Loving the Armour
Each of us has aspects of ourselves that we dislike, areas that cause us pain or get us into difficulties with others.
It’s good to remember that the parts of ourselves we most dislike or reject were once strategies that protected a small child. When we were young and defenseless, we armoured ourselves against the slights of the world as best we could. We all grew up in imperfect families, had imperfect teachers and friends and communities, and suffered countless blows to our sense of self. We learned ways to reduce the hurt and get what we needed – whether by withdrawing, striking back, distracting ourselves, controlling, hiding, dramatizing, manipulating, being as perfect as possible, cowering, demanding – and those strategies helped us respond to the distorted environments we found ourselves in.
Instead of cursing the automatic reactions that we wish we didn’t have, we could honour them. Thinking of the behaviour that bothers us, we could try to see how it connects back to what we experienced when we were younger, and say to it “Thank you for protecting a small child. It’s an honourable job. It’s true that I wish you hadn’t stuck around quite so long – but I want to say thanks for your help when I was a child.”
The aim is not to erase our flaws or limitations, but to see them clearly. Part of that is seeing that these strategies are, at bottom, well-intentioned, though they may have been outgrown or gotten rigid over the years. Through seeing their origins, we may soften our frustration and self-disgust and appreciate the hidden beauty in our layers of reaction.
“Even pain and neurosis contain their own colours and have their own strange beauty. I have always found intelligence within the heart of every psychological conflict, and I can usually find ways to appreciate peoples’ character armour – how it serves to protect them, and what a skillful creation it is in its own way, just like the porcupine’s quills or the armadillo’s shell.”
John Welwood, Towards a Psychology of Awakening
Next: The Habit of Observing
