Healing fantasies and the protective roles that keep us stuck

Welcome back to week 5 - so glad you’re here! Here’s my little reminder, as always, that it’s okay (and recommended!) to take this material slowly. Your brain might say, no, go faster, learn it all, do more! But in reality, making change requires us to titrate, i.e., take things one small step at a time. You have all the time you need. Wishing you tiny sparks of goodness this week!

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Hello and welcome back to Book Club, where this week we're going to be diving into Chapter 5 in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. So I'm curious how you're finding things so far. If you want to leave a comment or reply to me here, I'd love to hear any of the things that you're learning and thank you for all the comments you've left and shared with me so far.

I really love when this gets to feel like a community of us learning together. Because so much of healing from things like having emotionally immature parents requires us to have co-regulation. And for many of us, we may not have that.

We may not have a person in our lives who can truly understand what it's like to grow up in an environment like this. So while we might not see each other, I hope we can feel the energy that we're all holding as we do this depthful exploration together. So you may remember from last time that we talked about the different ways that emotionally immature parents can show up.

In Chapter 5, we're going to talk about two concepts that I find so important as we are learning to heal and rewire our brain after growing up in environments with these environmental failures. And that is the healing fantasy and the role self. So let's dive in.

If you have been with me for a while through some of the other book clubs or some of my classes, you've heard me use the term survival strategy, protective mechanism, or parts. Specifically, protective parts. Those are all words for what happens when our environment can't meet our needs in a way that feels good to us.

So whether our parent needs us to be perfect so that they can feel safe, they need us to not feel emotions because they don't know how to be with emotions, they need us to take care of their needs because they can't meet their own needs. All of those things create an environment where, as you've heard me say many times, it feels unsafe for a child. And I can't emphasize that enough that to our child brain, these environments create a bind where we have to choose between our caregivers or ourselves.

And we rely on our caregivers to keep us safe and alive as children. So we will always choose our caregivers and we will split away from ourselves. In this book, she talks about it as coping.

And I have nothing wrong with the word coping, of course, but I think a lot of times we hear the word coping mechanism and it can get used really negatively. Like, well, this is just a coping mechanism. You know, you're just coping and you need to stop doing that.

And it's a little bit different from coping, so that's why I like to use the word survival strategy or protective mechanism. Maybe you've heard before of like pro-symptom therapy models. And what that means is we understand that all symptoms, all behaviors, all ways of talking to ourselves and treating ourselves that are negative are as a result of keeping ourselves safe and protecting us.

It means they served us at some time in our life. So as we delve into this chapter, I invite you to hold that concept not of coping, but of safety and protection, that these neural pathways got laid down in your environment, in your life, to keep you safe, to help your brain and your nervous system make you feel safe, either by shutting things off, by pushing you into perfectionism, by pushing you into externalizing behaviors, which we'll dive into more. But all of this was in pursuit of trying to create safety in a situation where there were none.

We know we can rewire these pathways, but it's really important that the language we use reflects the truth, which is that it was protective. So it's not just coping. It's actually a very, very smart setup by our brain and our survival system to keep us safe.

Coping can make people think that it's a behavior that they should just be able to change. Rather than understanding, these are encoded as survival pathways in your brain. And your brain always values survival pathways over happiness or presence or whatever the other thing is.

So just keep that in mind as we go further. So the author talks here about this concept of healing fantasy. And we can think about a healing fantasy of this subconscious belief or daydream or story that one day, somehow, we will finally get what we didn't get in childhood.

Maybe that means we'll find the perfect partner. Maybe it means if we just work hard enough, we'll get the perfect job and we'll prove ourselves through success. We'll achieve enough that finally we'll be loved, cared for, and seen as good enough.

And we can really see how protective this is, right? We are trying to make a story about what is happening and to protect ourselves from the terror, rage, and grief of what we don't have right now. And part of that healing fantasy involves us changing ourselves into something that people will finally love. So these healing fantasies, these stories that are all part of these protective survival strategies always start with this idea of, if only.

If only I was beautiful enough. If only I was successful enough. If only I was funny enough.

If only I was wealthy enough. And so it's very typical and common that children who grow up in environments like this will spend a lot of time in this healing fantasy space. And as part of the healing fantasy is where this role self develops.

And this role self develops as a way to try to get attention or to try to find your place in your family. And remember, this is not manipulative. Children are not able to be manipulative.

They are trying to get their needs met. So you can almost think of the role self as us trying to figure out our space in the game of our family. So we're constantly trying to figure out what are the roles? What are the roles? What do I need to do to get my needs met and stay safe in the situation? But remember, when you're in an environment with developmental ruptures and environmental failures, the roles are constantly changing and the rules are constantly changing.

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So this role self is an identity that we're constantly trying to build to secure our place in the family. And that's where those protective survival strategies come from. If we figure out that our game piece is the caretaker, then we're going to develop a series of strategies, including shutting down our own needs, shutting down our own emotions, becoming hyper vigilantly over attuned and over aware of other needs, and really just creating a whole role where we convince ourselves that if we never have needs and we take care of everyone else's needs all of the time, then we will finally be loved.

So we have the role self and we have the healing fantasy that if I fulfill this role, I will be loved. From an IFS perspective, and for those of you who are here for No Bat Parts, you may already be putting this together. These fantasies and these roles are often held by exile parts and the protector parts, the manager and the firefighters.

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So that exile part that holds all of that emotion of what wasn't and what was too much that carry the memory of their unmet needs and that pin their survival on the someday solution. While the protective parts kind of build out around that of earning and fixing and performing of anything to kind of avoid that core wound. So we can see that same story here with the healing fantasy and the role self.

And in NARM, again, we will frame this as survival strategies that develop into a survival style based on disconnection from ourself to build this sort of compensatory identity, right? So it's the 15 layers of armor that you don't even know that you're wearing. Like you're just so convinced that no, you just love taking care of everyone else's needs all of the time, because it's not safe to look underneath and see that that's just something that you've had to do. But underneath of that, truly, you would also like to have needs, but it's too terrifying to look at that.

So we stay in the role self, we stay in the survival strategy, we stay in the protective parts, not because there's anything wrong with us, but because our brain is following well-worn neural pathways that are encoded for safety. It's important to understand that these fantasies are not just mental, they are very much neural pathways in the brain. But there are other things associated with those neural pathways that live in the body and in our behaviors.

They influence how we orient towards relationships. So we might lean in too quickly, we might find ourselves oversharing or getting into a relationship too quickly before we really know the person. Or we might feel really anxious in relationships, and we might freeze or fawn when someone tries to pull away.

We might believe we have to constantly fix or soothe or save someone. Or we might avoid emotions and relationships entirely, because we feel that we're just going to be taken from again and again and again. And all of this can manifest as anxiety, tension, clenching your jaw, your chest being tight.

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It can also manifest as not feeling anything, feeling numb, feeling like, well, I just don't really need emotions. So it's not just in the brain, these predictive patterns play out in different bodily and behavioral experiences. And so it can really convince us that what's happening is real.

Because when our brain predicts something dangerous is going to happen, the body will respond as such. So then when we go to check in with our body, and we say, well, my heart's beating really fast, and I'm bracing and I'm really tense, this must actually be dangerous. It can reinforce that feedback loop.

So what happens is that it's oftentimes in our adult lives, when we start to realize that we feel stuck, or unseen or disconnected, but we don't quite know why. Or we might think we know why, right? My intellectualizer will say, well, I know why I know all the facts behind all of this. But without really understanding that the knowing is different from the embodying and connecting to those old feelings, knowing that you had emotionally immature parents is a step on the path.

But connecting with the part of you that experienced all of everything that that meant, the sadness, the fear, the anger, the disconnection, and coming into your adult self, who can be with that part of you, and who can start to take off those layers of armor. That's how we start to make change. And so it's oftentimes very scary in therapy, because people will say, well, if I'm not the person who takes care of everyone else's needs all the time, then who am I? Am I going to change my whole personality? If I'm not the person that knows everything and handles everything for everyone all of the time, then who am I? That is the role self.

Oftentimes, our true self is hidden away behind all of these protective strategies. And we can't just go in and pluck it out. We have to go through a bit of an archaeological dig, an excavation process, where we're going through each of these layers, and touching little bits of your experience, and feeling what's different in the present.

So feeling in the present little tiny moments where maybe you don't have to be hyper vigilantly over attuned to everyone all the time, and things can be safe. And by doing that little by little, we rewire new safety pathways in the brain that says, hey, maybe possibly, potentially, I'm okay, if I'm not over attuning to everyone's needs all of the time. Remember, the brain does not like to form new neural pathways.

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It costs too much energetically, and it feels unsafe. But little bits at a time, we can do that, not because we dislike the role self. We understand how protective these roles have been, how much they kept us safe.

But we also know that that's not what we want for ourselves here in the present. Remember that because the brain resists this, the work will feel very difficult. It will bring us back into our patterns, because anything that contradicts that role that we took on to protect ourselves, the brain will view as dangerous.

So again, if we identify as a caretaker, but we then need support, or someone's helping us, or someone's giving us something, the brain's going to say, danger, danger, danger, this is a tiger. And it's going to make us feel actively dangerous. And so we might push the person away, or we might feel really embarrassed or shameful and not let ourselves accept the help.

That's not because there's anything wrong with us. That's because that role self is part of that deeply protective brigade in the brain that says, hey, we can't let her, we can't let our body do that. We can't let our body accept help, because then we could be hurt.

So how do we get her back on track? We can criticize her, we can make her feel shame, we can make her body feel really tight and tense. And that'll get her back into that protective braced state. And so those are those protective patterns that many of us are experiencing all the time on a day to day basis.