No more reactive behaviour-discarding old patterns

It’s important to remember that those coping strategies that helped you to survive, may not help you to heal from what you survived. They were defense mechanisms, parts that you developed in order to manage unbearable realities. They were the best friends many of us had, as children. But healing requires something different. Our healing requires that we peel away the adaptations and disguises and come back to our vulnerable core. Our armored warrior’s willfulness, our imaginative defense mechanisms, are now impediments to our quest for transformation.

We can’t come back to center, if we are identified with those parts that protect it. This is not to say that we harshly sever from what has served us. No, no, we do it slowly, lovingly, gratefully bowing to the best friends we ever had, as they assume a more secondary role in our life. A centered life is not a defenseless life. It’s one where we live from a sturdy and integrated core. Our defenses are no longer all that we are. They are places we consciously go now and then, before returning to the magnificent core of our being.

• Jeff Brown