Working With Our Own Defensiveness
Do you know that feeling of your throat closing, your chest tightening, your vision narrowing when you open that email or text message with some hard-to-receive feedback?
Or maybe it’s real-time in a conversation, maybe you even knew it was coming (like a review at work) and still you feel your body react.
Or maybe the feeling is different for you - what happens in your body?
We could call these body-level reactions defensiveness - literally, our body’s move to protect us from something our nervous system is perceiving as an attack.
And of course! We are wired to get vigilant when we are under threat, to move without conscious thought into fight/flight/freeze/appease.
What are we defending?
The thing is, often the feedback coming in is not at the level of threat our animal bodies think it is.
Something else is getting activated - an old story, an unfinished stress cycle, some layer of trauma that our reptilian brains don’t realize is past not present.
Or maybe it’s speaking to some insecurity you have about yourself.
One of my teachers on feedback, meenadchi, reminds us that feedback can hurt and raise our hackles when it touches a tender nerve, something we fear may actually be true about ourselves.
And all of this makes sense - you make sense! Let’s thank our bodies for their wise and human attempts to take care of us when we are feeling threatened and fearful.
Annndddd. Can we slow it down enough to notice that we’re likely much safer than we think? (Of course, if you are not actually safe, that’s a different story - then please do what you can to get more safe.)
But if we are actually safe enough, if it’s old stuff getting activated, can we pause and catch that moment of defensiveness as it ripples through our bodies? If it serves us, can we notice there may be other responses available to us besides defensiveness?
Working with my own defensiveness
I got a taste of my own defensiveness recently.
I received an email about the upcoming Unraveling Whiteness class. The feedback was from a person of color concerned that the way we were promoting the class perpetuated the very white supremacy culture we are working to unravel.
All of my defenses went up!
I very quickly felt my body go into protective mode. My chest constricted, my breathing shallowed and quickened, my tummy got tight. And my brain very quickly followed! All the stories and fears around being a good/bad white person, doing it right/wrong, wanting to be accountable but feeling trapped, dipping into overwhelm, started spinning.
Luckily, I had literally just been working on writing this here article when that email arrived, and I had just enough wherewithal to try some of my own medicine! :)
Because it’s familiar to me, I know this kind of spinning out can very quickly lead to shame, stuckness and paralysis. I was able to catch myself with care and slow things down, to notice I was scared, and give myself some tenderness and empathy.
Eventually I was able to come back to myself, to center, and to trusting myself and remembering my inherent dignity as a white person.
I was able to reach out to a trusted colleague and friend to get support and strategize, and then eventually respond to the feedback with what I hope was accountability and responsiveness, including a change of action on my part, and an extension of genuine gratitude for the learning.
If we are wanting to learn to receive feedback with more grace and care and responsiveness, working with defensiveness is key.
We may or may not want to work with our defensiveness - we get to be in choice around when we want to be responsive to feedback. Sometimes we simply don’t have capacity, and we get to honor that, too.
And, for the sake of shared projects, shared purpose, relationships we value and want to deepen, being able to receive feedback with less defensiveness is a valuable skill.
Body-based work
Building this skill is body-based work. Because defensiveness is usually not conscious, we need to learn to tune in to the body enough to catch that automatic reaction, and to become more familiar with how that first hit of defensiveness feels.
Here are some simple steps for starting to work with our defensiveness:
Practice a pause. If you are live, can you ask for a couple of breaths? Or to return to the conversation later?
Notice what defensiveness feels like in your body. What are the sensations, textures, temperatures, energies, colours, movements of defensiveness? (This is life long practice, especially as many of us have been disconnected from our bodies! Just bringing curiosity can grow awareness, even if you aren’t feeling much now.)
Notice what the defensiveness is taking care of. What are you defending yourself from and why? What might you be afraid of losing?
Offer gratitude and appreciation to the defensiveness. Notice that it’s working really hard to take care of you!
Notice what insecurities or fears about yourself the feedback is touching. Even if these things about you are true, can you connect to your inherent dignity? Can you hold yourself with exquisite care and compassion? With even 10% more self-acceptance?
From here, do you have any more space to take in the [hidden] gift at the heart of the feedback being offered to you?
When power dynamics are at play
Working with our defensiveness is especially important when we are in positions of power or dominance, which could be based on our identities, or on our positionality (think boss//employee) in a given context.
Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones (with many other colleagues) have given us the rich resource of wrestling with White Supremacy Cultural Characteristics (check out the new website for a nuanced and complexified exploration thereof), of which denial/defensiveness is one!
This characteristic plays out in particular ways as it relates to racism and white supremacy, and, I think it translates well to all forms of power imbalance/oppression.
Whenever we find ourselves in positions of dominance, privilege or power over, it is extra important that we lean into the growth edges and responsibilities of that position. From that place, working towards justice means inviting more feedback more often, and receiving it with as much grace and responsiveness as we can muster.
Our defensiveness in these sorts of dynamics can be about fear of losing power, losing face, losing comfort, losing privilege.
And again, of course these things are scary. This is why honoring the fears that our defensiveness points us to is so important.
Part of committing to undoing domination in all its forms is doing the hard and beautiful work of reckoning with our fears and insecurities so we can show up more grounded and accountable to the people we are in relationship with, so we can continue together to dismantle the systems that perpetuate domination in the first place.
This is especially poignant for me as a white person, and part of why I am so excited to be offering this upcoming course, Unraveling Whiteness: Introduction to Embodied Anti-Racist Practices.
For white people committed to racial justice, working with defensiveness and staying centered under pressure helps us to be more accountable and able to meaningfully integrate valuable feedback from people of color and other white people on this racial justice journey.
(If this peaks your interest, consider joining this upcoming class!)
For all of us, how might working with defensiveness support your relationships and collaborations? Your commitments to racial justice, to undoing domination in all its forms? Your own healing and resilience?