Defensive Behavior: How to Overcome this Pattern in Your Relationship: Episode 169
EmPowered Couples with The Freemans
Aaron & Jocelyn Freeman
5.0 • 589 Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2021
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Defensiveness is a learned behavior to compensate for something going on beneath the surface.
A few common sources of defensiveness in relationship:
- A lack of feeling emotionally safe because they often feel invalidated
- Taking something personally (and making it mean something different than what was said)
- Fear of being judged, not loved, abandoned, or punished
- An attachment to a certain perspective about themselves or the situation
Here's the thing...if you and your partner perpetually react with defensiveness, you will leave conversations unresolved, build up more and more tension, and/or get to the point where you feel like you're walking on eggshells.
So today's podcast episode goes deeper into understanding why defensiveness shows up in your relationship PLUS how to break this pattern, so you communicate openly and constructively.
Resources For Your Relationship:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Empower Couples podcast. |
| 0:02.3 | We're here you get modern, non-boring relationship advice for you and your partner to communicate like pros, fight smarter, and stay in the same team no matter the challenge that you face. |
| 0:13.4 | I am one of your host, Aaron Freeman. |
| 0:14.9 | And I'm Jocelyn Freeman, but you all just know us as the Freeman's. |
| 0:18.2 | And this episode is about defensive behavior. |
| 0:21.5 | How to overcome this pattern in your relationship. |
| 0:24.2 | All right. |
| 0:25.0 | Raise your hand if you're driving, if you're at home. |
| 0:28.8 | If you have caught yourself being defensive. |
| 0:32.5 | Or perhaps your partner or a combination of both. |
| 0:35.3 | And we aren't going to be speaking on this podcast from, |
| 0:38.9 | oh, we have this perfect and we never get defensive. We're always going to be human. There will |
| 0:43.9 | be moments that defensiveness pops up. But what we're going to talk about today is how to not |
| 0:48.6 | have this be a dominant way you two are reacting to each other because of the negative repercussions of that. |
| 0:55.3 | Yeah. Overall, we would say that communication and defensiveness is happening pretty much in |
| 1:00.9 | communication. Obviously, it then happens in your emotions and your energy. But the point being, |
| 1:06.1 | in communication, you're either communicating, check this out, even if challenges are arising, even if you're in a conflict, |
| 1:15.2 | then communication is either connecting you or disconnecting you, bringing you closer or apart. |
| 1:22.3 | And while we bring this up is defensiveness is probably one of the main ways in which in communication you are moving to |
| 1:31.4 | being more disconnected being apart rather than using communication to bring you closer. |
| 1:36.5 | And a big topic that's been coming up in our private sessions has been not feeling |
| 1:41.9 | emotionally safe. |
... |
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