Addressing Chronic Defensiveness

Imagine believing that a small flaw will create the most catastrophic outcome. Also, imagine believing that only the apparently perfect are worthy of love.

While most of us can become defensive from time to time, meaning we fail to consider the validity of someone else's criticism of us and instead jump to attacking it, perfectionists, who tend to catastrophize (i.e., believe they'll cause the worst possible outcomes), engage in this protective strategy regularly; they're chronically defensive. Their spouses, friends, and colleagues are often left frustrated, wondering why someone they love repeatedly fails to take any responsibility for their mistakes. Understanding the perfectionist's intentions here may be helpful, to everyone involved.

The Perfectionist's Intentions

Perfectionists tend to be highly self-protective, meaning that so much of their lives are spent considering how to keep themselves safe from emotional and physical harms. Therefore, and often much to their surprise, they miss the extent of their collateral damage, the casualties of their own assaults. Defensiveness is a misnomer, and in its chronic form, the individual is, in reality, highly offensive, using each stored bullet and gun in her arsenal to suffocate the potential of a future assault. She often uses her arguments to belittle, with her tone and words, the critic's feedback to put him back in his place. On the one hand, she's implicitly begging him not to leave her. On the other, she's also daring him to.

Chronic defensiveness tends to stem from childhood, family dynamics, wherein individuals are reared in a highly structured pecking order; there, rank means everything, and one can easily lose her position in line. It's a dog-eat-dog world for children in these families; posturing masks their vulnerabilities. "Who are you to criticize me?!" In this context, we get a better sense of the tragic coping mechanism. The perfectionist learns to act as his own defense attorney, persuading the jury of the stupidity of the state's prosecution and their inability to see it as such. Yet, while the accused ends his relations with the jury when the trial concludes, the perfectionist is required to manage the fallout of pleading his case.

Partners of perfectionists find it difficult to understand why something that seems so simple, admitting a mistake (which seems small) to save a relationship (which is big), is often avoided and substituted with a much more energy-consuming activity. They ask: Why does my partner frequently make the worst possible choice? When you're living in the jungle of your mind, everything related to emotional and physical survival is taken too seriously. Perfectionists fail to consider how their defenses invalidate and hurt their partners because they're preoccupied with having the upper hand (or moral high ground), essentially with saving themselves. An unfortunate aspect of chronic defensiveness is the black-and-white thinking involved. Out of fear of feeling and being perceived as inferior, the defense allows the defendant to maintain her sense and position of superiority, implying that she's the one who decides what's right and wrong, not you.

Understanding the Perfectionist's Defensiveness

It sometimes helps for loved ones to understand how insecure and terrified the perfectionist is when she's being defensive. It may also help to understand the way they structure reality, again, usually based on childhood experiences. Partners often feel sympathy, and even empathy, when they learn that perfectionists use a sense of moral superiority to protect themselves from fearing punishment. You can imagine how terrifying it must be to believe you'll be abandoned for a minor mistake. However, fundamentally, the perfectionist would need to begin to address her view of the world and accept the damage she's caused.

Much of couple's therapy in this respect revolves around a partner helping the perfectionist understand how their defensiveness affected them. While she was in her own world making sure she was safe, her partner was effectively drowning. That alone may be hard to swallow, but what's often even harder is knowing, and I mean more than just intellectually, that saving them required a much simpler task. A simple "I'm sorry" would have freed both of you. And, rather than being shamed for your flaw, its revelation would have, more likely than not, fostered gratitude, stemming from the belief that you care as much about them as they do about you.