How to Not Be Defensive with Narcissists and Everyone

Defending yourself sounds good. Being defensive sounds bad. What’s the difference, and how can we stop sounding defensive while still being able to defend ourselves?

Defensiveness is a self-protective blurt in response to something insulting. Someone knocks over our self-esteem. We lurch to right it before it hits the ground.

In contrast, defending ourselves is responding to content. Evaluating criticism.

I make a distinction between ingesting and digesting criticism. Ingesting it is taking it in. Digesting it is absorbing what’s useful in it and rejecting what isn’t, which takes time.

When criticized by someone you respect, demonstrate that you ingested it, even if it tasted bitter. Then sleep on it. Let your digestive fluids sort the nutrition from the waste product. For that, you need confidence that you can sort it. Without that confidence, you’ll want to spit it out rather than ingest it.

But that’s not the whole story. Narcissists just like knocking over people’s self-esteem. I call it sado-narcissism, though that’s redundant. Narcissism is sadistic, since putting other people down elevates a narcissist.

Narcissists know that defensiveness sounds bad, so they accuse you of it. If you say, “I’m not being defensive!” they’ll say, “there you go again, being defensive.” It’s one of the easiest traps they can set.

What should you do about that kind of trap?

There’s a way around this trap if you remember one fundamental thing that almost no one remembers.

Words that sound bad or good aren’t always. Every supposedly good or bad behavior in the human repertoire has its place. Show me some supposedly indefensible behavior and I’ll show you a situation in which it’s defensible.

Defending yourself sounds good, but it’s stupid to do it with narcissists. The notion that we should always be receptive to everyone’s feedback is how we end up enabling such people. Enabling isn’t always bad. We want to enable decent people, not narcissists.

Receptivity sounds good. It isn’t always. Obviously. Being receptive to a con artist isn’t good for you or anyone but the con artist. Yet people forget that when narcissists toss pejoratives at them like taunting apes, they are aping the sound of morality to throw you off your game.

They’ll fling whatever at you if they can destabilize you. Why should you listen to their stern sermons when they’re not listening to them for anything but sado-narcissistic satisfaction?

In general, stop paying so much attention to what sounds good or bad. If someone accuses you of being closed-minded, unreceptive, uncaring, whatever, don’t lurch to “Me? Impossible! I’m a good person. I wouldn’t do that. It’s always bad, and I’m always good.”

Most people go through life dodging bad-sounding labels and cloaking themselves in good-sounding labels. They treat morality like smells. If it smells good, they want to internalize it. If it smells bad, they avoid it, just a gut response to positive and negative, morally loaded terms.

This gut response makes it easy for narcissists to shame and manipulate people. Meanwhile, what’s really right or wrong for the situation becomes irrelevant. It’s just a mindless game of cat and mouse where defensive mice get eaten.

Don’t do that, or at least try to do it less, which can be hard if you’ve been doing it a long time.

It’s easier to stop doing it if you know what to do instead. Here’s my suggestion:

When someone accuses you of doing those supposedly always-bad things, like being unreceptive, own that you do it sometimes. It’s in your repertoire, as it is in everyone's. Ask yourself whether it was appropriate or inappropriate in the context in question. Don’t let yourself get distracted by positive and negative connotations. Turn your attention to whether you applied the right behavior for the situation.

This simple thing isn’t just a trick to deflect criticism without sounding defensive. To apply it convincingly, you’ve got to feel it in your bones. For that, make it your perspective on life in general.

We’ve all got similar repertoires. The same polarities even—receptive/unreceptive., caring/uncaring, honest/dishonest, tolerant/intolerant. You’re trying to figure out how to use your repertoire right. It’s guesswork, so you learn from mistakes, which we all make. When you do, you stand corrected and adjust.

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Decent folk are always learning how to use their repertoires better. Sado-narcissists are not. Don’t let yourself get distracted by loaded moral terms. It stunts growth, especially flung at you from an arsehole’s arsenal.

This article as a video.