Defensive body language involves creating barriers and appearing closed off, with common signs including crossed arms/legs, turning the body away, rigid posture, using objects as shields (like a magazine), and physical tension, often paired with facial cues like squinting or frowning as they try to deflect blame or retreat from perceived criticism.
Rigidity and Small Movements. When defensive, people are likely to become tense. As a result, they will remain rigid with tense muscles and move very little. If you ever spot this classic non-verbal signal, make the person move.
Recognizing When Someone Is Being Defensive
If they ignore or write off your emotions: defensive people will often brush off your emotions or try to convince you that they aren't legitimate. This is important to recognize because defensive people typically have a difficult time empathizing with others.
Defensiveness is often caused by perceived threats, insecurity, fear, the ego, childhood experiences, communication patterns, and/or constructive criticism. It can take a lot of time and effort to unlearn defensive behaviors, but it can be done.
Most Defensive Types
ENFJ – Like INFJs, ENFJs are empathetic and relationship-focused, so criticism can feel particularly personal. They can easily respond with defensive behaviors like justifying their actions because they feel they give so much to others.
This defense mechanism may have developed from earlier childhood experiences when you may have experienced a harsh parenting style, abuse, or neglect. This could also stem from being rejected by peers or bullied, or the experience of narcissistic abuse in a romantic relationship.
ESFJ (the caregiver) are very warm, compassionate, and helpful people. They are often willing to go the extra mile for others. Other personality types like ISFJ, INFJ, ENFJ, ENFP, and ISFP are also loyal, kind, and gentle souls, and personalities to have as friends, leaders, and family.
At its best, defensiveness is bad communication. At its worst, it's a form of manipulation.
1) Defensiveness in your relationship
Defensiveness in relationships is so common it may feel normal to have it occur in your relationship. However, according to Arlin Cuncic, defending or protecting is used to distract from feeling hurt or shame.
So, again, defensiveness and reactivity are a sign of inner insecurity. Working on yourself and come to terms with who you are, what you do, and who you are becoming can aid you in better being centered and balanced and assist you in less reactivity and defensiveness in your relationships.
Red flags in a guy often point to controlling, disrespectful, or emotionally immature behavior, including excessive jealousy, love bombing, poor communication (like the silent treatment or name-calling), lack of accountability, disrespect towards service staff, and a pattern of bad-mouthing exes, indicating potential issues with empathy, boundaries, and personal responsibility that signal unhealthy relationship dynamics.
Have you ever wondered why being defensive is so harmful to our relationships? There is a high cost to being defensive. It can make you feel lonely, even within your relationships, because it blocks intimacy. It also causes people to walk on eggshells around you, which does not invite deep and authentic conversations.
The goal here is to try to be as clear and intentional about your message in a specific way which will likely lead to being listened to. Hopefully, whoever you're talking to will be able to follow suit and both of you will feel heard, understood, and respected.
Excessive defensiveness: One common form of gaslighting is excessive defensiveness, in which one partner flat-out refuses to acknowledge any perceived inadequacies or shortcomings. This behaviour often starts other manipulative responses, and it can leave the other partner feeling unheard and invalidated.
Noticeable changes in gesture frequency or intensity means heightened emotions or discomfort with certain topics. Also pay attention to how gestures match spoken words to get a better idea of what the client is feeling and what they intend and how comfortable they are with you as their therapist.
Defensive individuals often have control and power issues, and perceive anyone confronting them or holding them accountable as a threat. They are uncomfortable with feelings in general and managing their own.
But it does provide some rough guidelines as to how soon may be too soon to make long-term commitments and how long may be too long to stick with a relationship. Each of the three numbers—three, six, and nine—stands for the month that a different common stage of a relationship tends to end.
10 signs of an unhealthy relationship
As a psychologist and sexologist, we've been studying relationships for more than 50 years combined, and we've found that no matter how you slice it, most of them fail because of poor communication.
The 7 key signs of emotional abuse often involve Isolation, Verbal Abuse (insults/yelling), Blame-Shifting/Guilt, Manipulation/Control, Gaslighting (making you doubt reality), Humiliation/Degradation, and Threats/Intimidation. These behaviors aim to control you, erode your self-worth, and make you dependent, creating a pattern of fear, anxiety, and low self-esteem, even without physical harm.
A major sign that someone may have narcissistic tendencies is defensiveness. In healthy relationships, people are open to feedback and willing to reflect on their actions. However, when someone is highly defensive, even gentle criticism can feel like an attack to them.
Summary. This blog breaks down ways you can tell if a person is an INFJ personality type. INFJs are known as the rarest and most mysterious of the16 Myers and Briggs personality types. Key signs of an INFJ include indecision, being lost in thought, conflict avoidance and hasty judgments.
Other research also shows that, based on similar interests and patterns of behaviors, these are some of the most highly compatible matches: