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  • 6/21/2025
Do you feel like every time you bring up something important in your relationship, your partner shuts down, gets defensive, or turns it back on you?

This video will help you:
✅ Understand why defensiveness shows up
✅ Say the hard thing without triggering your partner
✅ Set healthy boundaries without guilt
✅ Identify when it’s not repair—it’s burnout

Because repair is a two-person job.
Let this be the moment you stop personalizing the shutdown—and start communicating from strength, softness, and self-respect.

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💬 Share your story in the comments—let’s heal together.
Transcript
00:00What do you do if your partner always feels attacked when you bring up an issue in your
00:04relationship? Let's start here. You're not wrong for bringing something up. You're not too sensitive.
00:09You're not always starting something. You're trying to connect, but every time you do,
00:13it's like walking into a landmine. Boom. Defensiveness. Shutdown. Shame spiral. Now
00:19you're the problem for bringing it up in the first place, and now we're dealing with the trigger
00:23instead of what you brought up. I worked with a couple. Let's call them Jamie and Ari. Every fight
00:27followed the same script. Jamie brings something up. Ari gets defensive. Jamie gets sharper. Ari shuts
00:32down. Cue. Silence. Resentment. Two people lying back to back in bed texting their therapist.
00:37Neither of them were trying to be difficult. They just didn't know how to bring up the hard stuff
00:41without it sounding harsh, and Ari didn't know how to receive it without hearing, you're failing.
00:47So what do you actually do? You start here. Don't just say what's true. Say it in a way that keeps
00:51the door open. So instead of, you never listen to me. Just make it about yourself, aka instant
00:57defensiveness. Incoming shutdown. Try. I'm feeling unheard. I really want us to stay connected
01:02through this. Can we slow it down together? Same core message. Totally. Different. Impact.
01:07That's you being skillful. Now, you might be thinking, what if their reaction doesn't change,
01:12even after I've softened? What if I say the hard thing with heart, and they still shut down,
01:17still defend, still make it about themselves? Then you've just gotten really important data.
01:22It doesn't mean you failed, and it doesn't mean they're cruel. So what can you do? You start
01:26setting boundaries from self-respect. So you might say something like, hey, listen, I want to work
01:31through this, but if I can't bring something up without it turning into a blowup, we're going to
01:35need to get help, or space, or both. That's not a threat. That's an invitation to evolve. Because
01:40repair is a two-person job. If you're the only one doing it, it's not repair. It's burnout dressed up as
01:45effort.

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