A few months ago, a woman approached me after a workshop in Montreal. We were in the hotel lobby, and she’d been waiting until everyone else had left. “Anna,” she said, lowering her voice, “I need to address something with my business partner, but I know she’ll get defensive. How do I bring it up without making things worse?”
She was a co-founder of a design agency, and her business partner – her college roommate of twenty years – had started making unilateral decisions about clients without consulting her. Big decisions. They’d almost lost a major account because of it.
I asked her what she planned to say. She pulled out her phone and showed me a draft message. It started with “Why do you always…” and I stopped her there.
Your question already has an accusation built into it, I told her gently. “Why do you always” translates to “You’re doing something wrong and I’m about to tell you what it is.” Of course she’ll get defensive. Her nervous system will hear attack even if you don’t mean it that way.
What if instead you got curious?
When I just engage conflict, I get tight and defensive, filled with dread. When I love conflict? I get alive and curious, excited about what I’m about to learn.
The woman nodded slowly, deleted the message, and started typing something different. Her fingers moved quickly across the screen. “I’ve noticed we’re approaching client decisions differently lately, and I’m wondering if we could talk about what’s behind our different perspectives? I want to understand what you’re seeing that I might be missing.”
She read it back to me, looking up for my reaction. She sent it to her partner right there in the lobby, then looked at me with nervous hope in her eyes.
Two hours later, she texted me. Her partner had responded immediately, relieved someone had finally opened the conversation. They met for coffee the next morning and discovered her partner had been feeling overwhelmed and abandoned, making quick decisions because she thought the woman didn’t want to be involved anymore. They’d been avoiding a conversation about workload and commitment for months, and the unilateral decisions were just a symptom.
Defensiveness is usually a response to feeling accused. When someone feels like they’re being attacked, their nervous system goes into protection mode. They can’t hear you because they’re busy defending themselves.
Some people get defensive no matter how carefully you approach them. People come with genuine curiosity, frame things gently, take responsibility for their part – and still get met with defensiveness.
In these situations, defensiveness has become their way of protecting themselves from anything that feels like exposure. Maybe they grew up in a home where any feedback felt dangerous. Maybe past experiences taught them that being vulnerable leads to getting hurt. Their nervous system learned to put up walls, and now those walls go up automatically even when there’s no actual threat.
This doesn’t mean you’re helpless or that the relationship is doomed. You can still set boundaries. You can still make decisions about what you will and won’t accept. You can still protect what matters to you.
And here’s what I’ve noticed – when one person shifts how they show up in a relationship, the dynamic between them often changes. Not always. Not quickly. But I’ve seen it happen enough times to trust the possibility. The person who’s been defensive might eventually notice they’re being met differently and start to soften. Or your new approach creates just enough space for a different kind of conversation to become possible. You can’t control whether they change, but changing yourself often changes what becomes possible between you.
You can ask your question: In the comments here. Or send me a direct message
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