Understanding Defensiveness

[Max]

@anonymous3

Writing quantity increase (to more than fits the context)

@Elliot

A writing quantity decrease can also indicate defensiveness. Sometimes people write extra arguments to defend themselves with.

I think maybe I need to practice different methods for stuff I post, depending on whether it’s meant to be general/standalone or a reply to someone.

WRT my defensiveness, I think I usually end up writing more, rather than less. I also think I do this generally with stuff I write, like I value thoroughness^[1].

Another reason for my writing too much: I think having multiple points provides some excess capacity in what I’m saying. Maybe multiple points / excess cap is an okay strategy if I’m writing a post for a general audience, but not okay when replying to something where I risk being defensive.

Practicing different writing styles for different contexts sounds like it might help to avoid “Writing quantity increase (to more than fits the context)” (emphasis mine).

That said, I’m cautious about trying to address symptoms rather than systemic problems. Like, I don’t want to get better at hiding defensiveness; I want to not be defensive all together. This reminds me a bit of what @ingracke said recently:

@ingracke

I think “mastering” emotions may be the wrong way to think of them. It is hard to tell because it’s not really explained, so it could mean a lot of things. But usually when people talk about, say, mastering their anger, they mean that they still get angry, and they just have some amount of control over it. They are able to suppress it, or use it in a targeted way, instead of feeling overwhelmed by it.

So they aren’t really resolving the issues, beliefs, internal disagreements & coercion, etc that are causing their anger. Instead they are just channeling, controlling, suppressing, etc, the anger.

Note: I think I am doing more than just writing quantity stuff from @anonymous3’s list of clues, but this seems easy as a first ‘clue’ to discuss. It’s also a good one to try and fix first because too much text is a compounding^[2] error: more text → more places for defensiveness to emerge → more stuff to analyze → the harder it is to isolate individual problems and work on them.

---

1. mb I need to practice trying to say just one good decisive thing in a reply ↩︎

2. compounding isn’t exactly the write word, b/c like all errors can compound. I mean like it’s an error that (relative to other errors) does more magnification of problems. Maybe another way to put it: WRT overreaching, some errors are more significant than others, so bringing one’s error rate down to below one’s progress rate is faster if you tackle problems in the right order. ↩︎