Do you struggle with Defensiveness? You probably have a harsh inner critic!

The other day I came home from work. I walked in the door and saw my wife on her phone at the table. “Hey honey, how did your day go today?!” She looked up at me with a hurt expression on her face. She told me how she felt judged and micromanaged. She felt like she was failing as a wife. She felt like she could never live up to my expectations. I was speechless. “What the heck are you talking about?” Turns out my wife – along with millions of other humans all over the planet – has a BRUTAL inner critic. And when I asked her how her day had gone, that inner critic took on my voice. When I asked, “How did your day go?” the inner critic translated that into me judgmentally asking her, “Were you productive today? Did you get everything done that you planned? Do you feel good about yourself? Did you live up to your fullest potential?” She felt judged. She felt attacked. She felt like a failure. And immediately her defenses went up. I’ve been a marriage researcher for almost a decade. I teach people regularly that defensiveness and criticism nearly always manifest themselves together. If one partner is overly-critical, the other is often overly-defensive. But only recently did it occur to me that sometimes when we feel criticized by others, it’s really us using other people to reflect our own self-judgment back at ourselves. We seek any opportunity to validate our deepest insecurities of not feeling good enough, loveable enough, ambitious enough, _______ enough. My weakness? Taxes. My wife can bring them up in the sweetest, most sensitive, and non-threatening voice ever, and I often (and almost immediately) interpret it her questions about taxes as, “I’m a failure because I haven’t taken care of this yet. I’m unreliable. I’m incompetent. I’m a disappointment…” That inner critic is out of control. The temptation is to retreat into my fortress and put up my defenses as if my wife was waging emotional warfare on me. Can you relate? Defensiveness is dangerous. It can create an enemy out of an ally in seconds. This is why learning to acknowledge and manage your inner critic is absolutely necessary. It will keep you from going to war with your partner over something that’s completely made up in your head.