During one of my trainings, a woman volunteered to work with me in front of the room.
When I asked her what she wanted to change, she said something I've heard, in different words, from a great many people. "I need protection, because I'm all alone, and the world out there is dangerous."
She said it simply, the way you'd state your address. For people who carry a sentence like that, it isn't a mood. It's a fact they've lived by for as long as they can remember, and it quietly shapes how they hold themselves, how close they let people come, and how tired they are at the end of every day from keeping watch.
She was bright, witty and wonderful company. And a sentence like hers usually means something that's easy to miss from the outside: a guard that has rarely, if ever, been put down.
Why do I always feel the need to protect myself?
The constant need to protect yourself usually comes from an early conclusion: I'm on my own, and the world isn't safe. A child who drew that conclusion built a protective self to survive. That self keeps standing guard, long after the danger has passed, because nobody ever told it the war was over.
The need isn't a flaw in your character. It's a very old job, still being done faithfully.
Where does the need for protection begin?
Almost always in a moment when protection was genuinely needed.
A child who was left alone too much. A child whose parent was unpredictable. A child who was hurt, or who watched someone else get hurt. A child who reached out and found nobody there. In moments like that, a small person makes a decision that's entirely reasonable: I'll look after myself, because no one else will. And to make that possible, they build walls.
The walls work. That's the important thing to understand. They keep out some of the pain. They make the world a little more predictable. They let the child get through.
The trouble is that the walls don't come down when the child grows up. They're still there at thirty, forty, sixty. They're there with a loving partner. They're there with kind friends. They're there in a calm office on an ordinary Tuesday. The protection has become an identity, a survival identity, and it treats every situation as if it were the original one.
What does constant protection cost?
More than most protected people realise, because they've never known anything else.
It costs energy. Keeping watch is exhausting, even when you don't notice you're doing it. Many deeply guarded people describe a tiredness that sleep doesn't touch.
It costs closeness. You can't be fully known by someone you're protecting yourself from. So even the people who love you get a slightly edited version, and you get a slightly edited version of their love. Something always stays at arm's length.
It costs joy. A body braced against danger can't fully relax into pleasure. Laughter stays a little shallow. Rest stays a little watchful. Even good moments carry a faint readiness for them to go wrong.
And it often costs the body itself, in the form of tension held for so long that it feels normal: the tight shoulders, the clenched jaw, the stomach that never quite settles. I'm careful here, because I'm not a doctor and nothing I say is a medical claim. But people very often tell me that when the old guard stands down, their body feels different in ways they hadn't expected. That's what they report, not something I promise. If you're working with a doctor or therapist on any of this, keep working with your professional.
Why can't I just decide to let my guard down?
Because the guard isn't held in your decisions. It's held in the body.
Most guarded people have tried. They've told themselves they're safe now. They've practised being open. They've pushed themselves to trust. And each time, some part of them tightened back up, because the conclusion underneath hadn't changed. I'm alone. The world is dangerous. That sentence isn't stored as an opinion you can argue with. It's stored as a charge in the body, fused to the memory of the moment it was first true.
When that woman first said her sentence to me, she had already understood, intellectually, that it was limiting. She wished it away. It didn't go. That's not weakness. It's the difference between knowing something and being free of it, which is the same reason understanding your past doesn't change you.
What happened when her protection stood down?
I won't claim more than I saw, and I won't put a number of minutes on it as if that were a promise. What I can tell you is what it looked like.
We worked with the old conclusion, and the charge that had been holding it in place for so long. And as that charge came off, the sentence simply stopped being true for her. She didn't have to argue with it anymore. And we laughed a great deal along the way, perhaps more than anyone expects in work like this. Change doesn't have to be slow or grim to be real.
By the end, she was a woman who felt perfect in her own body, with joy welling up from somewhere inside her. That's how I described it at the time, and it's still how I remember it. What I took from it is something I've seen many times since: protection that has outlived its purpose doesn't need to be torn down. It needs to be relieved of duty.
How can I start to notice where I'm guarded?
This one is a small written exercise. It takes about fifteen minutes, and it's gentler than it sounds.
Take a sheet of paper and draw three columns. In the first, list the people in your life, and the places you spend time. In the second, next to each, write down how guarded you are there, on a scale from one to ten. Don't think too hard. Go with your first sense.
Now look at the list. Most people find some surprises. They're far more guarded than they expected with someone who loves them, and oddly relaxed with someone they barely know. Or they're guarded everywhere, at the same level, regardless of whether the place is safe.
In the third column, next to your highest numbers, write one line: what am I protecting myself from, here? Often the real answer has nothing to do with the person. It's an old fear, being left, being criticised, being overwhelmed, that followed you in.
That's the moment the protection becomes visible as protection, rather than just the way things are. And what's visible can start to be addressed.
What's underneath the walls?
Someone who was never actually broken. You are not broken. You are buried.
Under the protection there's usually a person with a great deal of warmth, humour and capacity for closeness, who learned very early that those things weren't safe to show. They're still there. They've simply been guarded for a long time. The work I do, which I describe on the RS Method page, isn't about building a better wall or learning to live without one. It's about removing the old conclusion the wall was built to serve. When that's gone, the person underneath doesn't have to be coaxed out. They step forward on their own, often with a lightness that surprises everyone around them, themselves most of all.
If you'd like to see which survival identity has been standing guard in your life, I built a short quiz for exactly that question, Who Did You Become to Survive? It takes about ninety seconds, twenty-one questions, and it might name the guard you've been living behind.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.