Protector Parts, Defender Parts

We are rather less a single, unitary 'I' than a system or community of parts, each in relationship with one another. And it can be so very revealing, and practically useful, to get to know the parts - their intelligence, their blind-spots, and the very particular projects they've each taken up in our lives.I've written before here about shame, a familiar background mood for me, as it is for so many people. It turns out that there are at least two parts of me that are actively involved in protecting me from shaming by others - one which pre-emptively shames me, and one which more directly defends me from shame. Each has its own form of good intention, and each often causes me difficulty.The first part is an inner critic part. It's so dedicated to me not being shamed by other people that it will frequently take pre-emptive action by shaming me itself. The logic is clear, and compelling: if I can be made to feel sufficient shame beforehand, then perhaps I'll hold back from acting in a way that would cause others to shame me. It's a simple exchange - the lesser pain of my own internally generated shame to protect against the more soul-searing shame that comes from the disapproval of other people.This is the part which would have me hold back from speaking my mind, from becoming angry with other people, from showing too much love, from being a surprise or a disappointment or a bother or mystery. This is the part which, for years, held me back from dancing, having me be ashamed of myself even before I begin. It's dedicated to forever scanning the horizon and keeping me within very tightly contained boundaries so as to avoid the kind of pain it knows I could, once, not tolerate. It is willing to exact quite a price in order to do this: the inner price of feeling some level of shame at all times, and the outer price of holding back what is, most truly, mine to bring.The second part is a protector part. Should the antics of the inner critic fail, so that I actually get shamed by someone else, it throws itself into action. It's not interested in waiting, nor does it have any time for curiosity or learning. What it most wants is the shame to go away. The protector part brings forward my defensiveness, my justifications, my denial. Insincere apologies, pretence, lengthy justifications for my actions, tuning out, disconnecting from people, freezing, abandoning my commitments, bending myself out of shape - all these are the order of the day for the protector part.The protector part is also willing to pay a price to protect me from shame, most notably having me act at odds with myself, with a relationship I care about, or with my deepest, most sincere commitments.And while both these parts have honourable and noble intentions, they are way out of date, having swung into action when I was very small and really needed some protection. They don't take into account that I am an adult now, and that there is another part of me, more akin to the me-myself that exists over the entire span of my life, that no longer needs their help. This part, which could be called essence or self, is really quite able to be in the world alongside shame, and anger, and hate, and disappointment. It is vast enough, deep enough, alive enough, and quite strong enough to experience whatever comes its way. It is curious, open, timeless, and willing to learn.Naming the parts has power. When I see that I am had by the inner critic or inner protector, I am increasingly able to ask them to relax, to step aside - to reassure them that I'm quite fine, whatever happens, and that I do not need them to protect me any more. And, in the space that this affords, I'm more able to step, willingly and without panic or rush, towards genuine relationship and inquiry, and into the world as it is rather than the world as smaller parts of me imagine it to be.

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Muted

Because we are story-telling beings, we humans have a million ways of avoiding being present to what is right in front of us - people, projects, possibilities, suffering - and what is within us - thoughts, feelings, and the sensations and wisdom arising in our bodies.We so easily spin stories, throw ourselves into guilt and reminiscence about the past, worry about and try to anticipate the future. And while each of these have their place, they so easily distract us from what we're most directly in the midst of.Missing what and who is here robs us of the opportunity to experience life in its richness as we go.More importantly for everyone else, it denies us the opportunity to bring ourselves at our fullest. Because in our distraction, we respond not to the needs of the moment, but to the needs of our fear, or to our wish to not have to face the world as it is.Our deepest possibilities for connection and contribution are muted - whenever here is not where we are, and now is not what we're responding to.

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Welcoming Ourselves and Others

[embed]https://youtu.be/dehBZzUlQk8[/embed]In this episode Lizzie and I talk about the radical possibility of welcoming ourselves, and others, just as we are.To those of us with a more action-oriented stance or a commitment to improving things, welcoming in this way can look like an act of irresponsibility. After all, doesn't making things better in some way entail rejecting how things are?We explore this tension together, looking at how our surrounding culture of keeping up and comparison with others turns us away from ourselves. We consider the possibility of both welcoming and working to repair the world. And in the midst of things Lizzie's niece joins us for a surprise visit.The source is written by our friend and colleague Steve March:

Letting Be - A Poem to Welcome a Fellow Journeyer

Dear journeyer, you are welcome here exactly as you are.No one here will try to change you according to their ideas or ideals.No one here wants you to be otherwise.We will let you be, just as you are.Only then can we celebrate your perfect uniqueness.

Letting be is a gift of love that we give to you.Love of your Truth.Love of your Beauty.Love of your Goodness.Only then can we relish your luminous brilliance.

Letting be is a gift of love that you can give yourself too.Letting be, your heart will melt, your mind will open, your body will release.Letting be, your creativity will rocket forth.Letting be, your innate resourcefulness will amaze you.Only then can you behold your true magnificence.

The sun beams just for you.The mountain salutes your majesty.The river of life guides you within its currents.The universe is your playground.Welcome home, dear journeyer.

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Scattered

Could it be that we're so harried, so unhappy, so stressed because we've forgotten the simple pleasure and discipline of being up to one thing at a time?When we're committed to being always on, always connected, always responsive - and to reacting to every email, phone call, tweet, facebook posting, news report - how can we expect to lose ourselves, completely, in something that's both fulfilling and of value?Everything is interrupting everything else, all the time. And we keep it this way because we think we like it. It makes us feel important.And perhaps most significantly, it saves us from having to feel, really feel, anything in particular - numbing both our anxiety and our joy.

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What we pay attention to (and what we don't)

So often what we are doing in our lives (and hence in every activity, relationship, project) is joining the dots, stringing together the phenomena we experience into coherent narratives and explanations. In other words, we are always interpreting - and which interpretations we choose (or which choose us) is of enormous significance.Of equal significance in this is our choice of phenomena to pay attention to. What we notice, and what we take to be meaningful, is a matter of both choice and practice. Choice - because an infinity of phenomena reach us and we pay attention only to some. Practice - because the way we pay attention (which includes what we pay attention to) is both a matter of habit (we most easily pay attention to what is familiar to us) and skilfulness (our capacity to discern and discriminate between different phenomena is something that can be learned, and cultivated over time).The current cultural background of scientific materialism in which most of us are deeply schooled without our knowing it does not help us well in developing life-giving interpretations from which to live life, nor in learning to pay attention to what might be meaningful to us. This is not through any fault in science, itself a powerful and rigorous method for discerning deep and fundamental patterns and truths about the material universe. But looking at our lives only this way has us pay attention only to certain kinds of experience. We look only at what can be reasoned about, logically and in a detached way. We treat as true only that which can be proved, measured, quantified.Scientific materialism, in its deep commitment to understanding the material world (and in understanding the world only as material) has little scope for understanding what's meaningful to people, what makes our hearts sing, how we are moved by encountering or making art, what it is to love and be loved, what it is to care about life, the world, others. Or, more accurately, when it does have something to say about these topics it can only say that love is a particular firing of neurons in the brain, or an evolutionary adaptation to make it more likely that we reproduce; or that art is simply an adaptation that allows us to build social status, or that our appreciation of it comes because of the transmission of pleasure signalling chemicals to reward centres of the brain. And while all of these might well have a kind of rigorous truth about them when looked at from a materialist perspective, they tell us nothing about the meaningful experience of being human - what it is to love, or be loved, to create art, or be moved by it, to open to the mysterious and endless wonder of finding ourselves alive, or to be a whole world - as each of us are - of relationships, language, meanings, longing, desire, sadness, grief, joy, hope and commitment.When we treat ourselves or others as mere material objects and truth as only scientific truth - as we are encouraged to do in so many of our systems in organisations, education and government - we miss out on deeper interpretations that take into account that we are subjects too, living beings who act upon the world through our ability to care and make sense, and who possess an exquisite and precious consciousness and capacity for self- and other-awareness. Precious indeed, because as far as we can tell, compared to the abundance of matter in the universe, life is rare enough. And among all the life we know about, as far as we can tell, consciousness and self-awareness (the capacity to say 'I' and reflect on ourselves) even rarer.Alongside our scientific materialism, we could support our understanding and care about being human by paying attention also to the insights of those cultures and peoples who came before us, many of which we have thrown out in our elevation of reason over wisdom. In treating only reason as valid, we've discarded ways of encountering truth that can include beauty, meaning and goodness alongside what can be logically proved to be true. Myth, art, poetry, music, legend and spiritual practices that bind us into communities of meaning and action are all worth studying and taking seriously here. They can teach us to pay attention not only to the deep insights of our logical minds but also to the wisdom of our hearts and bodies, and to our first-hand lived experience of being human among other human beings.Which brings me back to the 'dots' we pay attention to - the phenomena we treat as meaningful in our lives. What we experience does not come labelled for us as important, or not, significant or not. We have to decide what's worth noticing, and practice living lives in which we make matter what can matter. And it's incumbent upon us to do this, by paying a deeper kind of attention to our lives and our experience, and to what we choose to care about.

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Investing ritual with meaning

Of course, any of our rituals, even those already laden with meaning and significance in their structure and content, can be approached with cynicism, detachment and avoidance. It's true of prayer, of meditation, and of the various rituals we have for loving our children, our partners, our friends.Whether to invest our rituals with presence, aliveness, contact, wonder and truth; or whether to use them as a way to go to sleep our lives really is, to a large extent, something we each get to choose.

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Seeing through it

Given how often our naturally associative minds fill in the gaps in our experience with the ghosts of memories, projections, and transference, what are we to do?Let's start with understanding that all these processes are entirely natural and - in many circumstances - entirely necessary. Faced with something new and unknown, it's quite reasonable and very helpful that we have the kind of minds that enable us to predict what might happen and take action on the basis of our predictions.But let's also understand that in many situations our associative understanding of the world causes enormous trouble: when I try to gain your approval as if you're a parent because of the way you have positional authority over me; when I treat you as I do my younger brother because you're a peer on my team; when I project onto you those aspects of myself I don't like or can't tolerate, and judge you or criticise you because of them.As I have written here in recent days, each of these can lead us into all kinds of difficulty because we are no longer relating to the people around us as they are. So how can we work with colleagues, lead an organisation, parent or be a friend in a more truthful way, a way which is responsive to what's happening now and here rather than what was happening then or over there?Perhaps a powerful and insightful place to start is to take up the discipline of regular self-reflection. Buy yourself a journal - something you'll be pleased to write in. And a pen that you'll enjoy writing with. And then write, daily. You can uncover wonders with just a few minutes of attention each day (some hints on how you could do this are here).Write about what you see in yourself - your thoughts, what you experience in different situations, and the actions you find yourself taking. In particular, write about what it feels like to be with others. Where do you feel small, diminished, like a child? Where do you feel grandiose, puffed up beyond your normal stature? With whom do you feel judgemental, angry, resentful? Whose company are you drawn to?And then, most importantly, write about what each of those feelings remind you of. It's here that there's the most uncovering to do - that the watchful, vigilant state you find yourself in with Paul reminds you of the feel of being with your father when you were small; that Dana irritates you the way you feel irritated with your sister; that you long for signs of Karen's appreciation for you like you did with your mother.Often it's just the seeing of our transferences, projections and memories that allows their grip on us to start to loosen - that allows them to move from having us so that instead we can have them. And such self-reflection is vital work for all of us to do, if we want to take responsibility for the systems, communities, organisations and families in which we live our lives.

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The restorative possibilities of practice

It’s been a full few weeks, more full than I expected, and I have found it difficult to write. Any practice can be like this, crowded out by what seem to be the demands of the moment. And I notice, each time that I let a practice that’s important to me slip, how easy it is to take up the story that I’m someone who used to write consistently. And sometimes, that’s the simple truth.

But, this week, I’m in a position to set aside much of what has been pressing on me these past months, and already I feel more spaciousness in my heart, a renewed sense of aliveness in my body, and my mind is quieter too. I’m less convinced by stories about who I should be and what I’m supposed to be doing. These are stories which, I see from this vantage point, have me brace myself, grit my teeth and push harder, often long before I’ve caught on to what’s happening. I see how easy it is to be carried along by it all, as if hurled by a swelling tide until I no longer remember that I’m swept up in anything and life becomes an invisible whirling torrent of things to do and places to be. It should be of little surprise to me (though it often is) that in the midst of all that my body has tightened up, my heart more rigid, my mind filled with barely visible oughts and shoulds, judgements and obligations and disappointments.

In the space that this week is offering me, I’m reminded not only how easy it is to let go of regular practice, but also precisely how much such practice can support me. Writing, drawing, meditation, walking, playing music, kick-boxing and prayer are all ways I get to rehearse, repeatedly, a relationship with the world that’s full of life, and full of expression, full of connection to others, and full of welcome for all of it - even the greatest difficulties. And this, I’m starting to see more clearly, is the very point of practice - that over time, done again and again, it allows us to experience life as if parts of ourselves that are more often marginalised, abandoned or simply forgotten have come home again.

So I’m grateful for this week, in which I can practice remembering that there are many ways to be in the world, in which I have a chance to recover something of what’s been out of view, and in which I have the opportunity to dedicate myself anew to practices - including writing here - that are often so life giving not only to me but also to those whose lives my presence affects.

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Purposeful / Purposive

Purposeful - the projects we're committed to that we know we're committed to. That which we feel we have chosen.Purposive - the projects we're committed to that we don't know we've chosen, and which show up in our actions more than they show up in our minds.Our being human is an inevitable mix of purposeful and purposive, and much of our difficulty comes from the conflicts between the two. When I've purposefully chosen to be a kind and loving parent, for example, at the same time as having a purposive commitment to being right, or never being criticised. Or when I've purposefully chosen to lead others in a way that's wise and inclusive, alongside a purposive commitment to looking good, or being seen as perfect, or being in control.The trouble with our purposive commitments is their invisibility to us, which so often means we take them not to exist. But it's these very commitments that others often see most clearly.And it's in uncovering what's purposive for us, through careful observation and through the loving support of others, that we have a chance of freeing ourselves up to do what we intend. And a chance of undoing the silent battle with ourselves that causes us and others so much suffering, and which has us hold back so much of what we're here to do.

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Wading together

The kind of tiredness that tells us we don't want to be here isn't just a private, personal matter.How many meetings have you been in when it seems like everyone is tired in this way, but nobody is saying? And how many times have you pushed on, resigned to the pointlessness of the conversation, determined to keep going in the hope that it will help it be over more quickly?Over a decade ago, before I knew how to work with any of this productively, I was in just such a meeting. On a hot July morning, around a kitchen table, we made a decision to commit the company I co-founded to a multi-year project that would require all of our energy and most of our remaining resources. What I remember most was how the conversation felt - like walking through hot, sticky treacle, or wading through mud. Speaking was difficult, listening was harder, and mustering a 'yes' for what we were deciding to do, harder still. And what made it most difficult was the sense that others in the room were experiencing the same heavy tiredness but keeping it quiet. It doesn't surprise me that the project didn't work out well.What I came to see sometime afterwards was how powerful it could have been for any of us to say what we were experiencing, to ask 'how does it feel, right now, to be having this conversation?', and then to be curious about the response. We might quickly have learned about the reservations many of us had, about how we were trying to hide them in order to avoid conflict, and about how much life was missing from this particular project that might have been expressed - productively, willingly - in another.Tiredness like this in a meeting can very often show us that we're avoiding something, or trying to make a commitment that's not sincere. And if we'd known this - and acted upon it rather than pretending all was ok - we might have given ourselves a chance to dedicate our efforts over the following two years towards a project that really mattered to us, one that would have brought our our fullest, most whole-hearted commitment and with it, inevitably, our most generous, creative response.

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