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hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new here this month on this channel we're talking about integrity and today in particular I want to talk about defensiveness so this is a video that
Heidi Priebe explains why defensiveness arises and how to transform it into assertiveness by noticing bodily signals, separating signal from muddle, and asking what it would mean if you were wrong.
Key Takeaways
- Defensiveness often carries valuable information about values and boundaries and should not be dismissed outright.
- Naming and noticing the bodily experience of defensiveness in a neutral way creates space before reacting.
- Asking 'what would it mean if I were wrong?' helps uncover the underlying meaning and the real issue.
- Separating signal (genuine need to assert) from muddle (confused reasoning or self-judgment) enables assertive rather than reactive responses.
- Assertiveness, not defensiveness, is the goal: standing up for oneself while remaining open to one's own errors.
What the video covers
- Defensiveness is reframed as a potentially useful signal rather than something to dismiss as irrational.
- Step one: become aware of the body's signals when defensiveness arises and name the feeling neutrally, e.g. 'I am feeling defensive right now.'
- Defensiveness shows up differently for people: some shut down and withdraw, others feel activated, panicky, angry, or driven to over-explain.
- Disclosing defensiveness to a trusted other can act like a 'safety cone' signaling heightened emotion and the need to tread carefully.
- Step two: distinguish the 'signal' (a real need to stand up for oneself or one's integrity) from the 'muddle' (confused or faulty reasoning).
- A key question to ask: 'What would it mean if I were wrong about this?' This surfaces the deeper meaning being attached to someone's statement.
- Priebe illustrates with an example of a friend calling her an 'influencer' in a derogatory tone; her defensiveness was really about feeling disrespected.
- The process includes checking whether the perceived insult is real, a misunderstanding, or self-judgment being projected onto others.
- Where signal and muddle both exist, the goal is to address both harms rather than treating the situation as all-or-nothing.
- The overall aim is to avoid self-abandonment and build secure relating through assertive, clear boundaries.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Reframing Defensiveness
- 01:41Step One: Noticing the Body's Signals
- 04:00Why Disclosing Defensiveness Can Help
- 04:56Step Two: Signal vs. Muddle
- 06:37The Key Question: What If I Were Wrong?
- 09:00Personal Example: The 'Influencer' Comment
- 12:00Sorting Out Projection, Self-Judgment, and Real Insult
- 16:40Setting Boundaries and Addressing Both Harms
- 23:00Closing Thoughts on Relational Dynamics
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
I've actually had in the back of my head for a long time but I was waiting for when it felt like the right time to dive into the topic and this month when we're talking about self-respect and how to
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show up in a way that we're proud of inside of our close relationships it felt like the perfect opportunity to find bring in the topic of defensiveness now this is a topic that I think gets a really bad rep somewhat
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undeservedly so so very often if we're talking about someone and saying that they're very defensive or when we're accusing someone of being defensive we're kind of subtly implying that they are being irrational or that what they're saying doesn't really hold
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weight and what I want to talk about today is how to actually use the experience of defensiveness to to our advantage so how to stop or pause when we feel ourselves getting defensive and actually figuring out is there something
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here that it's actually really important for me and my Integrity to stand up for so this is about transforming defensiveness into assertiveness and we're going to talk about this at length in terms of what process brings us there but I just want
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to State off the bat that I think that there's often very strong signal inside feelings of defensiveness so I don't think that we should instantly dismiss them as being irrational even if we recognize that there's something not entirely rational inside of our thought
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process around it so we're going to go into exactly how to sort out what needs to be kept and defended in a healthy and assertive way as well as how to acknowledge and admit to ourselves that we might also have some muddle around
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the way that we're going about arguing our point this is the process of figuring out how to not self- abandon in the moments where we're not actually sure what it is that we're feeling upset about and I believe this is an
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incredibly important skill for secure relating so it's really worth it to spend some time on this step one in this process is just figuring out so that we start to be aware of this in the moment which signals show up in our body to let
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us know that we are feeling defensive and again when we're feeling defensive this is not necessarily cause for us to go okay time to shut down everything I'm feeling and admit that I'm wrong this is the experience of just being able to
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recognize in a completely neutral way I am feeling defensive so right now what you can try doing is pulling into your body a memory of the last time or a recent time that you felt defensive and just notice what changes happen inside
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of your physiology as you're recalling that memory defensiveness does look and feel different to different people so for some of us we might go into a total shutdown response when we feel defensive and kind of tell ourselves these stories
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about how this other person could never understand us so we're not even going to bother but for other people it feels really upregulating so when you're feeling defensive you might feel this mix of kind of panic and anger or maybe
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you feel the really strong urge to explain yourself and to tell the other person as much information as you can about what it is that they're getting wrong and so what we just want to do in this first step step is start becoming
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aware of what happens in our body when that feeling of defensiveness is online and what we are not trying to do is completely get rid of this feeling actually we want to welcome it in so that the next time we notice it showing
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up instead of immediately switching into whatever response we usually take when we feel defensive whether that's shutting down or lashing out or anything else in between we can just name it for ourselves in a neutral way we can just
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tell ourselves I am feeling defensive right now and if we happen to be in a relational Dynamic where it feels safe to disclose that to the other person I really highly recommend doing that as well so just taking a breath and going
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I'm feeling really defensive in this conversation or I'm feeling a lot of resistance to what we're talking about in this conversation or the way this conversation is unfolding or something like that that gives you a moment to kind of ignore knowledge where you're at
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before deciding what to do next so I've been on both sides of this equation and I can say that from the receiving end when someone tells me overtly that they're feeling defensive it's actually kind of like them putting out a safety
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cone in the conversation because now I know there's some heightened emotions going on right so we're going to need to tread a little bit more carefully but again you're going to need to use your discretion as to whether or not you want
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to disclose that which leads into how we want to step two step two of this process is figuring out where both the signal and the muddle is inside of your defensiveness response so these are terms that a close friend of mine always
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uses that I find really really helpful in navigating through these situations so where is the signal where is the part of me that actually knows I need to stand up for myself here versus where is the muddle where am I actually
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getting a bit confused and making a case that doesn't necessarily apply where is my cause and effect reasoning not quite clear here so this step can be done interpersonally with the other person you're in conversation with if there's a
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high degree of trust there but if not this might be something that you want to ask for a couple of minutes to excuse yourself from the conversation and kind of sit with yourself and try to sort this out and there is one question that
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I encourage you to ask yourself when you're trying to figure out where the signal and the muddle is in your feelings of defensiveness and that question is what would it mean if I were wrong about this so if someone makes a comment and we
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immediately feel like no you've got it wrong I have to overe explain myself or you have misunderstood me I need to completely shut down what we want to focus on is if this other person were actually right about that thing even if
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in reality we actually know for a fact that they're wrong what would it mean if they were right and I were wrong and what that's going to help me surface is the meaning that I'm making out of their statement that is deeper than the
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actual statement that they're making so for example years ago I had an Instagram account that was dedicated to some writing that I was doing at the time and my work started gaining some traction and I started getting a
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following on Instagram and I had this one friend at the time who would always kind of make jokes with me about oh you know now that you're a big time influencer and what was interesting to me was that I didn't have any negative
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connotation associated with the word influencer I had friends who were influencers and who did sponsored posts and I thought good on them it's like any other job but I got the sense that this person was saying it in a slightly
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derogatory way so I would always feel defensive when that word came up and I didn't know whether or not that was true right I didn't know for sure if they were implying something negative or not but I sat with that question and went
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what I'm making this mean is that they don't respect my rights writing and the fact that I share it online so my instinct was to push back against the label of influencer because I felt like that didn't accurately describe what I
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did in the sense of I just literally was not an influencer I was not selling any products but there is a subtext to it so arguing back against the influencer status for me was not just arguing that I wasn't an influencer it was arguing
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that I thought I deserved this person's respect and those are actually two separate conversations so this is about figuring out which things were lumping together that actually are two different things so clarifying that I wasn't an influencer was one conversation but
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talking to this friend about the feeling I had that they didn't respect my work was a different conversation and so this is what we want to do with this question we want to get clear on what meaning am I perceiving to
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be behind this question whether or not I'm right about that so I find that very often what happens when we identify a person as very defensive is that we are saying something to them that might be kind of benign to us but that carries a
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very deep unconscious meaning for them that feels like an attack so for a lot of us there are a lot of things that just kind of feel neutral about our personalities like if someone came up to me and went Heidi you're pretty bad at
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tennis right I'd be like yeah I am bad at tennis I think I've played it like one time in my life when I was 12 so I would be very surprised if I went to go play a game of tennis and found out that
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I were good at it so the comment that I was bad at tennis wouldn't feel loaded in any way but now let's say I grew up in a family where there was a super strong tennis culture and everyone loved
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tennis except for me I didn't really like it but I felt like I kind of had to play it to fit in with the culture now if someone comes up to me and goes Heidi you're not very good at tennis right I
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might instinctively translate that in my mind to mean Heidi you're not good enough for your family right and so now I have to start pushing back and defending that actually I do know how to play tennis I just haven't been out much
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this year and I haven't been hitting the courts but it's because work has been swamped and what I'm actually fighting back against in this situation is not the original claim itself it's the meaning underneath the claim I'm trying
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to argue that it's okay that I don't like tennis and I should still be accepted but they might not have any idea of that if let's say this is just a coworker of mine who is trying to figure
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out if I was going to be interested in playing on the company tennis team so these are the areas where I think that we're most prone to calling somebody defensive is when they have a very strong unconscious interpretation of
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something that we have almost no underlying unconscious interpretation of and that's very often where these big mismatches happen so if we want to try to be less defensive the first thing we want to work on is getting clear on
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which really heavily loaded unconscious interpretations we have to fairly benign comments that other people might make but I also want to to point out that this is not to say everybody else is always operating in good faith so in the
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second part of this video what we're going to talk about is how to deal with scenarios where it feels like maybe we actually are being insulted by someone they're just not doing it in an overt way so an example of this would be if I
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came from that family where tennis culture was so strong and one of my cousins who had a long history of bullying me came to visit me in my workplace and was joking with all my co-workers about what a bad tennis
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player I was that might be a scenario where there actually is real signal in the fact that I feel defensive because I actually am kind of covertly being insulted so what we want to do here is try to get really clear on which
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situation is which and in the second part of this video we're going to go over how to deal with every possible version of that including versions where we truly don't know if the other person is mocking us or if we are just being
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overly sensitive because we know that we have a really loaded interpretation around that thing but in this step the only thing we're paying attention to is what do I think it means if this thing that this person is saying that I feel
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defensive around is true what meaning am I making out of it we have to get to that meaning or else we can't do the rest of the steps in this process another example of this to give some varieties when I was in university I
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remember the first time my father who is a very cleanliness is Next to Godliness kind of person came to visit me he immediately kind of walked through my house and started pointing out all of the places where I was not being tidy
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and making a lot of comments about the mess in the place and I remember getting really really defensive about that and I didn't have the language for it at the time but the meaning I was making out of
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it was that if I am messy or untidy it means I am lazy and I automatically assumed that that was what he was implying about my place and the truth was that I was not lazy the reason my
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place was not super clean was because I was working three part-time jobs and going to school full-time so I would often work a midnight till 8: a.m. shift and then go do a full day of classes and then nap for a few hours and then work a
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shift at my evening job and this didn't leave me a lot of spare time to devote to housework so the truth was that my place was a bit messy but I didn't want to be seen as lazy so what I immediately
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started doing was lashing out at him and I went well you have militarist standards for cleanliness and no reasonable person could ever live up to that and making it all about him having an unrealistic bar for cleanliness when
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in reality there was both signal and modle in what was happening for me the signal was that I did want to be respected and seen for how hard I was working the muddle was that instead of admitting yes my place is a mess but
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there's a reason for that and I really want you to see how hard I'm working in these other areas and it hurts that you aren't recognizing that I was trying to convince him that actually my place was not a mess and that was untrue so that
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was the muddle I was trying to argue my underlying Point by distorting my surface level one but this is often a really tricky thing to get clear on especially if we grew up in environments or find ourselves in environments where
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passive aggressiveness genuinely is a tool that people use very often to communicate things they don't like about us or that they wish we would change so step step three in this process is figuring out is the insult that I'm
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feeling defensive about personal so is this a way that I am judging myself that the other person actually isn't implying at all so this would be the case with let's say one of my co-workers asking me whether or not I was good at tennis and
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me getting all flustered about it I would be instinctively judging my worth as a person around whether or not I was good at tennis whereas it's likely that my coworker was not doing that even a little bit so this would be a case where
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our feelings of defense and insult are personal or is it interpersonal which means is this person actually insulting me covertly here which is somewhat often the case right or is it neither or is it both so we're going to look at what all
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of these look like but first we just want to note that the root to figuring out which it is is through reality testing so once we have surfaced that story that meaning that we're making out of the comment that someone has made then
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we just want to be clear with them hey I'm interpreting what you're saying as this am I getting that right or am I making that up so if I had had the language for it that time that I was in
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university and my dad came to visit me I could have said hey I'm interpreting your critique of my house as you calling me lazy am I right about that or am I wrong about that or in the case of my
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friend continuously lying that I'm an influencer in a tone of voice that I found kind of suspect I eventually went up to that friend and said hey it's not technically true that I'm an influencer and that that's actually not my job but
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I don't really have any problem being thought of as an influencer but I feel a little uncomfortable around the way that you say it because I haven't heard you in the past talk very positively about influencers and so I'm wondering if
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there's some judgment there or if there's something you don't respect about the fact that I put my writing on the internet and what this does is it gives the person the option to do one of three things one they can admit that Yes
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actually I was kind of taking a dig at you there I find this is pretty unlikely it takes an exceptionally honest person to do that but it is one of the options or if they genuinely did not mean
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something that way and it was a true misunderstanding they can also let you know that so that's usually going to sound something like oh my God I'm so sorry that is not at all what I meant I really don't want you to think that
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that's what I think of you right you can usually feel when someone's being authentic in that way and three is they might deny it in a way that you feel is probably not the truth so they might go
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of course not you're just being too sensitive right and give some sort of dismissive response but the reason why this is an important step is because if it is a true genuine misunderstanding it can stop here right then there's no
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reason to continue defending the self and you've just expressed something vulnerable to another person because when we explain the things that we feel self-conscious about it is a vulnerable thing and now they know you better right so we want to reality test this at least
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to rule out option two which is that it's just a misunderstanding but here's what we do with the other things what we want to figure out is the following we want to look at am I feeling defensive because
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something has poked at something in me that I judge myself for or is this something I don't judge myself for so we want to clarify which of those two things it is and then we want to look at do I think the other
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person is being genuinely disrespectful towards me or not and this will give us four different scenarios that we can respond to in four different ways so let's say in the influencer example my friend goes oh my God no no no I'm so
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sorry this is not at all what I meant I actually think it's really cool and I really respect your work now what we have is a misunderstanding I respect myself and they respect me so in that case we can probably patch it up pretty
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easily laugh it off and now maybe they have a little bit more information about the fact that I do sometimes get judged for that and maybe that's something they didn't know but what happens if I do that same reality testing and I get the
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same response from them that oh my God that's not at all what I meant but I realize I still feel kind of agitated that they noticed that this is something that I do and that they use that label
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maybe it turns out I actually have a problem with that label and there's something they're pointing out that I'm actually mad at myself for now we're in a situation where I don't respect myself but the other person does and in this
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case what we probably want to do is apologize for having projected that onto them and then look at how we want to heal our own self- relationship with the part of us that judges oursel whether that means changing what we do or just
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becoming more comfortable and accepting of something that we do but let's say I don't get that totally understanding and apologetic second response from people where genuinely do respect me let's say I get one of the other responses so
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either yeah I actually was insulting you and the meaning that you're making out of that statement is correct again you don't get a lot of this but it might happen or someone dismissing your meaning making and acting like you're
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crazy or of course they didn't mean that but in a way where you're not fully convinced so now you're in a scenario where if you have self-respect around the thing that you think this person is insulting you for but they don't seem to
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be respecting you you want to look at which boundaries you can draw around this and what I found is that in scenarios where people are doing that kind of denial game but I don't really believe it it's really helpful to treat
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it as though it's in this category and say even as a hypothetical okay I appreciate that you weren't trying to insult me but just so you know if you really did disrespect what I did that would be a pretty big issue for me and
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our friendship because I respect what I do and I feel really uncomfortable if you're kind of mocking me around this thing and even if it's phrased as a hypothetical and even if they dismiss you as being overly sensitive they will
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hear the boundary that you're putting down that doesn't necessarily mean they'll respect it in the future but people hear us when we set boundaries even in hypothetical forms and now they understand if I continue behaving in this way this person is not going to
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find it funny and they are going to stand up for themselves assertively and then if it happens again the conversation might need to happen again right I don't feel comfortable with the way that you bring this up or I don't
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find that joke is funny could you please stop making it this is healthy assertiveness you're addressing the subtext of what's being said even if it's just hypothetically and letting them know in a hypothetical situation where that is what you mean I'm not here
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for it and I will not take that kind of treatment and this this is going to get you a lot further in the long run than arguing back endlessly against the surface point if you believe that there truly is a subtext and of course if they
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admit that there is one then it's time to draw some explicit boundaries I'm not okay with you talking about my house like this I understand that you think it's messy and it's not up to your standards but I have a lot on my plate
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this isn't something that I think is a priority for me to attend to and quite frankly I'm not going to want to have you over if you're just going to come and criticize the way that my place looks so this is where we need to get
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clear about our boundaries and stand up for ourselves and the part of us that feels put off and defensive in a clear and assertive way and then we're going to look at the last quadrant so what if you surface
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that the other person is insulting you around something that actually you also feel a lot of Shame around and that you don't respect yourself for this is the quadrant where we have two harms that we need to attend to not zero so sometimes
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we're quick to go well they're kind of disrespecting me around this but I also don't respect myself around this so those cancel each other out and I should just leave it alone in reality what we want to be doing is attending to both so
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this is where we have a conversation about how to talk about this thing so let's say I have made it clear to my friend that I don't really respect the work that I do but then they also start
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making fun of my work in front of other people and maybe I'm uncomfortable with that in this case it's time to have a conversation with this friend about how to talk about the issue hey I know that I complain about my work and I don't
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really like it and I feel kind of embarrassed about what I do but I don't appreciate you making jokes about it in front of other people that feels really crappy to me and sometimes you surface some really important things out of this
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right maybe you are endlessly complaining about your work to your friend and they're getting frustrated because they feel like they're putting a lot of time and energy into to trying to help you sort out the problem but you're
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not taking action on it and so maybe these quips that they're making are their way of kind of venting some frustration about the fact that they feel like their listening skills are being taken advantage of by you so this
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can Surface some really interesting things that might be happening under the surface of the relationship Dynamic if you can address it directly another example of this Dynamic that I find is fairly common is let's say you are making relationship decisions that you
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know are not great for you or that are not not really coming out of a place of self-respect and you're telling your friends about it and then the next time you go to them and you're like ooh actually I haven't taken any of their
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advice or done any of the things that I said I would do to set boundaries in my relationship and then them just asking hey how's your relationship going can put you instantly on the defense because them asking that question to you might
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have a subtext that goes if I have not taken their advice or implemented what I said I was going to implement it means that I am pathetic or unworthy or whatever it is and this is a case where
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you might need to approach that conversation with just as much transparency as possible I'm disappointed in the way that I'm acting around this and I don't really know why I keep acting this way around this and I know that you guys are probably
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frustrated too so let's talk about how we can talk about this issue in a way that isn't making both of us perpetually frustrated right you bring the elephant into the room but the thing that's really important here and what we just
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want to make sure we are paying attention to is where there is signal inside of our feelings of defensiveness usually when we get defensive it's because there is a part of us that genuinely wants us to stand up for
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ourselves we just aren't super clear on what that part is and where it's getting confused inside of the scenario so we have to make that explicit separate what's different about the conversation we're having and the meaning that we're
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making out of it reality testing whether that meaning is actually being implied in the conversation or not and then responding accordingly by being assertive in the right area that actually gets at the core of what's Happening under the surface of our
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conversations and the more comfortable we get doing this the less defensive we naturally become and the more clean and clear we start getting on what these underlying Dynamics in our relationships that we might feel so perpetually frustrated by are and how we can address
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them more often at the root all right that's all I'm going to say for today on this topic as always any questions thoughts comments you guys have coming up as you've gone through this video do leave them in the comment
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section below I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon [Music]
Topics:defensivenessassertivenessintegrityself-respectboundariessecure relatingemotional regulationcommunicationself-abandonmentHeidi Priebe
