defensiveness = protectiveness
- necessary when necessary
- unnecessary when unnecessary
- integrate instead
- wherever you can see how
- (this feels less significant in 2023 than it did in 2020 when I felt a need to point out that some of what we were calling protectiveness at Liminal Space Agency seemed to be just a special version of defensiveness, and we weren't treating it as such)
- although interestingly!
- "defensiveness towards X" means you're defending against X
- "protectiveness towards X" means you're protecting X
13 linked references
December 10th, 2022
@ 13:44 - trying to figure out what I'm doing with my wri… › hmm... choosing to do, vs choosing to allow › allowing the other's view/perspective/experience/desires,…
- ahhhh there might be something around defensiveness = protectiveness / guardedness here!
- insofar as there might BE a difference between these two, it might be something to do with my new model of judgment and perspective-taking
- (which I have a recording of an articulation of today - relevant section ends ~1h)
Podcast summaries
- Keywords: NNTD, Home, everyone will constantly point out ways in which things are incomplete, Learning how to trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too, community, what might a healthy community look like?, complaints are sacred: how we affirm our values, protectiveness is damage control, defensiveness = protectiveness, Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings, sometimes things need to be said even though they feel like they really really should go without saying, What is Blame?, everything makes sense, there's no way to communicate correctly or incorrectly - there's just what works in context and what doesn't work, apologize in the other person's frame; forgive in your own frame, power dynamics
November 13th, 2021
- I think this connects to the defensiveness = protectiveness thing & thinking that rejects other thinking
September 2nd, 2021
tracing how Mark Lippmann influenced NNTD › > There’s a few broad failure modes that can happen when … › this feels like it's embodying something like sometimes t… › and in particular, there's a tone of reassurance here tha…
- it could easily read as passive-aggressive or neurotic, and I'm not even 100% sure it isn't, but it's still a very different stance than the defensiveness = protectiveness anti-reassurance one that I sometimes held prior to discovering the NNTD
August 1st, 2021
What are the components or dimensions required for collab… › current/new model as of sometime in 2021 › 3. emotional flashback management / Unlocking the Emotion… › what else might make it difficult to collaborate with them?
- a different element though might be that some aspect of what you try to talk about with them activates some emotional flashback to some moment of unsafety, which generates an acute contracted awareness and then often a compulsion to engage in some defensiveness = protectiveness rather than feeling able to listen or dialogue
- see Dream Mashups for a discussion of this and how to work with it in the moment
- less in-the-moment, there's a need to do some sort of therapeutic process to untangle the system that is hyperactively generating a panic response in a given situation
- some such situations might still be threats of some kind, but the current response heightens the threat rather than neutralizing it
- some such situations might not be threats, but are being tagged as threats by an emotional brain that can't tell the difference (or eg the "same situation" would have been a threat in childhood but isn't now) and it can learn to differentiate
July 2nd, 2021
- for reference, discussion of defensiveness = protectiveness / protectiveness is damage control here:
- also this thread:
June 17th, 2021
#2tweet bit about thinking that rejects other thinking (t… › the difference between ideological thinking and X thinkin…
- (not just "distrusts" but "is guarded towards" - defensiveness = protectiveness)
Sequence on NNTD
- ~elaborating on the "A is trying to fuck you up" tweet
