How do you talk about yourself?

What is it about the feedback that is tossing you into the defensive stance? Fear of criticism could be family of origin and worthy of therapeutic work through. Are they judgy or is it lingering from your life?

Hey,

Kudos on joining support group.

I can somewhat relate to it. Point is, it stems from hurt in childhood, atleast in my case, where parents or anyone who matters to you are overly critical. So when anyone says anything negative about me, all that untrue criticism opens up wounds and you start getting defensive to keep the child in you from getting hurt.

I think its a good thing that we both recognize that we are being defensive. Take some time, slowly you would learn to take criticism without getting hurt. Thoughts that helped me, was telling myself, is that in every action, I am being sincere, criticism is opportunity to learn and not an attack on me.

Ofcourse addressing your hurt also helps you. I maintain a secret blog where I write about my hurt. Do try that too.

The fellow who had me feeling defensive reminds me of this post I made a while back.
http://forums.psychcentral.com/perso...ersations.html

He makes snide comments to me outside of the group. He's kind of an ***. As far as I'm concerned, my choices are to stop going to the group because of him (I've only attended twice), or keep going and try to focus on the other 5 people in the group. http://forums.psychcentral.com/relat...c-journal.html

I can brag, and be arrogant. Those qualities are counterproductive. I want to have real, quite, self-confidence and I would like to work on being more supportive of myself in public. Or at least not act defensive and undermine myself with comments like "I know I'm not perfect."

I sort of think of it as not commenting on your own comments.

Like you just give your thoughts, opinions, speak your truth, explain what you experience, etc, but don't make any comments on those things.

If you make comments like, "I know I'm not perfect" then it sort of leads people, instead of them giving you their honest-to-goodness feedback.

"I know I'm not perfect" says "I think there is something wrong with my thoughts and opinions and feelings". Lemming-types will therefore automatically conclude, "There's something wrong with his thoughts and feelings."

This usually either leads good hearted people to trying to reassure you when perhaps you could use some constructive feedback, and leads predatory types to trying to take advantage of your self-doubt (like the ***hole guy in your group).

In a way if you want a good variety of feedback, you almost have to make sure you give others a chance to form their own conclusions without leading them. Then when they give you feedback, you can keep it as simple and polite as, "Thanks for giving me your perspective," if you want. You can decide for yourself whether you agree or not with their opinion.

But basically remember that you are always teaching people about yourself, just like they are always teaching you about themselves. If you want them to focus on your thoughts, then just say your thoughts. If you start verbally doubting your own thoughts, chances are other people will, too.

IME

Thanks CopperStar. I'm also wondering if this is something that a lot of abuse survivors struggle with.

I believe so. Your options as far as coping are pretty limited as a child, because you instinctively understand that you depend on your caregiver(s) for survival.

Normally you have your fight/flight/freeze mechanisms to help you survive.

However if you kill your caregiver (primitive fight psychology), you're doomed.
If you run away from home (primitive flight psychology), you're doomed.

This leaves only "freeze" and then also, "appease" left on the table.

Once you become an adult and are no longer dependent on caregivers for survival, all of your survival mechanisms are free to activate.

For some people, they suddenly have a ton of old, pent-up rage coming to the surface as the "fight" mechanism activates for the first time in their life.

For some people, they suddenly have panic attacks and such as all of that pent-up fear comes rushing to the surface, as the "flight" mechanism activates for the first time in their life.

For some people, they continue to disassociate and/or appease as their primary coping mechanism(s).

And for some people, all of this stuff happens intermittently.