Your protection is not bad. It is the part of you that stepped up so you could survive the wounding that occurred in your earlier life. It's proof that you love yourself, however your protective self is not able to transact love, and instead it takes action, usually at the expense of your deeper feeling realities. So here is the catch 22: It's acting out of love, yet it is doing the very things that inhibit your soul essence, i.e. ‘love’ from coming out, as it limits letting life in in deeper ways. And as a result that place in us 'feels' bad.

In some healing work, the 'ego' or our defenses or protective aspects are seen as something to transcend, get away from, erase, bypass, win over and no longer need, befriend but keep at a distance, breakthrough and so forth. 

In my work with people, the ego is seen as the relationship self has with self and it can be healthy or unhealthy. If the way we are relating to ourselves is to not feel what we are feeling (that is to say your unconscious root emotivity vs. passing moods and feelings), then this is an unhealthy relationship our self has to our insides. If we allow ourselves to feel what we really feel then we have a healthy relationship with ourselves. It all goes back to the truth that we are emotive in our essence and as a result must really live from that if we are to be real as ourselves. 

Sounds easy, but it is really difficult to embody as we have been taught via our upbringing and cultural conditioning to do the opposite. 

Think about in your life how often you got the message that what you were feeling wasn't relevant or important or it was outright dismissed or judged by someone else. In my company called GraceWorks that I have run for the past 15 years, I have so many of my staff say that working with me is the best experience they have had with an employer as they actually feel cared about, they experience that their feelings and reality matters and they are responded to as a person. This can be a rare find in the world of business. 

Can you relate? 

Think of how this same dynamic applies with so many people’s experience of being parented which sets the stage for why they would be willing to be in such an unhealthy work environment. 

Now, we can start to turn towards your protection and your inner life with compassion. We are looking to deeply honor and respect your protection and welcome its experience which will create a new opportunity to emerge for healing. This will help you move into a healthier relationship within yourself. 

Oftentimes, when we really get to know the protective part of ourselves, we find they are lonely, tired and they feel a lot of certainty, victimization, dread, self-hatred and guilt. Consider that these aspects formed into something they were never meant to be in order to protect your more vulnerable essence. Your protection is a hero/heroine in that way. 

Can you see why? It is with this orientation that we go into engaging with these aspects of ourselves.

When we start to change the vertical relationship that we have with ourselves we can start to relate more healthily horizontally with others as well. This directly applies to dating and getting involved with someone romantically and the possibility of how we might draw a soulful relationship.

One of the steps that we can begin taking in the EBE process is to develop the willingness to be with discomfort rather than always seeking comfort. In our society, oftentimes unexamined happiness is a drug that covers over deep unconscious reservoirs of unhealthiness and unworthiness. We get the notion that feeling good is good and feeling bad is bad. This starts early on in life through parental and societal conditioning. However, just because a heroin addict feels good on heroin doesn't mean it is good for them. So too it goes for us in how we may show up in relationship, for example, thinking codependence feels good but isn't good for us or the other person. 

Or maybe we use pornography as a way to cover our fears of intimacy.

Or maybe we stay out of sexual closeness with someone we love as it is too scary to risk that level of closeness and so rather keep them as a friend rather than get intimate.

Sometimes what feels bad is actually a good thing for us. Sometimes what feels good is not good for us at all. It can be challenging sorting out what is what in relationship to all of this. That's why it can be so helpful to have a guide or mentor that can help you explore your relationship to relationship of all kinds as well as soulful peers that can walk with you along the journey. It is also why you can't do this process alone and why I offer individual sessions to clients and couples. In addition to that, our wounding happens in relationship, so it needs to be healed through relationship, both within ourselves and with another that we can feel feels us.

There are a lot of ways in which we can seek what is comfortable for our conscious self and if we start looking into the unconscious motivations driving the intentions, actions or outcomes we are seeking there, we can often discover it is unhealthy for us. So the invitation here is to start exploring your relationship with comfort and discomfort. There is a logic to your being which is unique to you which we want to welcome through this process and at the same time invite you to explore where in your life you may be avoiding discomfort out of unhealthiness or unworthiness.

There is one more point to mention: our protection learns early on in our life to use our mind and mental capacities, our will and energy to not feel what we are really feeling. 

There are numerous ways that it plays out in our daily lives. I'll give you some examples: 

Some people use rationality and logic to not feel what they really are feeling. They stay in a head space to not feel how life and others really impact them and can’t feel how they impact others while keeping emotionally distant from others. 

Some people stay busy all the time, doing, distracted, staying 'productive' and using their will to not feel what they really are feeling. 

Some individuals use their third eye, or psychic abilities, and how they can track energetic reality to not be in relational space with others in the heart. 

In all of these cases, the protection is using some form of mind, will or energy to navigate reality rather than living from a root emotive feeling first seat of being in life.

Again, if it's true that we are emotive beings first, and then mental, willful, energetic, and physical beings, and if we aren't living from our emotive ground of who we are, something else is going on instead in its place. That something else is our protection and it keeps 'life' out by default. That includes real bandwidths of love as it is too dangerous from the protection's perspective. 

When we were little children and our soulful hearts were open, 'life' didn't treat that open heart well often. Even by well-intentioned parents. Then the protection formed to cover over the pain of that to the point of us forgetting all about it in some cases. Our protection then made a decision to never allow that open heart again out of its care for our being. The way you get to open your heart is to meet the part of you that covered it over to protect you in the first place. Here we get to use curiosity to start to find out exactly what is happening for your protection instead of feeling so we can start to make room for the deeper emotive you to emerge.

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