Responding To Your Partner's Defensiveness

With A Backbone And Compassion

I'll get right into it. Your partner tends to get defensive. When you're trying to share your thoughts or feelings about the relationship or something they did that impacted you, they jump to explaining themselves, pushing back on your experience, or shutting down. You don't get the care and concern you need, so your issues fester.

Understanding Your Defensiveness

How To Navigate Your Defensive Reactions So They Don’t Mess Up Your Relationship Recently, I was feeling defensive in response to something my husband brought up. I don’t struggle too much with big defensive reactions (he agrees) but everyone gets defensive sometimes, me included. As I rode out the sensation

Love Notes for Real LifeMarina Rosenthal

Today, I'm breaking down practical ways to respond when faced with defensiveness from your partner. Let's be clear—it's not your job to make them less defensive, and nothing you do will improve the situation if you have a partner who isn't invested in making the relationship better.

But although their defensiveness is theirs alone, you're still there left needing to respond to it! So...let's get into how you can most effectively reply when their defensiveness flares up.

Stay Differentiated

When you share pain and receive defensiveness in return, it's easy to get caught up in what their defensiveness means about you.

You start thinking:

"If they're reacting like this, maybe my feelings aren't valid"

or "I have to make them see that they hurt me."

If your partner struggles with defensiveness, your own capacity to ground in your experience and self separate from them is vital.

This is called differentiation—which, roughly speaking means, knowing where you begin and end in relation to another person. When you can stay differentiated in the face of defensiveness, you'll see the behavior, and you may have understandable emotion in response to it. But you won't attach to it and make it about you and your own value or the validity of your own feelings.

Their defensiveness starts a wildfire in your relationship when you grab hold of it and implicitly say, "you can't be defensive, because when you are, I can't cope."

Hold onto yourself. Know that your feelings are not more or less real when your partner is defensive.

Neutrally Restate

They launch into their explanation (ahem, defense) in response to you sharing feelings. Rather than latching onto all the details of what they're saying, circle back to your emotions. This can sound like:

"I want to come back to what I'm really saying here, which is that my feelings were really hurt when you didn't reply to that text"

or "I hear you, you had reasons for doing what you did. I am still feeling betrayed and want to talk about those feelings."

While I wouldn't go so far as to say "be a broken record," you can bring just a smidge of that vibe into the conversation. Without escalating the intensity, come back to the point you are actually trying to make (which hopefully centers around YOUR emotional experience).

Talk About Your Feelings

It is difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to react defensively to plainly stated emotion. You're much less likely to hear "you're wrong" if all you literally say is "I'm feeling hurt." While it's reasonable to reference your partner's behavior, make sure you share actual feelings too and spend the majority of your time on those feelings. And (see above) come back to your feelings again if they start going on the defensive.

For reference, "You're being a jerk" and "I can't believe you did that" aren't feelings.

Feelings are emotion words, said directly. And even if you think you're sharing your feelings, all too often you're not (or you're sharing them very briefly before circling right back to all the details of a situation). Make sure you're talking about your feelings, for real.

Disengage From Unhelpful Dynamics

Do not keep trying to make someone understand your emotions when they are too activated and defensive to hear you. This is hurtful to you and won't get you the care you need.

I can hear your rebuttal..."but that's what they want, they'd love it if I disengaged."

You might be right. You may be providing relief to them in the moment when you stop engaging in a unhelpful dynamic. But continuing in that dynamic only hurts you. Long term, mutual participation in defensive dialogue reinforces and encourages more defensive dialogue.

You can set the boundary:

"I'm not feeling heard. I am going to step away from this conversation. Let me know when you're open to listening to my experience."

Name The Impact Outside The Moment

Defensiveness is typically reflexive. It's not a strategic, planned response—it's a knee-jerk in the moment reaction. Talking to an actively defensive person about how much it hurts you when they're defensive is the path to insanity.

Outside the moment, you can share how their tendency is impacting you. For example you might say:

"In our recent conversation about X situation, I tried to share my feelings with you. I felt like you were focused on telling me why I shouldn't feel hurt and explaining your behavior. I didn't feel heard or understood. I've felt this way in other conversations with you, and it is making me feel frustrated and discouraged about bringing my emotions to you. Can we talk about how this could go better?"

Notice that the description of their defensive behavior is bare bones and pretty concrete. Avoid explaining or reenacting all the things they said that irked you or read as defensive.

If there is no good time for this conversation or if it perpetually brings in more defensiveness, you may need to enlist the support of a couples therapist to help name the dynamic and provide skills to change it.

Defensiveness is both a natural human tendency and also an incredibly unhelpful way of relating. The onus falls on each of us to respond non-defensively to our partners as much as we can. And also...in relationships, the reality is you work with your partner where they are right now. It helps to have some tangible strategies in place for when their defensiveness rears up.

Questions? Drop them in the comments.