This is an insightful read. Especially for its time! I struggle with being defensive at home; for example if a mistake that I've made is pointed out, my first reaction is to deny or look for excuses rather than to empathise with the other person, who may be feeling upset and unheard as something has happened for the nth time. For some reason, this doesn't happen to anywhere near the same degree at work, where I am fully able to own my mistakes and look for ways forward.

Text at this level of emotional abstraction can be quite difficult to internalise, especially for those with less practise or who might be "on the spectrum". It's helpful to have one or two illustrative examples in each category. For example:

Evaluative: "Sort out your code before sending it for review, it's an absolute mess yet again and wastes my time."

Descriptive: "After an initial review I can see code style issues A, B, C, some of which also occured in PRs X, Y, Z. Please make sure you're checking through for these in future review request as it would greatly streamline the review process."

Also, listing out a set of categories is useful, and even sufficient for many people. But it doesn't tell you how to stop being defensive, just what being defensive looks like and how to deal with defensiveness in others. Defensiveness often stems from some insecurity about yourself. Reassuring that insecurity can resolve the issue. In my above example with Evaluative and Descriptive text, the speaker may be more evaluative if they're stressed about time-pressures and resent having to mentor more junior employees. It might be helpful for them to cultivate the part of themselves that values broad, long-term knowledge and skills growth in the team, and to take some perspective regarding the relative seriousness of those time pressures.