At face value, it’s really hard to believe that when you have something that you really, really need and really, really want, the very thing that may be getting in the way of you getting what you want, is you. It seems totally counter intuitive. But the reality is that we all have ways that we prevent ourselves from getting the very thing that we want. 

Let’s look at the number one way that we get in the way of what we need and want most is: Our protector personas. For most of you reading this, it isn’t going to make automatic sense, so let me explain. People adjust and modify themselves according to the environment they find themselves in, as well as the other people around them. This begins when we are children. We adapt to our parent’s personalities, beliefs, wants and needs, likes and dislikes. We adapt to our culture. We adapt to the language we are taught to speak. We adapt to the schools we are educated in. We adapt to the peers we end up with. We adapt to society at large. And we especially adapt to traumatic situations we may find ourselves in. 

A simple definition of trauma is distress without resolve. What should stick out to you about this definition of trauma is that this could mean anything from an infant being weaned to chronic experiences where you end up feeling like your worth to others is only about the quality of your performance all the way to a veteran watching comrades being blown up by landmines at war to complex sex abuse and trafficking. Trauma is something that happens in all demographics, across all societal classes, to people of any age, race, class, religion or sex. There are so many types of trauma that a person can experience. Everyone has trauma. Everyone has experienced distress in their lifetime that is unresolved. Everyone has made adaptations to their personality as a result of experiencing trauma. When we experience trauma, we split our own consciousness. It is an act of self-preservation. When we experience trauma, we create a split between the vulnerable self and the self that coped with that vulnerability so as to self-preserve in that specific situation. We identify with the parts of ourselves that coped to self-preserve.  These aspects protected us. They allowed us to stay as far away from our vulnerability as possible. For example, imagine that a child experiences a blindsiding abandonment. One that they didn’t understand. In that moment, the child may dis-identify with the aspect of themselves that is confused and terrified and powerless and that doesn’t understand why. And to the opposite, develop an adaptation of figuring everything out and knowing everything they can about human behavior. This child believes that if he just knew everything about human behavior, he would not be blindsided anymore by people behaving in painful ways and that he can even prevent such things from happening. This protector has developed to give him greater sense of control in his relationships with others. Maybe this person goes on to be a counselor or a psychiatrist. This protector persona is the part of him that he is going to identify with. 

Or, to give you another example, let’s say that a little girl grows up with a disengaged father. And as a result, she is not protected. She will feel exposed and without social care and afraid and starved for safety. She may adapt by creating a persona that can fend for itself. She may adapt by developing a protector self that is domineering and independent and scrappy and that can rise to any occasion. 

Every person alive has protector personas. And they represent an adaptive strategy to the exact and specific unsafety that we faced as a result of our unique life experience. They may be the thing that helped us to adapt to our life experience and survive those traumas. But there comes a point when they inhibit us. They prevent us from getting the very things we are the most desperate for. And they prevent our personal expansion. This is especially true of our primary protector persona. Our primary way of staying safe. 

So that you understand this, I’m going to give you three examples. First, meet Julian. By the time that Julian was a teenager, he realized that there was nothing he could do to get the people around him to feel good. His home was always a cess pool of conflict and his mother was chronically depressed. His powerlessness to making things better emotionally, led him to figuring out a way to escape from his own emotions as well as everyone else’s… Positive focus. Julian developed an adaptive strategy of only looking at the bright side. He crafted a Pollyanna self that was not interested in any negativity of any kind. The problem is, now Julian is in his 40s. And he is desperate to find a compatible partner and have kids. He’s always wanted a family of his own. According to Julian, the last three women that Julian has been in a relationships with, all just reached this point where they started having issues and kind of lost it and then just eventually left him. One even cheated with a friend of his. He doesn’t get why this keeps happening. The thing is, if you talk to all three women, you find out fast that they all couldn’t take the relationship anymore because they felt so alone and so judged in the relationship. Why did they feel this way? Because Julian’s toxic positivity protector persona, made it so that any time they shared their true feelings, they were dismissed and even shamed for having those feelings and thinking the way they think. They started to feel like there was no space in the relationship for emotions or truth because Julian made it very clear that there was only one acceptable thing: Positivity. They started to feel guilt and shame for having negative feelings. On top of this, Julian turned into a gas lighter without knowing it. Whenever something bad happened, he would simply negate that something bad was happening and reframe it. This caused two of the women to doubt their own sanity and seek out a psychologist. On top of this, because Julian would not take any negative feedback seriously, he would not change any of the things that these women needed adjusted in the relationship. He was fundamentally unresponsive. Julian is in a place where his primary protector persona is the very thing standing in the way of his deepest desire in life. 

Now meet Nayeli. Nayeli was raised in Compton, Los Angles, an area plagued with poverty and gang violence. Nayeli’s never knew her dad and her mom was a meth addict. Nayeli really had to fend for herself. She developed the adaptive strategy of becoming masculine. She started to emulate the men who had the most power in her culture. The thing is, those were gang members. She started dressing in masculine clothes, acting tough and displaying a hard, rigid, aggressive body language; as well as a threatening manner of talking. She took every responsibility on her own shoulders, so as to avoid further calamity. She identified with a part of herself who could handle life on the streets. The thing is, Nayeli is desperate, and I mean desperate for caretaking. She is desperate to be able to experience what some other girls she sees at school have experienced. To feel safe and protected in a way where she can be feminine and soft and playful. Like she was once, when she was very, very young. She often mocks these girly girls. But underneath that is an extreme jealousy of what they have that she doesn’t. The thing is, the way her protector persona behaves, she is a magnet for men who like a woman who can fend for herself, so they don’t have to take any responsibility for her. On top of this, because she takes responsibility for everything, she doesn’t even register when people are putting pressure on her that isn’t hers to carry. So, she ends up carrying all the weight for everyone in her life, at home and at work. Because she signals that she is masculine, the very men who adore feminine women and would absolutely caretake a woman, don’t have any interest in Nayeli. They are put off by her. And she does not make any of the choices that a feminine woman would make that would put her in a different position. A position to have the very experience that she wants. She would have to make choices that send the message that she wants what she wants. Not choices that send the message: Get away from me, I can take care of myself. 

Last, let’s meet Miles. Miles was raised by a mother and in a society that really embraced the women’s rights movement. One tiny problem with this is that Mile’s mother hates men. So, she took great care to raise her son up to be the exact opposite of any man that hurt her or that hurt women throughout history. She especially felt threatened by a man having any power. Miles adapted to his environment by becoming the epitome of a “nice boy”.  He developed a protector persona that was super compliant, and always ready to please. One that is quiet and controlled. One that looks for leadership and is willing to follow. A persona that comes across as very weak, so as to disarm those around him. Miles needs and wants to make something of himself. And he is at a place where he has an opportunity to start a business with a friend of his. He’s never been more excited about something in his life. But, to be a success at this new venture and to make something of himself, he needs to be taken seriously. He needs to be able to lead a team. He needs to be able to talk in a commanding enough way that investors are willing to invest and clients are willing to buy. This, isn’t happening. Let’s fast forward. Miles clams up whenever he needs to talk. He lets other people take over. He looks for leadership, instead of taking the lead and so his team does not respect him as a leader. He doesn’t set boundaries or play hard ball, so he lets contractors get away with terrible things and agrees to contracts he should never agree to. His friend, who is his business partner is feeling like he is going to need to somehow get Miles out of the business because Miles’s behavior is a liability and he just isn’t able to be in a leadership position. Now, Miles’s protector persona is the very thing sabotaging the very thing he wants most. 

Because our protector personas are the thing standing in the way of what we want most, and are therefore standing in the way of both personal and universal expansion, our protector personas will be broken one way or another. This is especially true now, in this universal pressure cooker dynamic that we are currently in. We will be snapped. Our protector personas will not work for us anymore. But seeing as how they are the thing that we are using to protect ourselves, this process of losing our protector personas is a deeply difficult and terrifying process. We will be forced to face the very things we are the most terrified of. We will be forced to be re-united with the vulnerable aspects of ourselves that were hiding behind those protectors all along. Parts of ourselves that we lost touch with and even awareness of long ago. 

What we can do is to get out ahead of this process. We can start to recognize the ways that we keep ourself safe or “successful”. And start to see how these behaviors that are associated with our adaptive strategy, are in fact opposing what we need and want most. One exercise that you can use to do this is to identify a trauma that you have experienced in your life. This should be an experience that didn’t feel good that happened in your life where you felt distress and where there was really never any resolve to what happened. This could be something you judge as really big and/or something that you judge as small. It could be a one time event, or a chronic experience. Next to the trauma, you’re write down what you made that experience mean. What beliefs did you develop as a result of it? What decisions might you have made as a result of it? 

And next to each one of those answers, you are going to write down what changed about you and your life as a result of that experience. Did your personality change in any way? Did your behavior change in any way? Did you change what you did every day? Did you adopt any coping mechanisms? See if you can identify the adaptive strategy you adopted and therefore identify a protector persona. 

And next to that, you are going to write down how the thoughts, decisions, behaviors and actions associated with that protector persona could be getting in the way of what you want. You could do this with any adverse experience you had that you can identify. The more experiences you do this exercise with, the better. 

Without rejecting or condemning this aspect of you (it is after all trying to keep you safe in the best way it knows how), consciously work to change your perspective that this persona and its behaviors are keeping you safe and guaranteeing you success in life. And consciously start making different decisions and practice different behaviors and take different actions. Things that are more in-alignment with what you are needing and wanting. 

If you would like to work directly with any protector personas, or call forth any aspect of you that may be more aligned as an internal resource for getting what you need and want, you can do so using parts work. If you’d like to learn about parts work, you can watch my video titled: What is Parts Work And How To Do Parts Work. Also, it may really benefit you to understand these protector personas of yours better by watching another video of mine titled: There is No Such Thing as Self Sabotage.  

By consciously integrating the protector personas that are getting in the way of what you need and want, you will begin to align with what you need and want more and more. And when all of you is aligned with what you truly want, it tends to become your lived experience.