When Feedback Becomes a War
Imagine offering someone genuine feedback, only to watch it spiral into a quarrel. The conversation veers off course. The original point is lost. Now the topic is no longer the feedback but the two of you, and how each of you is always treated. It becomes a matter of ego, where each wants to prevail over the other.
You realise you only wanted to give feedback, and now it's a full-blown war. You grow resentful of the person. Frustrated, too. If this happens often enough, you lose the inclination to share anything meaningful. The relationship soon becomes a pretence, with both people concealing things from each other to avoid the next quarrel.
We conclude that they are insecure, that they perceive everything as an attack. This is partly true, but there is also a risk of being overconfident and missing the genuine point being made. When two people argue, it is important to isolate the point of conflict. Which part of the argument is actually fuelling it?
A useful exercise is to inhabit their point of view. Understand what is driving their reaction. When you are dealing with such defensiveness, it usually stems from a fragile identity. You say the room is messy, and they hear that they are messy. Every opinion is taken personally, not objectively. When the fact and the personality are fused, every piece of feedback becomes an attack to be repelled.
That doesn't mean they cannot hold a genuinely different perspective. Your view may have seemed right only until you heard theirs. And you might be suffering from the very problem you accuse them of. Their perspective, set against yours, might register with you as an attack on your standing and respect. The problem can originate in either person. Defensiveness is not an exclusive trait. It is a matter of triggers, and everybody's triggers are different.
Instead of arguing from opinion, people often start arguing from personality. This usually happens when something is unresolved. They cannot separate themselves from their things and opinions because their sense of self isn't secure yet. Which means they haven't spent enough time in conversation with themselves. They haven't reconciled their feelings. Why did something hurt the way it did? This is the most important question, and answering it is what fortifies the self.
So the next time something minor turns into a quarrel, break the argument down into its individual threads and identify the one causing the rift. And in the process, do not forget to separate the opinion from the self.