Getting defensive and taking things personally ruins the trust and intimacy in your marriage because neither of you accepts the other person's felt experience.

Defensiveness is a reaction to feeling judged and unjustly accused of something. It comes from insecurity and feeling like you’re being attacked.

Explaining and justifying, over and over again, why you feel unfairly criticized or attacked comes across as immature and childish.

Mature masculine energy is more calm and confident. 

Sometimes it’s not even a verbal energy. 

When you choose to tap into this energy of masculine strength and conviction in your own value as a man, you can stand tall and face the feeling of being attacked without getting upset and taking it personally.

Taking attacks, insults or criticism personally is a choice that we have as men. 

Defensiveness is that inner wounded part of us that wants to make it better and stop us from feeling so bad. 

Defensiveness normally ends up with us attacking the other person in order to make us feel better again.

Defensiveness always comes from insecurity

Defensiveness erodes the SAFETY, connection and trust - that you will respond without anger or intimidation. 

Defensiveness ALWAYS increases the negative, downward spiral in your relationship.

When you are defensive, she can't trust that you are a man who is consistent in your energy and that makes you unsafe, unpredictable and just as with horses - safety is a fundamental need for women in relationships.

So if you want to stop the downward spiral, you’re going to have to stop your defensiveness.

When somebody is attacking you, criticizing you, or coming after you emotionally it’s always because of something that they are FEELING inside. 

Some kind of shame, hurt, pain or fear that they’ve got going on inside them.

You have to realize that the reasons people attack you are almost never about you.

Stopping being defensive requires you to create your own confidence.

It’s very difficult to be confident and not react defensively unless you’re feeling a sense of inner peace and inner calm.  

This is mature place of self-reliance.  

Where you don't need to look outside yourself to feel like you’re a good man, a powerful man, a man of value that the world appreciates and needs.

If you’re feeling low or you’re feeling inadequate or insufficient, or you’ve been feeling rejected a lot lately, you’re going to have that insecure little boy – that we all have inside us – come out and defend.

The way to stop being defensive is to start growing with other initiated men. Men who have been through this process of development and reached a calm, strong, powerful, confident place of belief in themselves.  They are very clear in who they are and why they don’t need to defend themselves.

These men know that taking things personally is always a weaker act than standing strong on your own feet and your own terms.

This is what we help men do at Goodguys2Greatmen.

If you want to learn how to stay calm and confidently handle negative feedback in a way that reduces how frequently it happens, then let's talk...