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Protector Strategies
🔑 Our Protectors want to keep us safe, inside and out, and their strategies are how they achieve this — they are attempts at finding safety. They were often helpful to navigate trauma and past experience but are a mismatch for our present lives. They are temporary, short-term solutions that potentially elongate inner and outer problems, but there is real intelligence to be honored in each of them because they also keep the wounded parts of ourselves contained until we are able to attend to them. These strategies are trailheads – by focusing on them we can find and get to know the Protectors who use them.
I use the word “strategy” because it’s the best approximation I've thought of, but it’s only tonally accurate for some Protectors — not all of them are strategic or cerebral. Many are just doing their best with what they know.
Protector Strategies tend to be either…
- Compensatory: they’re intended to help us not feel our Exiles’ pain.
- Overriding: they override other protector strategies that our Protector Parts or those of other people take issue with.
These strategies exist on a spectrum from mild and socially acceptable to extreme and polarizing, and 🔑 the more wounded the Exile, the more extreme the Protector. Some are behavioral, some are emotional, some are psychological processes. A full list would be enormous and probably impossible, but this one can bring some of the most common into awareness and help us recognize others which aren't represented here so we can start to unblend. Having Protector Parts who use these strategies is not any kind of failure — 🔑 they are signal flairs.
Remember: