You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships.

I'm your host, relationship coach Stephanie Rigg,

and I'm really glad you're here.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, I'm answering

the question of why avoidant partners can struggle so much with defensiveness.

So I'm often getting questions from folks who are more anxious leaning and who are in

relationship with avoidant partners and who really struggle with this in conflict, in conversations

or maybe just in casual you know, casual interactions,

that there seems to be this real sensitivity and that their partners are very quick to become

defensive, often in response to things that can feel kind of innocuous, almost to the point

where it feels like you don't really know what happened. You say something that you feel is

pretty innocent and all of a sudden you're getting this big defensive response that seems to

escalate a topic of conversation or a rupture. It really takes the heat up very quickly in a way

that can feel quite sudden and abrasive and confusing for you if you're on the receiving

end of it. Now, of course, defensiveness is not something that is exclusive to avoidant folks,

but I think it would be fair to say that it's a pretty common thing for people with more

avoidant attachment patterns to really struggle with and for that to be something

that they lean on as a strategy to keep themselves safe to protect themselves when they are

feeling under attack and it may be that their perception of what constitutes an attack might be

quite different to yours but that's all part of being in relationship,

right, is recognizing that our intention is not always the way something lands. And so trying to

cultivate a level of understanding and curiosity for someone else's experience so that we're not

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