Anyone who has been in a relationship has been asked the question, but what is the answer and how can we change it?
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“You ALWAYS do that!” my (now ex-) wife screamed at me. I stared at her with my usual blank, deer-in-the-headlights look. I’d run out of words, run out of arguments, and was now feeling cornered. My only line of defense was a Normandy Day-like run up the hill spewing insults like bullets as fast as I could, while making a mad dash to safety. I had learned the fastest way to take the focus off of me was to redirect the argument toward her and what she was doing wrong. Most of the time it had nothing whatsoever to do with the issue at hand. Why couldn’t I just deal with the problem?
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The Biology of Fight or Flight
As most people know, our brains are wired to either confront a situation head on (fight) or run away (flight). In prehistoric times, it was a survival mechanism to avoid getting bitten by a snake, eaten by a wild boar, or defending our food and territories. Those dangers aren’t as prevalent in today’s electronic world, but they certainly exist emotionally. Our brains react the same way to emotional conflict as they do physical conflict.
At the center of our brains lies the amygdala, which, among other things, is our emotional center. When triggered by an argument, a belief contrary to our own, or something that threatens our physical or emotional safety, we either come out swinging (a reaction), or give a more thought-out decision (a response).
How do we do that?
Think of the brain like this. If you close your hand with your thumb tucked inside, it represents the brain, with your fingers as the cerebral cortex, from where we reason, and your thumb, the amygdala, is the emotional center. The cerebral cortex is like a hat on your emotions. When you respond to a situation, your emotions and reasoning work together (Figure 1). When you react to a situation, you “flip our lid” (figure 2) and that reaction is a physiological fight or flight reaction, devoid of reasoning. The amygdala then tells the rest of your body that this is a dangerous situation and it must flee for its life. The difference between whether you respond or react has to do with your emotional intelligence. The good news is that you can work on your emotional intelligence and increase it.
So why do we get defensive in the first place?
We generally get defensive when we feel insecure or threatened. In my case, I couldn’t be honest with myself or my wife, because I knew at a gut level that if I was honest with myself and others about what I really thought, believed and felt, my world would come crashing down. My amygdala ruled my conversations and my reactions kept her and others at bay. I refused to think or reason through the way I felt.
If you’ve ever scrolled through the comment sections of online blogs, videos, or perhaps your own social media feeds, you’ll find a lot of name-calling, defensive comments, and sometimes a complete inability of some people to have meaningful conversations. Insecurity and defensiveness are usually at the root of personal attacks, passive aggressive statements and sarcastic comments.
Defensiveness does not come from a place of security, but generally tells people that we are struggling with beliefs about ourselves, our world, or perhaps our relationships with others.
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Defensiveness does not come from a place of security, but generally tells people that we are struggling with beliefs about ourselves, our world, or perhaps our relationships with others. Defensiveness hides us, in a sense, but really only hides us from our own feelings and thoughts. Others generally see, or perceive through it. Where there is defensiveness, there is usually a lack of intimacy. It is impossible to build true intimacy when we have something to hide.
So what can we do about it?
Know What You Believe and WHY!
In my book, Everything I Learned About Management I Learned from Having a Kindergartner, I take a deep dive into self-awareness in chapter one. I started with this concept in chapter one because whether a person is a manager, a husband, a father, or just a human being, success will always be elusive if we don’t know who we are.
…success will always be elusive if we don’t know who we are.
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I spent years relying only on the beliefs of my family, religion and politics. Self-reflection was impossibly scary and I found reasons not to do it. I avoided deep conversations, meaningful relationships, and most scary of all, discussions about me. Over time, however, hiding took its mental and physical toll on my body and I was forced to take a closer look at myself out of sheer survival.
When we were young we thought we were not only invincible, but could do anything we set our minds to do. My daughter, a talented dancer who spent many years in cheer and dance, came home to tell me one day that she would like to sing for the talent competition at school. My heart sank. I knew she couldn’t sing and I needed to figure out a way to encourage her and, yet, stop her from getting on that stage and embarrassing herself. Suddenly, I had an idea.
She sat down at the piano to practice her song and I decided the best option would be for me to record her singing, and then play it back to her. She would realize that this wasn’t her best idea and she would do something else. It might have worked if I hadn’t gotten a case of the giggles, which sent her to her room in tears. I felt horrible.
“I’m so sorry,” I told her. I rubbed her back as she lay on her bed. I searched for something to say. “You know,” I started, “when I was a kid I really wanted to draw. But no matter what, I was terrible at it, so I decided to find something else that I was good at, which I eventually did.”
She paused between sobs, took a deep breath and amid streaming tears yelled, “I can’t draw either!”
(By the way, I was actually good at music, but I knew that would just be rubbing it in.)
My daughter is older now and still finding her place in the world, but with much more realistic expectations about what she can and cannot do and, more importantly, who she is, what she believes and why. She is developing into a very secure and self-aware young lady.
Control your emotions
Feeling defensive doesn’t mean we have to act defensively.
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Feeling defensive doesn’t mean we have to act defensively. In fact, in those relationships, which are the most important to us, it is imperative that we stay engaged in spite of our feelings of hurt, anger and defensiveness. This tells the other person that he or she is important and matters.
After developing a sense of self-awareness, I was more able to spend time in the practice of being uncomfortable. We practice being uncomfortable by engaging our cerebral cortex, the part of the brain we use to think. Consider what the person is saying to you. Why are they saying it? Is there truth that you don’t want to hear? Why does it cause you discomfort? Is there another way to resolve the problem besides shutting down, changing the subject, or making snide comments? What is it?
Develop compassion
First of all, it is difficult to have compassion for others when we don’t have it for ourselves. If we spend time berating ourselves and are self-critical, it is virtually impossible to show compassion and understanding for anyone else. Part of self-awareness is giving ourselves the grace to be human. Along with learning self-compassion, we must learn compassion for others. Validate the journeys of others – the triumphs, failures, emotions and feelings – just as we wish to be validated and understood.
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While feeling defensive is universal, the response to feeling defensive is not. We have to make the choice to enact our thinking and reasoning abilities, stay engaged and grow.
Photo – FreeDigitalPhotos.net