instead of listening and understanding them. If you speak in the heat of the moment, you'll be reacting out of emotion rather than understanding. You then need to name what you're feeling. I am feeling the urge to protect myself. I'm feeling defensive right now. Even just taking a minute to try and understand what you're actually feeling can take [00:24:00] away that initial heat of the moment emotion, so you can have a bit more of a productive conversation rooted in compassion rather than emotion. If you need more time to process what someone else has said to you, just take it. There's no pressure to have the conversation right then and there, especially if you don't feel the emotional capacity in that moment to have that conversation. That's fine. Ask for clarity. Tell them that you want to understand more before you respond. You also need to separate intent from impact. You need to understand that if you've done something to hurt somebody or bother somebody, you can mean well and still hurt someone. Both can exist at the same time. There's so much nuance to having difficult conversations like this. That's why we need to learn how to deal with them. And why it's important to have them. I also have an episode on why it's important to have honest conversations and give feedback to the people you love. Make sure you go and watch or [00:25:00] listen to that one as well. you can also ask yourself grounding questions in the moment, like, which part of this feels true? Which part of this conversation is triggering that reaction in me? Because that's likely where the wound lies. What am I afraid that this says about me? Even communicate the answer to that question to that trusted person. An important distinction to make is that sometimes we can get defensive because we are actually being wronged, and it's an important distinction to make. Sometimes when someone else comes to us with something, it can be to control you, to invalidate you, to make you feel small, and some people use giving feedback as a way to control or shame somebody. This is manipulation, and like I said at the beginning of the episode, some people can label this as just being a brutally honest person. So remember that you need to stay true [00:26:00] to yourself, and growth doesn't require self abandonment. So in the defensiveness that I was talking about in the majority of this episode, where if someone is honorably coming to you with an issue and your defensiveness is rooted in your own wounds, acknowledging that and learning how to deal with that and have these honest, deep conversations that don't involve defensiveness, that is growth, and that will help you grow as a person. Whereas if someone is coming to you to shame you, to invalidate you, to make you feel small, they're most likely asking you to self abandon and you can usually instinctively tell the difference. Because someone who comes to you with a real problem that wants to work on the relationship and grow with you, they will come to it rooted with compassion. People who want to hurt you will shame you will come to you [00:27:00] attacking you using language that makes you feel unimportant to them, unworthy to them. That reflection, there is a powerful tool to tell the difference. If you are worried that you can't tell the difference, ask a third party. There is so much clarification that comes with telling a trusted person about how you're being treated. I have had so much clarity from doing that. So just to conclude, defensiveness is not something that you need to eliminate. If you do get defensive or feel defensive, that is not a character flaw. Everyone has emotional reactions. It's just information. It's just something to listen to, to help you grow and to help you understand where your wounds are. The people who grow are not the least defensive people. They're just the people who are able to stay present while feeling defensive. Thank you so much for listening to episode [00:28:00] 20 of Things We Say in Therapy. If you've made it this far, thank you so much for your support. I really appreciate you listening to this episode, and I hope you found it insightful and helpful. Always remember to stay compassionate with yourself. Self-compassionate is the number one skill for growth. Please go and find me on social media. I post clips for self-reflection and to help you deal with discomfort. come back on Thursday for my snack size deep dive episode. I, we will be talking about ways we can be dismissive when we can't handle discomfort. If this felt uncomfortable, that means something clicked. Sit with it. I'll see you again. Bye.