You know what’s really happening when you’re defensive in a fight? You’re not being difficult. You’re being human. Your nervous system has just heard something that sounds terrifyingly like “you’re not enough” or “I might leave you,” and it is doing exactly what it was built to do. It’s protecting you.
So the first thing I want you to know is this: defensiveness is not the problem. Defensiveness is the symptom. The problem is underneath it.
Here’s what I see in my office, over and over again. One partner comes in with their hurt. They’ve even done the work, right? They’ve used their “I feel” statements. They’ve been responsible. They’ve read the books. And then they share their pain with the person they love most in the world, and that person gets defensive or counter-attacks, and the first partner thinks, “See? This is why I can never bring anything up.”
But here’s what’s actually happening. When you tell your partner, “Something happened that hurt my feelings,” even if you say it beautifully, their organism, millions of years old, hears something much more primal. They hear: “You’ve disappointed me. You let me down. You didn’t love me enough.” And their system does what any system does when it feels like it’s about to be thrown out of the village. It fights back, or it shuts down, or it runs.
And here’s the thing I want you to sit with. That defensive reaction? It’s actually evidence of how much they love you. The more activated they get, the more you matter to them. I know that’s hard to feel in the middle of a fight, but it’s true.
So how do you actually stop the defensive spiral?
You cannot think your way out of this. You cannot out-communicate your way out of this. What has to happen first is a shift in what you’re actually trying to solve.
Most couples, when they’re fighting defensively, are each trying to win their own video. You have your video of events that starts when you got hurt. They have their video that starts a week ago when you did something that stung them. You both show up to the fight with your video evidence, and you play them at the same time, and nobody can hear anything because both TVs are on at full volume.
What I want you to do instead is stop the videos. Just stop. And look at the still image. Right now, in this moment, what does the still image show? It shows two people who are hurting. Two people who are both experiencing the other person as withholding love. Two people who love each other so much that this moment is genuinely painful for both of them.
That’s the doorway out.
When you can say, out loud, “I can see that we’re both hurting right now, and this is awful for both of us,” something shifts. It’s not magic. It’s biology. Your nervous systems stop treating each other as threats. You go from two crocodiles to two little field mice who are scared and just want to be held.
Now, I’m not going to pretend this is easy. It is not easy. It requires you to hold your own pain while also making room for theirs. That’s incredibly hard to do when you’re activated. Which is why I always tell people: don’t expect the first conversation to go well. Build in the expectation that there will be a traffic jam. That’s not a sign you’re going in the wrong direction. That is the road. You go through the traffic jam to get to the ice cream on the other side.
The practical thing you can do, starting today, is this. The next time you notice yourself getting defensive, or you notice your partner getting defensive, try saying this: “I can see this moment is really hard for both of us.” Not as a technique. Not as a line. But because it’s true.
And if you can get to a place where you’re both standing on that shared ground, where you’re both looking at the painful cycle together rather than fighting each other inside it, that’s when two people stop being opponents and start being teammates facing the same problem together. The defensiveness doesn’t disappear overnight. But it shrinks. And what grows in its place is something that actually works.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: How to Stop Fighting and Start Communicating in Your Relationship
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