How Shame and Defensiveness Damage Relationships
There’s two levers to pull for optimal conflict management in any relationship: injury prevention and repair. And just like with physical health, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Injury prevention comes from the basics: mutual respect, kindness, consideration, transparency, reliability, speaking the other’s love language. The golden rule, or perhaps the platinum rule.
But we will all mess up, and our most intimate relationships are the arena in which we are more likely to. This is where the masks come off, our inhibitions are lowered, and where we may have it less together. Our emotional capital is often spent outside the home, and so there may be less in the way of patience inside the home–it doesn’t make it right, but it can certainly be common.
Therefore, it’s an essential skill to learn how to repair relationships, and one big impediment to that is this little dance here:
DARVO
Deny
Attack
Reverse Victim and Offender
Here’s what DARVO can look like in a conflict:
Person A: “I feel hurt that you didn’t listen to me when I was telling you about “x”. You were on your phone while I was talking to you, and I didn’t feel like what I was saying was important to you.”
Person B: “No, I was listening to you.”
Person A: “OK…but…you were clearly scrolling on your phone. And then, when I was finished talking, you said, “huh?”
Person B: “OK, yeah I was on my phone but you’re on your phone all the time, too. I can point out ten times the same day you were on your phone. Why aren’t we talking about that? You’re not looking at yourself. I mean, if anything, I should be upset. I’m the one who is never listened to around here.”
An emotionally mature version of this conversation would go something more like this:
Person A: “I feel hurt that you didn’t listen to me when I was telling you about “x”. You were on your phone while I was talking to you, and I didn’t feel like what I was saying was important to you.”
Person B: “I’m sorry, I was. I should have put my phone down. I didn’t mean to make you feel unimportant.”
Person A: “Thank you. I did, and I know I do the same thing too sometimes, so I was concerned about bringing it up.”
Person B: “Yeah, I mean we definitely both are on our phones a fair bit. I’m glad you brought it up though. Maybe we can put phones away for a half hour in the evening so we both feel like we’re having uninterrupted time together.”
In the latter example, B ultimately still gets their own point across: “I’m not the only one doing this.” But B accomplishes this not by defending and attacking and reversing the victim, but by accountability (“I should have put my phone down”). This invites accountability from A too (“I know I do the same thing too”), and ends in more closeness and shared accountability, rather than leaving both A and B feeling more isolated.
If you read about DARVO, you’ll often see that it’s described as a manipulation tactic, a form of gaslighting, and a strategic technique of emotional abusers. This essay doesn’t address the intentional manipulation of abusers who employ DARVO, but rather is intended to explore the defensiveness and shifting of blame as a (poor) coping strategy that may underpin interpersonal conflict and impede its resolution.
Let’s face it: accepting blame requires a degree of emotional maturity that many of us did not grow up with nor have modeled before them, and we can then be prone to repeating those same emotionally immature patterns in our adult relationships. Blame is very closely tied to shame for many people.
When people who have difficulty accepting blame are told about something hurtful they did, their response can often be immediate shame: “I’m a bad person.” And because they lack emotional resilience–the ability to withstand difficult emotions–the reaction to that shame is to get rid of it. To deny the thing that elicits it. “I won’t feel this terrible shame if what you said is untrue.” And then, they may take it one step further: shift the shame-eliciting-behavior onto the other person, who is “making” them feel bad: “I’m not a bad person, YOU are.”
Of course, the consequence is that the other person–the one with the original injury–is left feeling invalidated. Consistent defensiveness and evasion of accountability is hurtful behavior, regardless of the intent. Done repeatedly, it can severely damage—if not completely destroy—relationships.
So if you notice in yourself a difficulty with accountability and repairing mistakes, here are a few tips:
Recognize that emotional growth requires effort. Just as you don’t expect physical fitness without diet and exercise, and you don’t expect material success without work ethic and financial savvy, thriving emotionally doesn’t happen without putting in the work. Get in the mindset that emotional success is a high-value endeavor, but it requires developing an awareness of your maladaptive behavior, gathering knowledge on more constructive behavior, and putting new behavior into practice habitually.
Practice resilience. The roots of shame can almost always be traced back to early relationships in which a person’s psyche cemented low feelings of self-worth and inadequacy. Shame is the personalization of guilt: It’s not just that I did something wrong, I am wrong. I am bad.
Resilience is about depersonalization and separating out the behavior from the person (even if that person is you). You can be a good person and also mess up as a parent, as a spouse, as a friend. Developing thicker skin allows you to be present with someone who you’ve hurt and to say sorry, rather than get caught up in your own feelings around guilt and shame at what they are telling you was your hurtful behavior.
Learn how to apologize. There could be a separate essay dedicated to the art of apology, but the highlight is to understand that “Are you mad at me?” or “I’m sorry” are not adequate apologies. Accountability in an apology looks like taking ownership of the wrong: “I’m sorry for doing x”, acknowledging the impact: “I recognize it left you feeling y”, and attempting repair: “I will try to do z next time.” Even better, don’t wait to be told you messed up; develop the radar for it yourself.
Remember that gentleness is not weakness. There is a saying in my faith tradition: “Verily, gentleness is not found in anything but that it beautifies it, and it is not removed from anything but that it disgraces it.” Many people confuse aggression as a sign of power: Yell to be heard. Fight to be understood. Don’t say sorry if you don’t think you did something wrong. These things don’t make you powerful; they isolate you, which can then worsen feelings of inadequacy. It requires emotional labor to be a gentle force (see #1), but as the hadith goes, it is beautiful, and its absence only disgraces us.
Great article! Thanks. I would add that the key lies in simply recognizing how our everyday interactions, often unnoticed, shape the health of our relationships. Many people don’t actively think about conflict dynamics because they assume minor tensions will resolve themselves. Over time, these small fractures accumulate, quietly eroding trust and connection. In many cultures, addressing relationship struggles openly is not always encouraged, making it difficult to prioritize emotional well-being. For example, in cases when professional help should be pursued, cultural norms sometimes prevent even those in deep distress from reaching out. When emotional well-being isn’t seen as a priority, repair becomes an afterthought rather than an essential practice.
You are absolutely right about the need for emotional maturity. It is not just about managing conflict but about creating a space where accountability and repair are natural, not forced. Without it, people become trapped in cycles of deflection, mistaking self-preservation for self-respect. True maturity is the ability to hold discomfort without weaponizing it, to listen without the urge to retaliate, and to accept that growth often comes at the cost of shedding old, harmful patterns.
So beautifully written. Thank you ❤️