What are you defending?
Getting defensive sometimes gets a bad rap.
"Why are you being so defensive?"
Personally, I think it's kind of nice.
If you think about it - when you're being defensive, you're usually defending something that matters to you in some way. Something you care about. Something you want to protect. If it didn't matter, there'd be no point in defending it. Sometimes we're conscious of whatever we're keeping inside of our fort, drawbridge raised, and sometimes we're not. More about that in a bit.
It's easy to let the defences do their work (that's what they're there for, after all), and turn away, give up, retreat. Abandon the request you were making, the conversation, the person now digging in inside their fort.
Instead, here's another option (I suggest playing with this one when the stakes aren't so high, at least at first). When you run into defensiveness, in yourself or in others: get curious.
What are you protecting?
A boundary? A belief? A part of your identity or your self image? Your time? An expectation? Something else entirely?
If you know what you're keeping safe inside your fort, it can also be useful to find out why it's necessary right now to be holding it close.
Does the situation remind your body and nervous system of similar circumstances in the past? Is having clear boundaries something you struggle with, so it's easier to put up walls? Are you tired, so anything that feels like another demand makes you (wisely) need to retreat?
Our defences have an innate intelligence, so there are no right or wrong answers - it's all good information.
What if you don't know what you're protecting? That's good information, too. You might like to take that question - what am I protecting - to your journal, or to a friend to talk it through, or to a therapist if you have one. And if you can't figure it out, that's okay. Sometimes it's enough to know there's something there that needs to be held close for now, and with space and kindness it will unfold in its own time.
The thing with defences is that they're meant to defend against real or perceived attack. So when they're not met with a battering ram, and there's nothing to defend against, the drawbridge might be lowered of its own accord, allowing that curiosity to do its work, conversation to happen, and perhaps an outcome negotiated where everybody wins.
So your mission for this week, should you choose to accept it, is to start to notice your own defences, and when they pop up, to get a little curious around what you're defending and why. The things we keep inside our forts are important; it's useful to know them and understand them, so we have a more finely tuned sense of when to pull up the drawbridge, and when we might get curious, instead.