Tag: Relationships

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Increasing Accountability

  • 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:

  1. 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.
  2. Defensiveness can create major barriers in relationships, please see my post on this f research for more information on effective and ineffective conflict.
  3. To learn more about relational security see this post on secure attachment.
  4. If you regularly struggle to feel safe enough to take accountability, check out this post on relational trauma and its impact.
  5. 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.
  6. Defensiveness can be thought of as a form of displacement.
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You Married Your Parent?

  • When we are drawn to relationships that parallel our relationships with our parents we are often drawn to how we FELT in the relationship and our experience of the relationship.
  • This can include the role we take on in relation to the other person, what we expect of them and how they’ll react, and our sense of how we’re supposed to be around them.
  • Your experience of a relationship is likely to be unique to you, which means it may not be similar to experiences other people (including your siblings) had of your parent.
  • An example: For the parent that had a temper, think about your experience of that, perhaps it’s something like ‘I had to walk on eggshells around her, and I felt like I had to keep her protected from something that might make her too angry. I was often scared or nervous when something might upset her’. 
  • While your spouse may or may not have a temper, you can explore whether or not there is an experiential parallel in how direct you feel you can be with your partner, or if you feel like it’s your job to keep your partner “in a happy zone” because it’s hard for you to trust they’ll be able to productively manage upsetting information independently. You can also consider how similarly you feel when you anticipate they’ll be upset
  • We end up in parallel relationships often because we are drawn to that familiar feeling, role, dynamic, or experience. 
  • When we build insight and understanding into what our relationship was like for us we can make decisions (in an active way) about whether that served us (or not) and whether that’s an experience we want in our relationship(s) moving forward (or not).
  • So when we question, “am I dating my parent”, we want to be on the lookout for both traits between your partner and your parent as well as your experience of each relationship. 
  • You can end up “marrying your parent” by marrying someone who makes you feel the same way or take on the same role in the relationship even if they have very different personality traits. 
  • See post for more information and sample questions to ask yourself to help you build this understanding. 

For most of us, when we consider whether or not we’re dating or married to “our parent” (as the expression goes) we think about this concept in terms of interests or personality traits. For example: my mother was organized and so is my spouse; my father was a runner and so is my partner; my parent had a temper and so does my wife. 


Many of us know we are drawn to what’s familiar, and so yes, we can be drawn to familiar personality characteristics. When I’m thinking about whether or not someone may be replicating an earlier relationship pattern in a current relationship I’m also on the lookout for “experiential” parallels, something I find far fewer people have heard of or considered. 
By experiential, I am referring to YOUR experience in the relationship. We’re looking at how our personality interacts with the personality of another person for a unique relational dynamic between us.


For many of us it can be hard to get descriptive in a concrete way about our experience of our parents as the relationship becomes our standard for “normal” far before we have the capacity for words or for memory.


A helpful way to explore this idea is to focus on your experience in the early relationship and your experience in your current relationship and see what parallels arise. Ask yourself questions about your experience, and it’s ok if your responses surprise you.

Samples:


How understood, alone, connected, or important did I feel? 

When a problem arose did I feel safe in discussing it? Afraid? Like it was my job to  figure it out alone? Maybe it wasn’t my job at all?

How was accountability handled? Who took responsibility for problems or accidents?

When a change needed to be made did I feel like it was my job to adapt, did I expect  them to adapt? Did we all work towards making changes? 

When something needed to be figured out was I included? Ignored?

These prompts will help you connect with how you felt, the role you took on, what you expect of others, and what the relationship was like for you.  We can then use that information to help us change patterns that may not serve us moving forward, and work towards keeping dynamics that did work well for us and our relationship. 

Notes:

  1. If you’re having a difficult time getting descriptive about the relationship (i.e. going beyond “the relationship was good” or “the relationship was bad”) read more about how to find and use descriptive language in ways that help us move beyond words like “good” or “bad”. 
  2. Still having a tough time identifying your experience? When you try and explore it let go of how you think you “should” feel and allow yourself to be present with whatever comes up, even if it feels surprising or uncomfortable. 
  3. This post also relates to a prior post where I cover how our early experiences shape our understanding of what to expect of ourselves and those around us. 
  4. An example of relational experiences that occur with specific personality traits: For the parent who got a lot done, ‘I always knew I could rely on her to take care of things, but I also always felt like she was so busy, or distracted, or not really present with me and so I got used to feeling like she wasn’t totally plugged in to me’. Whether or not your partner “gets a lot done” in the way your parent did, if we were having you pay attention to your experience of the relationship we’d want you to be reflecting on how important you feel when you’re together, and exploring how much you feel like your partner offers you their full attention when you’re together, and how available to you they are. 
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