Defensiveness

What It's For, How It Works, How To Help

Repost, originally from June 25, 2020.

I’ve been studying courage, and one of the juiciest sub-topics so far has been defensiveness. Whatever a mature practice of courage entails, seems like situations involving defensiveness call for an extra large dose of it.

Over the past thirty years, I seem to have somehow ended up half-adopting the following implicit beliefs about defensiveness: Being defensive is a bad thing that pathetic people do. If you feel defensive, you should stop being defensive and start being open and compassionate instead. If you fail to be open and compassionate instead of defensive, you should probably hide in a hole and wear a horse hair sweater for the rest of your miserable life.

Presumably those beliefs came from some kind of cultural miasma that developed in response to the really stupid shit people sometimes do while they’re being defensive. And people are indeed pretty terrible, sometimes, under the influence of defensiveness. Myself included.

I have this general theory of emotions, though, in which *every* emotion is trying to help a good thing happen, and ought to be treated as something like an intellectually disabled but perceptive and virtuous comrade. When I find myself dissatisfied with my patterns of behavior while under the influence of a particular emotion, I ask myself, “What, in general, is this emotion trying to accomplish, what is its strategy, and how can I help?”

I asked myself these questions about defensiveness, and at this point I have answers I’m pretty happy with.

“What is defensiveness trying to accomplish?” According to my working model, defensiveness is trying to preserve access to valuable information you can see from your current perspective. Defensiveness knows that sometimes, when you accidentally fall toward another vantage point, you might get stuck there, forgetting what you used to see and know and care about. Defensiveness would like for you to only gain information, and never lose it.

“What is its strategy?” Mostly, defensiveness is in the business of constructing barriers between you and the places where it thinks you might get trapped. It freezes perceptual mobility. Sometimes it freezes your conscious thoughts all together so that rash psychological change is unlikely. Sometimes it steers conversations away from dangerous topics. Sometimes it inclines you to rehearse the implications of crucial pieces of info you already have (”It wasn’t my *fault*, though! I had no power over that!”). Sometimes it drives away, silences, or simply ignores paths toward other vantage points (such as empathy with people who might disagree with you).

“How can I help?”

“Wait a minute, do you actually *want* to help with that? Sounds like a good way to be more of a closed-minded stick-in-the-mud.” Well, I don’t exactly want to help execute the most basic version of the defensiveness strategy. But I do in fact want to preserve access to valuable information, and I agree that there are times when I’m in danger of losing that access. I even think those times are pretty well picked out by “times when I feel defensive”. So I do want to help, and what I mean by “help” is approximately “boost the intelligence of my process for preserving access to valuable information”.

Here’s how I’ve been helping:

When I notice that I feel defensive, I say, “I’m afraid of getting sucked into a story where [blank]. I don’t want to get stuck there.” And I fill in the blank. When I’m done with that, I say, “What I want is to retain the ability to see [blank].”

That’s all. Once I’ve completed this little ritual, I can keep my walls or silence or whatever. But so far I’ve found that I mostly don’t need to. After filling in those blanks, much more of my mind is protecting access to the important information I’m afraid to loose, which means it’s safer to think.

It’s amazing how much cognitive freedom this immediately creates when I do it right. I think it also has a lot of potential for untangling long-standing psychological knots when repeated on the same tricky topic over time.