UNSTUCK: Week 3

Befriending the Bodyguard: Imagine that you have a bodyguard. Their only task is to keep you safe and away from pain, shame and fearful situations — by any means necessary. This bodyguard does an excellent job. In fact, they do too good of a job, because they’re even willing — paradoxically — to hurt you or cause distressing situations to keep you away from things that they think will be worse in the long run. 

Not only that, sometimes they sense that trouble is around the corner even when it isn’t. When someone loves you, they see how vulnerable that is and become feisty. When you go to try something new or ambitious, they scream at you and pester you, because you might get hurt. 

They even stoop to manipulating you and telling you that you’re not good enough and that you’re a total failure, just to scare you into staying small, not trying at all and staying on familiar ground. In fact, most of the time, that’s where they keep you: in familiar territory that feels safe, known, not risky, and in situations where your efforts will be met with validation and praise from others. They constantly brace you against the world, make you a bit anxious, cause tension in your body. This rarely if ever makes you truly happy, but again, that’s the lesser of two evils.

At times you seek to get rid of them. You’ve argued, yelled, read self-help books on how to shut them up or ignore them or even kill them … yet you find that you’re stuck with them, like it or not. 

The only hope for relief is to befriend this bodyguard. If you befriend them, they might just hear you out about all the ways they can be a bit misguided. They might even begin to realize that you are pretty competent and resourceful when it comes to taking care of yourself. In fact, you’re getting better at it every single day.

You realize that they’ll never talk to you if you approach them with resentment and animosity. You finally relax out of your negative reaction towards them and find a bit of appreciation and maybe even good humor about the situation. You’re finally ready to talk to them — except that you’ve yelled at them and tried to get rid of them so many times that they don’t trust you and are even a bit upset with you.

So, from that place of appreciation, friendliness and maybe even compassionate forgiveness, you set out to resolve the relationship. What do you say? What might need to be said first for them to be willing to listen? And once they’re listening, what more could you say or ask them that might help get them to become your ally? How might you earn their trust so they can relax more?