If feeling something all the way through is what heals it, a reasonable question follows. Why can you not simply go home and do that yourself?

Because a part of you is working very hard to prevent it, and that part is good at its job.

The Ways We Protect Ourselves From Feeling

In my work I look at two categories of these protections. There are emotional defenses, which keep you away from a feeling, and relational defenses, which keep you away from another person.

The emotional ones are probably familiar once they are pointed out. Dissociation, where you leave your body and go somewhere far away without deciding to. Minimizing, where it was really not that big a deal. Rationalizing, where you explain the whole thing so thoroughly that nobody notices you skipped the feeling. Vagueness, where every answer stays general enough that nothing can be touched. Some people swap one emotion for another, getting angry every time they are actually sad, or collapsing into sadness at the exact moment anger belongs. And some turn it inward and attack themselves, which hurts, but hurts in a way they can control.

Moreover, spiritualizing and intellectualizing show up constantly in the people who read articles like this one. Both work beautifully as defenses because both look like growth.

The Defenses That Keep Other People Out

The relational ones are quieter. You create distance whenever closeness gets near, sometimes by picking a fight, sometimes by getting busy. You block good things from coming in, so praise slides off you and affection makes you uncomfortable. You go numb to what your body is telling you about someone, because feeling how much they matter means knowing you could lose them.

Even Language Can Keep You Safe

Language does a lot of this work. A client will tell me they want to feel close to someone, and I stop and ask whether they mean they want to feel closer to Steve. The general version is safe. Saying his name is not.

Getting Curious About The Part That Protects You

When one of these shows up in session, I work with it directly. I use the AEDP approach along with something from Internal Family Systems, where we get curious about the protective part rather than trying to break through it. I want to know what it is guarding, when it started, and what it believes would happen if it stepped aside. In addition, that part usually has an answer for me, and the answer usually makes sense.

The Moment Protection Starts To Look Like Sabotage

Here is where clients tend to feel ashamed. They see the defense clearly for the first time and conclude they have been sabotaging their own life for twenty years.

What I tell them is true, and it changes things. Every one of these was adaptive when it formed. A child who could not get comfort learned to stop needing it. A child in a house where anger was dangerous learned to be sad instead. These were intelligent responses to real conditions, and they worked, which is precisely why they stayed.

Your Protection Is Running On Old Information

The trouble is that they are running on old information. That part of you is held in implicit memory, and implicit memory has no clock in it. Time simply does not register down there. It has no way of knowing that you moved out at eighteen, that the dangerous person is gone, that you are an adult now with resources and choices.

So the protection keeps operating exactly as it did when you were nine, in a life that stopped existing decades ago.

You are not sabotaging yourself. You are being guarded by something loyal and outdated that never got the news.

Notice What Happens Next

Take a look at your own list this week. Which one do you reach for. When someone gets close, when you are complimented, when something in you starts to rise up in a conversation, what happens next and how fast does it happen.

Then consider how old you were when you first needed it.