- The antidote to defensiveness is accountability.
- Conversations that explore and identify how something problematic happened (and how to avoid a recurrence in the future) are incredibly difficult, if not impossible, if one or both parties is defensive (i.e. unable to own their part).
- When we are defensive we focus on justifying our actions or our participation. We blame, deny, rationalize, and deflect. We are trying to prove (to ourselves or others) that we were “right” / “correct” / or “appropriate”.
- Defensiveness is more likely to occur when we’re caught off guard, when we’re focused on what we intended, when we genuinely don’t understand, when we feel emotionally unsafe, or when we have fears of being “wrong” or “imperfect”.
- Accountability (when we take ownership of our contribution to a dynamic) requires that we be honest with ourselves and others about the impact of our participation. We have to let our guard down enough to let the truth in.
- Many times, accountability is challenging to access because we are heavily focused on our intentions, we are afraid to be vulnerable and acknowledge our impact, or we have blind spots in our ability to be objective about ourselves.
- In relationships, defensiveness creates a barrier to collaboration and connection because the defensive party can’t effectively participate in the process of understanding their impact and repairing the hurt that was caused by it.
- Accountability is a vital component of repair in relationships. When we’ve transgressed another, they need to know we “get it” to rebuild their sense of trust in us. Sometimes we need help (i.e. feedback) if we genuinely don’t understand how our participation contributed to an outcome. If we are defensive, we can’t receive that feedback.
- True curiosity (taking a stance where you want to understand, rather than argue) is a vital in-between step from defensiveness to accountability. We have to be willing to listen with open ears so we can learn from another how we may have effected a dynamic.
- Once we understand what’s happened, we have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to take a stance of accountability and ownership. In that stance, we are invested in acknowledging how we participated, rather than defensively attempting to “prove” we weren’t a part of the problem.
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No one is able to be totally vulnerable, objective, and self-aware all the time. For us to truly know how we impact others and our environment, we need to be open to outside perspectives. Often we are more comfortable hearing feedback when we feel secure in ourselves and our relationships. That security also makes accessing a stance of accountability more accessible; we have to believe it is “ok” to not be “perfect”, “ideal”, “attuned” (etc). Instead, we have to feel from others (and from ourselves), that we are good enough, and that the safety of a relationship (or our sense of self-worth) isn’t conditioned upon always “getting it right”.
Often times, the person who is being defensive is – on some level – afraid. Afraid to own their part, afraid to feel imperfect (or be perceived that way by others), afraid of repercussions, afraid of the guilt that might follow if they owned their participation, afraid of being rejected or of being harshly blamed. This is why creating safety is so essential to enabling accountability. Safety needs to exist within us (“I still see myself as worthwhile even if I’ve done something problematic”), and needs to exist in our relationships (“this person is still worthy even if they’ve messed something up”) for true accountability to have a chance of emerging in a difficult moment.
There is complex reality in the dynamics that create defensiveness and enable accountability in relationships; while it’s not “our fault” if someone is defensive with us, and we can’t control whether or not someone is accountable, we can work to create a safe environment between ourselves and others that makes accountability approachable to another party. If you are finding others are often defensive with you, take a look at how much safety you create in your relationships for others to be imperfect. If you find you are often defensive with others, take a look at how much you believe you have to be “right” or “perfect”. You can challenge and change these barriers to accountability and relational repair.
There are concrete steps you can take to increase safety in a relationship, and increase your sense of worth if either are struggles for you. See links to resources to support this quest in the comments.
Comments:
- Taking in feedback from others is tricky, and while this post encourages accountability and an open stance to the perspective of others, I also don’t want to encourage *always* taking in feedback from others as though they know more than you do about any particular situation. For relationships to work well, both the person giving the feedback and the person receiving it have to come from a stance of honest accountability. While the focus of this post is when the person receiving the feedback is more invested in defending themselves than hearing and integrating feedback, if the person giving the feedback is not invested in looking at their part, they are in a position to potentially hold the other party overly responsible for a problematic dynamic. Externalizing is one way that overly responsible stance can happen as well as dismissing and denying another.
- Defensiveness can create major barriers in relationships, please see my post on this f research for more information on effective and ineffective conflict.
- To learn more about relational security see this post on secure attachment.
- If you regularly struggle to feel safe enough to take accountability, check out this post on relational trauma and its impact.
- if you find that you can’t trust yourself to take the leap of faith that would allow you to be open to dropping your defensiveness, you may want to work on attuning yourself to who is safe and nonjudgmental around you. Those will be the best people to start working on taking a step towards accountability with.
- Defensiveness can be thought of as a form of displacement.