A defensive person has trouble accepting responsibility for their speech and actions. They have difficulty with constructive criticism and may mistakenly take it as a perceived threat. Anyone can be triggered by a personal issue that causes them to have a defensive reaction.
Signs You Are Defensive
Stop listening to the other person. Make excuses about whatever you are being criticized about. Blame the other person for what they are criticizing you about. Accuse the other person of doing the same thing.
Someone on the defensive is concerned with justifying their actions or words. They have a defensive attitude as they try to protect themselves. If you know that to defend is to protect, you have an idea what defensive means. When a person is acting defensive, they're trying to protect or justify themselves.
“I'm not going to keep talking to me if you won't listen and just have to tell me that I'm wrong.” Guilt: “If you really cared, you'd never talk to me that way when I'm just trying to share my feelings.” “Can't you see that you always try to win by telling me where I'm wrong?”
The defensive behaviors include evaluation, control, strategy, neutrality, superiority, and certainty. The supportive behaviors, in contrast, include description, problem orientation, spontaneity, empathy, equality, and provisionalism.
They include flight, freezing, defensive threat, defensive attack, and risk assessment. The type of defensive behavior elicited in a particular situation depends on features of both the threat and the situation.
Research has shown that defensiveness in response to wrongdoing is exacerbated by making the wrong doer feel like they're an outcast. Defensive behaviours are common responses when people feel personally attacked but can undermine our ability to identify problems and find solutions.
Narcissists are extremely sensitive individuals with very low self-esteem. When their shortcomings are pointed out, they become defensive and frustrated. Their delusions of grandeur are put on display and their inadequacies are highlighted.
Defensiveness is most often a response to criticism. It's when a person tries to defend themselves from feeling angry, hurt, or ashamed when they perceive the other person as critical. Criticism may make the other partner feel anxious or worried that the other partner does not care for them.
When someone is embarrassed by what another person says or does, they may respond defensively. Embarrassment often occurs because of incorrect beliefs someone may have about themselves such as worthlessness, fear of abandonment, failure, or scarcity of positives in their lives.
Sitting or standing with your arms crossed across your chest is nearly always seen as defensive body language. Universally, when a person crosses their arms, they are viewed as insecure, annoyed, or closed off.
In almost all cases, defensiveness is the result of emotional insecurity and fear. And when we feel insecure and don't know how to manage our fears—especially in the relationships where there's a lot at stake—we tend to fall back on primitive coping strategies like defensiveness to feel better.
Defensiveness is a harmful and unhealthy emotional coping strategy that leads to personal and relationship dissatisfaction over time by avoiding bad feelings in the short term and not actually solving the problem. Some other examples of negative coping strategies include: Emotional Eating. Substance Use Disorders.
7 examples of defensive behavior:
Making yourself the victim: "You are always so mean to me!" Returning blame to the other person: "I only did that because you did X." Counter-criticizing: "I will start doing the dishes when you start taking care of the lawn better. You are always ignoring that."
At its core, defensiveness is a way to protect our ego and a fragile self-esteem. Our research team member Ellen Alley explains that our self-esteem is considered fragile when our failures, mistakes, and imperfections decrease our self-worth.
Instead of communicating needs or stating a position using clear, concise, and non-combative language, a defensive person will rely on passive-aggressive statements that throw the argument back on their partner. Instead of explaining a point of view, all you're doing is giving your partner all new reasons to be angry.
They are sensitive but, often, their reactions to your comments are a defence mechanism. The two may feel the same to the person experiencing these feelings but, in reality, they are worlds apart.
Guilting defensive actions are part of making someone feel guilty about something that they've done wrong.
The three types of defensive operations are the mobile defense, area defense, and retrograde. All apply at both the tactical and operational levels of war. Mobile defenses orient on destroying attacking forces by permitting the enemy to advance into a position that exposes him to counterattack.
1. aggressive or submissive behavior in response to real or imagined threats of harm. A cat, for example, may exhibit defensive aggression by spitting and hissing, arching its back, and raising the hair along the back of the neck in anticipation of a physical threat (see animal defensive behavior).
Defensive individuals don't like to “work through” emotional issues in the collaborative way adults are expected to. They can be highly impulsive and quick in their emotional reactions, without pausing to think things through in a balanced way. Finally, they tend to avoid too much emotional closeness with others.
Defensiveness is a coping skill — a response to a perceived attack or criticism. In general, there are two ways to respond: You can deny it, act out, attack, blame someone else, or. You can intellectually rationalize the perceived attack or criticism.