# Defensiveness does not equal guilt

I often see people treating defensiveness as proof of guilt. The thought seems to go that if someone is defensive, it’s because they know they’ve done something wrong. There are even proverbs around this, such as “[a hit dog will holler](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_hit_dog_will_holler)” or “[the lady doth protest too much](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_lady_doth_protest_too_much)”.

This has always felt false to me.

Now, it’s certainly true that having done something wrong *can* be the cause of defensiveness. But that’s just one out of many options!

Some situations that have made me defensive include times when someone has…

*   … had a negative stereotype of some group that I belong to, and said something derogatory about it.
*   … acted judgmentally about my choices without understanding my situation or wanting to hear my explanation.
*   … dismissively rejected my input about a decision that I felt was important.

In none of these situations did I feel *guilty*. I may have felt offended, stereotyped, mistreated, unheard, or belittled. But I didn’t feel guilty.

Defensiveness is exactly that - it’s a way of trying to defend yourself. You might want to defend yourself because you’ve done something bad and people are judging you for it, but you might also want to defend yourself because you’re being *unfairly* judged.

Another way of putting this is that for someone to become defensive, it’s enough for them to be afraid that *others* might believe them guilty.

I once saw a case where somebody’s organization had been publicly accused of abusing their employees, with a forum discussion that had hundreds of comments dissecting everything about it. When the organization published a response to the allegations, some of the comments said something along the lines of “Your response reads to me as somewhat defensive, which makes me unhappy and suspicious about it”.

I was somewhat flabbergasted to read this (though, to my slight shame, did not get involved in the discussion and respond to them) - the whole professional reputation and livelihood of the organization’s founders was at stake, with dozens of previous comments where people talked about them in a hostile tone. And some commenters felt that it was suspicious or even morally questionable that the response to the allegations was tinged with some defensiveness! I think that some defensiveness in that kind of situation is a completely human response, entirely regardless of one’s guilt.

Furthermore, even if one *does* act defensive because they *feel* guilty… that doesn’t mean that they’ve done anything wrong either! People feel guilty for things that are not their fault all the time!

A friend of mine was once denied the social security benefits she’d been expecting to get, and was left in a position where she would be unable to pay her rent. The thought of letting that happen made me feel guilty, so I felt compelled to loan her money, even though I had absolutely nothing to do with her problem.

A meditation teacher I know tells the story of a student on a retreat who had the major breakthrough of realizing that *climate change was not his fault.* It took an extended retreat to make the person get that he was not personally responsible for global warming being a thing. More generally, many people feel guilty about all kinds of natural disasters and wars that have nothing to do with them.

In his book *Lapsuuden kehityksellinen trauma,* the psychotherapist Juha Klaavu uses the term “magical guilt” to describe an experience that some people have, where they feel guilty about just about *everything.* A description that he offers for this is that “when I’m in a park and witness a dog I don’t know biting a person I don’t know, even this seems to somehow be my fault”.

A related emotional belief is that “I am bad and defective, and therefore everything that I do is also bad and defective”. Klaavu tells the example of one of his clients who had been traveling with some of his college buddies. They were in a country where the tap water was not good to drink, and one evening they returned to their hotel so late that they couldn’t buy any. The next day, it turned out that somebody had broken into the hotel’s kiosk during the night and stolen a couple of bottles of water.

Even though the client had nothing to do with the theft, he was immediately struck by an intense sense of guilt. It was so obvious that the hotel owner came to him and started angrily berating him. The client felt such deep emotional conviction that this was his fault that he couldn't speak or say anything to defend himself. Fortunately, upon witnessing this, the person who had actually done the break-in confessed and offered to pay for the damages, and the matter was settled.

In this case, the person suffering from the magical guilt wasn’t even defensive - he felt too guilty to do even that. But it’s easy to imagine that if that guilt had been just a little more manageable, he could have gotten very defensive while trying to keep it at bay.

I think more accurate than “defensiveness is a sign of guilt” is that defensiveness is a sign of *insecurity*. If a young child thinks that I’m dumb for not knowing all the characters in the cartoon series they’re obsessed with, I don’t get defensive because this doesn’t threaten me in any way.

But if something makes me feel insecure in my position or worth, then I will feel a need to defend myself. That insecurity might come from a sense of guilt (justified or not) - or it might come from something else.

*This article was first published as a paid piece* [*on my Substack*](https://kajsotala.substack.com/) *1½ weeks ago. Most of my content becomes free eventually, but if you'd like me to write more often and to see my writing earlier, consider getting a subscription! If I get enough subscribers, I may be able to write much more regularly than I've done before.*