Guardians Raise Objections!

By Susan Mitchell

We gotta love the prickly Guardian parts of our soul/heart, but they can create strife when their protective objections conflict with our current goal or purpose. This often happens when my husband is chauffeuring me somewhere: I’m totally at ease playing on my iPhone, but my Guardian suddenly emerges to shriek, Watch out! about a “dangerous” shadow movement out of the corner of my eye. Then hubby’s Guardian comes out in response to being startled into, well, nearly wrecking the car. Or, on occasions when I have gone to meet with a group I know and love, some Guardian gets alerted and irritated for who knows what reason and simply won’t calm down. I might even get into an argument with someone if I don’t resolve the trigger, choose a non-reactive path, or remove myself. 

A few Sundays ago I was looking forward to peaceful time with my church. Worship for many of us is one place that is usually safe from triggers, so this is often easy since Guardians are often lulled into a sense of safety by music. The worship team began singing “How Great Is Our God,” a lovely anthem I’d heard many times. The word pictures (“wraps himself in light” and “time is in his hands”) ignited my imaginative awe and sparked actual conversation with the Lord (“my heart will sing”). The Function, Emotion, and True Self parts of my heart were wholly engaged in appreciating the Lord and allowing their joy capacity to expand.

At the moment my Guardian did not seem to be “up,” which is not surprising. They can go dormant for months or years. They do not sequence time, so they can be completely desynchronized from a person’s overall timeline, unaware of past encounters or experiences that occurred between their creation and their seemingly random awakening to take a guard shift.

But on this occasion, when we hit the line “the Lion and the Lamb,” my Guardian woke up to declare the equivalent of, “Danger! Untrue! Words found nowhere in Scripture! Misquote of Isaiah 11:6, 'And the wolf will dwell with the lamb….’”

Guardians can really wreck a party, but my Function considered the artifact of the song and the accusation carefully and came up with a logical narrative counterpoint: “This song is about the reach, span, and range of God: age to age, beginning to end, Lion apex predator to slaughtered Lamb. He is great in encompassing it all, and Jesus stands in these two faces of himself in Revelation 5:5-6. It’s legit.”

Guardian, appreciating the logic, bought it and relaxed, letting the gate swing wide open for the rest of my heart to re-engage in the adoration of our great and glorious God. Whew.

A few takeaways —  

• Music is a good way to keep Guardians at peace. I believe King Saul used David’s harp-playing to keep the scary, loud evil spirits that were attached to his Guardian at bay.

• If a Guardian shows up unexpectedly, take some time to reply kindly with facts and with logic to suggest another way to view things. 

• If they keep intruding (not all Guardians are as compliant as mine was), it’s often helpful to affirm them: “Guardian, you are an important part of me, and I appreciate your help. However, I, Susan, could really use this time to soak and relax from the stresses of the last week. Is it okay if we continue this conversation later?”

• Of course, if this is a Guardian that simply will not be mollified, it might be time to schedule an appointment to do look deeper at the cause, so Jesus can be brought in to resolve and heal the underlying issue: www.estuarycourts.com/book

Hard-Wired for Love

By Dorothy Mitchell

Do you ever wonder, “Why don’t people feel safe around me? Why can’t we all just get along?”

Everyone wants to be loved. We are built to respond to and seek out love. Why then, in our desperation to be loved, do we push others away? How do things go wrong before a single word has been exchanged?

It’s because our heart, the largely subconscious parts of our mind, is divided and trying to protect its own integrity. Our heart gets wounded. In response to traumas experienced in relationship or in community, our heart may develop deep insecurities. These insecurities are held in our emotion parts, and they rouse the guardian parts of our heart to step up and protect us. Guardians that are on hyper-alert or easily triggered can create a hostile and unpredictable context for friendship. Insecurities also affect the way the function parts of our heart walk and talk and act.

Your intention of friendship may be pure, but others may perceive that the relational safety they require cannot be guaranteed should they make a mistake. Some people are good at reading into others’ words or body language, and other people may be forewarned in their spirit, and may even subconsciously step carefully around you or avoid provoking you. It takes a mature guardian and a mature heart to be able to approach an insecure person with an immature guardian and relate and minister to them. Even then, some boundaries are needed.

Tensions. Sometimes two people have guardians with mutually incompatible ways of protecting the heart. One person’s penchant for yelling when upset is not compatible with another’s need to process conflict in silence. One guardian’s alarm is fed by seeing alarm in another guardian, and the two guardians’ hackles begin to raise at the same time—like two suspicious animals circling and readying for an imminent fight! When this happens, we could follow HeartSync founder Andrew Miller’s example in admitting, “my guardians don’t like your guardians.”

When I was at my most wounded, I had a habit of saying, “I would hate to meet myself. I don’t think we would get along.” At the time, this was probably true. One of the first people I was assigned to receive HeartSync ministry from was very much like me, and she was very competent at facilitating a HeartSync session while her ‘Original Self’ was in charge. But outside of a session, I could not understand why I was so nervous and tense around her, and I hoped someone else would be assigned to help me. She was a very complex person; I was a very complex person. We respected each other, but we just didn’t get along without accidental ouchies, like two hedgehogs trying to hug. But the more healing we both get through our synchronization to Jesus, the more likely we are to be able to get along on this earthly plane.

Shortcuts. Another reason why instant fear or dislike may take place is because of the patterns that guardians have picked up on over time. Human beings have a natural ability to analyze, categorize, and sort experiences and encounters with people, animals, and objects, and associate “these things” with “those things.” The amygdala in our brain, which is associated with the guardian parts of our heart, is particularly devoted to assessing whether these experiences put you in contact with something good, bad, or scary. Instead of approaching every situation as if it were absolutely new, your brain will try to read into it according to the patterns it has perceived in the past. While undergoing trauma, using shortcuts like these may be vital for survival.

This is easy to see in abused animals, who react with fear or anger to people who match the profile of their old abusive master in their memories. These animals must be re-homed carefully. So too can our fear be easily transferred from one person to the next or from one context to the next. But here’s the good news: so can joy. When you have a memory of someone you trust who has been devoted and good to you, that joy, love, and trust can be transferred to people who remind you of them. Your guardians like their guardians, and you get on like a barn on fire!

Society has a way of instilling stereotypes into us; you may hear us call this “programming.” What you see, read, and hear on the news, or in the paper, in books, in movies, on social media, or from friends and family informs us about the world we live in. But these stories are not necessarily true or retold at a frequency that reflects reality, and they can erode our innocence over time. When feeling threatened or scared, we make a lot of snap judgments based on these stories. At worst, we inflict harm and perpetuate phobias and bigotries through these snap judgments in the forms of sexism, racism, ageism, ableism, paternalism, and so forth.

Although it is good to question stories and pursue education about the diversity of cultures, I believe that the ultimate deliverance from all these -isms can only be found in Christ Jesus, in whom we are enabled to see each other as the Father sees us. We cannot return to dovelike innocence or embrace an unencumbered snakelike canniness by our own strength. But if we repent and submit our biases to the Lord for judgment, he will surely help us.

Interrelated Parts. In a nutshell, we get wounded (heart/identity/original self), and then our insecurities (emotion) fuel our guardians to come out, which can create a hostile or unpredictable context for relationship, affecting how we act and talk (function), and how free or cautious our friends (guardians) feel around us and react to us. And when the world consequently feels unsafe, our hopes and dreams (original self) gets relegated to the backburner so that we survive instead of thrive. But Jesus called us to an abundant life. If you feel stuck, let us help you in a HeartSync appointment: https://www.estuarycourts.com/book.