When Protection Becomes a Prison

For a very long time, I liked things done a particular way.

Actually, "liked" might be putting it mildly.

I wanted people to be punctual.

At work, I wanted documents presented in a particular way.

I had fairly clear ideas about how people should behave.

Even something as simple as an outing needed a plan. What time are we leaving? Where are we going? What time will we be back?

Once the plan was made, I didn't particularly enjoy changing it.

You could call me rigid.

I would call me rigid.

And I really have to give my friends and family credit for continuing to love me while occasionally navigating their way around the many things that could irritate me.

For years, I thought this was simply part of my personality.

I like structure.

I like things organised.

I have high standards.

That's just who I am.

But as I started practising mindfulness and paying more attention to my own patterns, I began to wonder whether there was something else going on.

Why did I need things to go according to plan?

Why was it so difficult when they didn't?

Why did uncertainty make me so uncomfortable?

And slowly, I started seeing something I hadn't seen before.

A lot of my rigidity was actually about feeling safe.

Like everyone else, I've been hurt.

I've been scared.

I've had situations in my life where I've felt completely overwhelmed and had no idea what to do next.

And, most of the time, I've eventually found a way through.

We do.

We catch our breath.

We figure out the next step.

We carry on.

But I don't think I realised that carrying on didn't necessarily mean I'd left everything behind.

Some of those experiences had changed the way I moved through the world.

Without consciously deciding to, I'd started building what I can only describe as a suraksha kavach around myself.

A protective armour.

If I could plan everything, perhaps I wouldn't be caught off guard.

If people behaved the way I expected them to, perhaps I wouldn't be disappointed.

If things were done the "right" way, perhaps there would be less room for something to go wrong.

Control made me feel safe.

The problem was that life had absolutely no intention of following my plan.

People were still late.

Plans still changed.

People still disappointed me.

Things still went wrong.

And I was still trying harder and harder to make everything fit within the boundaries I'd created.

That's something mindfulness helped me see.

Not all at once.

There wasn't a day when I suddenly thought, "Oh, I'm rigid because I'm protecting myself."

It showed up slowly.

I would notice how irritated I became when a plan changed.

How quickly I wanted to correct something.

How uncomfortable I felt when I didn't know what was going to happen.

And instead of stopping at, "Why am I like this?", I started looking a little further.

What am I trying to protect myself from?

That question changed things for me.

Because once I could see the protection underneath the behaviour, it became harder to simply judge myself for it.

At some point in my life, perhaps I had needed that armour.

Maybe planning helped me feel less scared.

Maybe control helped me navigate situations where I had felt powerless.

Maybe rigidity gave me some sense of certainty when other things felt uncertain.

So I don't really want to be angry with that version of myself.

She was doing what she knew how to do.

“Something that protects us at one point in our lives can start restricting us at another.”

The armour can become heavy.

And sometimes we continue wearing it long after the danger has passed.

I think that's what I've been learning to recognise.

I don't have to throw away the parts of myself that like organisation and structure.

I still like a plan.

I still appreciate punctuality.

And please don't send me a badly formatted document and expect mindfulness to perform miracles.

But I'm getting better at noticing when a preference becomes a need.

When "I'd like this to happen" becomes "This has to happen."

When structure stops supporting me and starts controlling me.

And when an old need to protect myself is making it difficult to simply let life unfold.

There's another thing this has made me think about.

The people we find difficult.

The person who is angry.

The person who needs everything done a certain way.

The person who seems demanding or controlling.

We don't know what sits underneath that behaviour.

That doesn't mean we have to accept being treated badly.

Understanding someone's behaviour doesn't mean excusing it.

But perhaps we can leave a little room for the possibility that there's something there we can't see.

Maybe somewhere underneath all that armour is someone who once needed it.

I know there was for me.

I'm still learning when to take mine off.

There are days when I slip straight back into wanting everything exactly the way I think it should be.

But now, sometimes, I can see it happening.

And I can ask myself:

Is this protecting me from something that's happening now, or from something that happened a long time ago?

Because something that once helped me feel safe doesn't necessarily need to decide how I live today.