Spending years in a defense-focused survival mode often creates a hard outer shell around our expectations for how we need to show up in the world to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe.

Whether built over time or dropped into place due to catastrophe, this armor guides most of our behavioral choices. When we’re under constant, unrelenting threat of fire, those choices calcify.

In the face of the day-in and day-out rigors of holding a safe enough container, we don’t have the time, energy, or safety to try something new. Unless a known approach to guarding those in our care stops working, the risk of trying something new feels too dangerous.

My own experience created a figurative fortress between me and the world. The framework formed during a childhood where I felt responsible for figuring out how to human by myself. In the five years following my dad’s death, I perfected my building methods, leaving no way for you to get in to touch me.

By the time I went to start trying to connect with the world again, I had locked myself into a fortress of solitude. All the windows had been boarded up. The doors had walls inside them, preventing them from opening. And the active security system burned away every ounce of air or thread of connection inbound.

This hardening over time and pressure meant that as I looked to reconnect to the world, I had a better chance of doing so when I was intentional about changing my approach.

In the more than twenty years I’ve spent doing my own work and witnessing others walk their path, those of us with hardened exoskeletons often dance between making holes and reinforcing the walls. By being intentional as we do both, we can, over time, change our relationship with the world.

Some Truths About the Work

• Between the vagaries of life and being armored, often making holes requires metric tons of courage because we only have a guess as to what the hole means to our systems or those we’re protecting.

• Not all of the holes you make in the armor will stay open. Some of them allow access you didn’t intend and need to be closed. Some of them activate your system in a way you’re not yet equipped to address. Your system will close those holes for you.

• The emotions you experience while doing this work are often contradictory. Relief, fear, joy, apprehensiveness, and more will show up - sometimes, all at the same time.

• Expect pendulum swings as you grow. Our capacity for change fluctuates over time. Our life circumstances and the world around us impact how much time and energy we have to give to this process.

• Sometimes, the work is giving yourself time to integrate what parts of the work your system will accept. What feels like backsliding can be a sign that parts of your system cannot safely make that shift. Trying to make that shift again may work best if you get curious about which system parts objected and why.

• You will need to make the choice to adjust your armor more times than you want to dream about. Patterns and habits do not bust overnight. Shifting them takes work. There are some fabulous (relatively simple) tools out there to help you break patterns, and you have to intentionally choose to use them.

The Most Important Truth

Your armor exists for a reason. If you are living in a threat-filled situation where removing your armor will result in you getting harmed by someone else, please table this work until you have extracted yourself from this situation.

If life has provided you the experience to create hardened armor that makes softening into fluid connections neigh on impossible, it doesn’t have to stay that way.

If you find yourself in a stable, supportive, and relatively non-aggressive environment, you can adjust what that armor looks like.

The first step is to consider it doesn’t have to be like this until you are dead.

The second step can be exploring your options for making a hole in your armor. Some of us have been known to jump this step on occasion.

The third step is choosing to try something different.

As you travel along this path, you’ll make friends with folks you could never have imagined and discover things about yourself that’ll amaze and amuse you.

I offer a special thanks to Bella Smith for the prompts change, connect, and courage in Promptly Written on Medium.