Love and Abuse – Manipulation and Emotional Abuse in Relationships

When you’re constantly defending yourself

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When you’re constantly defending yourself

February 19, 2019

Do you spend all your energy defending yourself with certain people?

Is it impossible to get anywhere with them because they continue to paint you into a corner making you feel like you have no choice but to correct them about what you’ve done or who you are?

It may be time to stop defending yourself and start realizing exactly what game is being played so that you don’t fall for it anymore.

Today, I want to talk about something I might call a mix of crazymaking and redirection.

I think it’s important to identify specific behaviors so that when they happen to you, you can label them. When it comes to any type of abusive or toxic behavior, it’s good to have a label for it so that you can recognize it. It helps you spot it so you can work with it and have something tangible to put on the table.

When it’s out in the open, you can gather all the pieces and make a bigger picture of what’s happening. And when you know what’s happening, you have some semblance of sanity, less confusion, and more understanding.

When you understand what’s happening in a toxic relationship or even in a “normal” relationship, it gives you a bit more power and options. If you have at least one more choice at your disposal, then you have a chance.

You get another option that maybe wasn’t there before or that you didn’t see. And I think that’s important.

What I’m talking about with these weird terms I brought up is “truth erosion,” “fact erosion,” “truth attrition,” and “fact disintegration.” It’s when someone takes the facts and twists them in a way to make you believe something other than the truth.

What I mean by that is you can have one person in a relationship say, “Look, we had this conversation last week, and I said that you can’t use the car,” and the other person might say, “No, you didn’t. You didn’t tell me that. You did not say I couldn’t use the car.” Then the other person will say, “Yes, I did. I remember this conversation clearly.” If someone is doing this type of fact-altering or truth-attrition, they are going to twist it and turn truthful data into a falsehood used to their advantage.

They do this because it’s part of gaslighting, which is meant to make you feel crazy. If you begin to believe this alternate reality they’re creating, you will lose the ability to trust your instincts and decision-making abilities, making you more vulnerable. And they have you right where they want you: in a defensive posture.

This is the focus of this episode: your defensive posture.

When you’re in a defensive posture, that’s exactly where they want you (the toxic or manipulative person). In this posture, you spend all your energy defending yourself and explaining the truth.

By forcing you into this defensive posture, the focus comes off of them and onto you. It’s important to know this because we do this to ourselves all the time. Somebody says something about us or to us, and we go “No, that’s not true at all. Let me explain to you what really happened,” and then we spend a lot of time defending ourselves in certain situations. In the toxic interaction I’m talking about, that’s where we’re most vulnerable.

It’s like being in a small boat with a hole in it, and all you have is a small bucket while water keeps coming in. You’re scooping up the water and pouring it out, trying to keep up because the water keeps coming in.

The water that keeps filling up your boat is the other person keeping you on the defense. If they keep you on the defense, you can’t catch up, and eventually, you’ll sink. That’s the point of defeat, where they finally have you where they want you because you spent all your time trying to empty the water out of the boat with this little bucket.

My advice to you is to jump off the boat and swim to shore. In other words, do not defend yourself.

I know it will be hard to do because your character, integrity, morality, ethicality, and even the legality of something could be questioned, making you feel like someone’s looking down at you. You will feel the need to correct them, want them to see the better part of you, the good part of you, and not the bad part that they’re creating.

Because the idea behind this is that you’re a good person, and they’re trying to make you into a bad person by saying these things about you or something that you did, and you don’t want that to be true.

You want to correct that truth, and that’s where the downward spiral begins. That’s when the hole gets in the boat, and you have this tiny little bucket, and you can’t keep up because if you are busy defending yourself, they are going to wear you down. You’ll eventually wear yourself down to the point where you give up.

How many times have you reached and given up making your point to someone? I know I have. I lived with a girl a long time ago, and she was a wonderful person. We were both young, and we didn’t know about emotional abuse, bad behavior, or toxic behavior. All we knew is how we learned to communicate since we were children.

We all go through this. During our arguments, she used to win every time, and I couldn’t figure out why. And it’s not like I wanted to win, but I just wanted to feel right once in a while.

In hindsight – after I learned all about human behavior, manipulation, influence, verbal abuse, and emotional abuse – I realized that during our arguments, she was doing several things that made me feel small and took up my energy. I don’t think she was doing it on purpose.

Like I said in another episode, not all toxic people are doing it on purpose. It’s just the way they’ve learned to communicate, and some people will be able to heal from that and stop being toxic, and other people won’t. We just have to find out which direction they’re going to go if we want to continue associating with them.

But back to that past relationship – I figured out that the woman I was with would minimize me, invalidate me, and sometimes stonewall me. If you’re unfamiliar with these terms, keep listening to this show. For example, stonewalling is like putting your hand in the other person’s face and saying, “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

Along with the other behaviors I was experiencing in that relationship, the one characteristic that kept showing up again and again was that I was always on the defense.

When she put me on the defense, I spent a lot of time and energy trying to tell her, “No, this isn’t who I am. You’re seeing me all wrong. This is who I am. This is what I did. This is what we said to each other a week ago,” this, this, this, and that.

And, of course, she would counter with more things that I would have to defend myself for. I would almost always spend the entire conversation or argument defending myself instead of making my point.

That’s what I want to highlight today, even though it may sound weird, but stop defending yourself.

Yes, there are times to defend yourself. Absolutely. But are you defending yourself against someone that actually wants you to defend yourself? Someone who wants you to keep defending yourself so that you spend all of your energy?

If you spend all your energy, you get weak and become vulnerable. Not a safe kind of vulnerable where you are with someone you trust, and you can just let your guard down. The kind of vulnerable that can be further attacked or further worn down. It’s an emotional erosion.

It’s the erosion of:

• The facts
• Your belief system
• Your ability to make good decisions
• Your belief in your intuition
• Your belief in your intelligence.

All of these things are part of a bigger picture of emotional abuse, but today I’m talking specifically about when you get on the defense. When you find yourself becoming defensive, ask yourself if this is where you normally go in these times of conversation with this person. “Is this where I normally go? Do I spend more time defending myself?” Because if you do, don’t.

I know, easy to say, hard to do, because we get emotionally triggered. But let me give you some tools so that when you are in this space, and you really feel like you want to defend yourself.

Instead of jumping into that emotionally triggered defensive state, let me give you a couple of things that you can say. One of them is, “That’s incorrect, and you know it,” or “That’s not true, and you know it.”

Think about that. They say, “Well, last week, you said this,” and instead of defending yourself and saying, “No, I didn’t,” which usually originates from an emotional trigger because you get upset and you just want them to know the truth, in a calm but even assertive manner, you can say “That’s not true. And you know it.”

And, of course, if they’re the type of person that wants you to stay in that defensive state, they’re going to say, “Yes, it is. I know it is. This is what happened,” and then they might make something up. But they’ll probably tell you that you’re wrong.

The next thing to say could be something like this: “I’m sorry you think that, but I’m not going to waste my energy defending myself.”

Now, they’re going to work with that too, because the toxic person will know how to take your words and twist them and throw them back at you, and make you feel guilty or responsible or bad in some way.

And they’ll make you feel bad about yourself:

“How could you do this? What kind of person are you?”

They’re going to say things that make you hurt, and it will hurt, and you will be emotionally triggered. But this is something you practice, and you find out what happens next. It is sort of an experiment. If you have no choice or very little choice to be with someone who does this to you, you have to experiment a little bit.

The idea is to not jump into the emotionally triggered space of being defensive and trying to correct them. It’s better just to say “It’s not true, and you know it.”

And they may say, “Well, this is what you did,” say “I’m sorry, I’m not going to waste my energy defending myself. You know the truth, and I know the truth.” They may push, and they may push again, and then they may keep pushing.

You might have to get to a point where you just leave the room, and they may follow you. They may keep badgering you – you know, this kind of intimidation tactic. It can work, I’ve seen it happen.

I was at a retail store once, and somebody found a product, and I think they switched the tags. It was a massive difference between what price it was supposed to be and what price they put on it.

But they switched the price tags, they came up to the register, and they said, “I would like to buy this,” and the clerk looked at it and said, “Well, this is the wrong price. I can’t sell it to you for this,” and he started becoming very upset – “What? This is what it was tagged at. You need to sell it to me for this price!” And he got so angry. He got louder and louder until he was screaming.

This is totally an intimidation tactic designed to make the other person feel defeated and get to the point of giving up so that they give the person what they want. And it does work. It can be a way to shut the person up, just to say, “All right, all right, I’ll give it to you, just get out of the store.”

But I was impressed by this clerk. He said, “I’m sorry, I can’t do it,” and the guy yelled at the top of his lungs; everyone was looking at him. And the customer finally just threw his hands up and left, and I was happy to see that that’s somebody who stood their ground and said, “I’m sorry, this is not the price we sell it for. The price is incorrect.”

If he tried to buy it at an advertised price, that might have been a different story. But this was a clear case of someone switching the tags.

Anyway, the idea is that he was trying to wear down the clerk, he was trying to tackle the clerk’s brain, so that the clerk would spend a lot of time defending himself. But it didn’t work.

It didn’t work on this representative of the store because he didn’t fall for that trick. So the guy had nothing to work with.

When someone like that has nothing to work with, they get louder and angrier. They get ruder. They get more intimidating until they finally get their way. But that’s just the game.

When you’re with someone who plays this game, you don’t want to be around them. The reason they’re playing that game is that they have nothing else to work with, so they get louder and louder until they get their way. This is good for you to know in case you’re with someone, and that kind of behavior often points to someone who’s trying to manipulate the system, trying to control you.

This kind of reminds me of another tactic that some toxic people will do, which is overriding your brain. They’ll override you with a non-stop barrage of talking, convincing, and telling you what your perception should be. They talk and talk, and you get worn down because even though you’re not doing anything, you’re sitting there waiting for them to stop talking.

And it’s another intimidation tactic. It’s not always intimidating, though it doesn’t come across as intimidating. It usually comes across as logical or analytical, very well thought out, because many toxic people are intelligent people. But it’s a non-stop barrage of continuous talking that eventually puts you in a state of defeat, and you give in.

That’s all this is – they’re just trying to get you to that point of giving in. I might call that verbal attrition – where the manipulator wants to wear you down so that you’re weaker, more vulnerable, and less effective. You’re less capable of defending yourself.

So sometimes they want you to defend yourself because that wears you down, and sometimes they want to put you in a place where you can’t defend yourself because they cover every angle by telling you what you did wrong or how you’re wrong or why your thinking is wrong, or how you spent your money wrong or how you spent your time wrong, or how you’re seeing them in the wrong light.

They’re just going to keep talking and talking until you finally give in and allow them to finish their thoughts – when it’s all part of the game that they’re playing to make you vulnerable, to make you weak, to make you just want to give in, and then they win.

When you think about that, if their goal is to put you in a weak, vulnerable space so they can control you, knowing this allows you to start seeing it happen, seeing when it starts so you can look at your past and realize, “Oh, this feels like the last time this started. Oh, this feels like the same thing that happened two weeks ago. This feels like what’s happening now.”

My piece of advice for you there is to start catching it as it happens inside you so that you recognize the feeling. It also comes as a thought like, “Oh, this is happening again.” Recognize it and label the emotions you’re having and remember to stay on point because it’s going to be hard to do, but they’ll take you off point.

You might make a point at the beginning of the conversation, and they’ll take you off that point, they’ll twist it, and then they’ll make it all about something else or something you’re doing. So you have to be defensive. But come back to the point. Just come right back to that point. Say, “You know, let’s just come back here. Okay, you have all those things to say about me, that’s fine. But let’s come back to this point and get this resolved.”

First, it takes practice. It’s not easy with some people, and sometimes it’s impossible. I’m going to share that with you right now. With some people, it is impossible. That’s why you need to keep learning about this type of behavior so that you stay in your power, so that you’re not susceptible to some sort of manipulation or control game.

It’s so important that you continue learning about this and really educating yourself to keep you safe, to keep you from giving in, going into defeat, and allowing them to win time and time again. When you do that, your spirit erodes, and we don’t want that.