LISTEN:
The Protector/Risk Manager: Vigilance/Reclamation/Surrender
We have all been through painful things in our lives. When we were met with challenges that threatened our love, belonging or well-being in any way, we developed a fierce protector inside of us to make sure we don’t get hurt like that ever again. In Shadow Work™, that part is called the “Risk Manager.”
That Risk Manager can show up in all sorts of guises. It might be your Lioness that roars danger back when it comes too close, your Kali, who might cut anyone who dares threaten your wellbeing, your Silent Sentinel, that will find the nearest exit or the quickest way out when danger flares, or your Inner Godmother, who takes you into her arms to cry or for protection when threatened. However you see this part, or whatever you call it, you have one. We all do. This part is there to protect you and it might choose to do that in all kinds of ways.
Your protector has been told many things about sex from the voices it heard while you grew into your adult sexual self: the fears, the risks it shouldn’t take, the shame it could feel or experience, the damage sex could do, the things it should never be.
This protector also learned from the deep harms that were done to it and etched largely invisible maps on your body so you would not forget. The algorithms of possible landmines and legitimate fears of potential abuses and assaults, or the cruelties that were cast upon your psyche remain with you.
Your protector desperately wants to shelter you from ever experiencing those things again, and it built some armour as protection, wise part it is. That armour can unfortunately become impermeable and can unwittingly keep out many of the good, pure, pleasurable aspects of sexuality and sex itself. An unintended consequence of this battlefield.
This protector part alerts you when potential danger is near, and it often crosses wires with the parts that provide pure goodness and pleasure to you, so it’s easy to see those things as wrong, especially when you got a lot of messages telling you so from your environment and your upbringing.
Because of that, it can keep the best parts of your sexuality hidden from you, locked away in compartments you do not dare open or touch. It’s too risky, after all.
Working with this part means being willing to take new risks so you can open those locked doors and see what is waiting in there for you. It means making your own sexual discovery and expansion more important than battening everything down to stay safe.
For some people’s circumstances, this may not be wise. There may be real threats to your sexual safety and bodily autonomy in this present moment. If there are, that protector is there support you.
But if you are living from a place of protection because of fears that past experiences will repeat, then they continue to define who you are now. They are preventing you from knowing and growing into the sexual person you are ready to be.
In order to do that, you may need to do some significant dearmouring work. There may be some walls to take apart or even smash through–in both your mind and your body. There may be so many layers of distrust and pain keeping you from the true gold that is inside of you, keeping you from the sexual freedom, pleasure and wholeness that is your birthright.
Each time you get a glimmer of that wholeness, freedom and pleasure, you–and your protector–may doubt it. You may think it’s a fluke, a one-off experience that can’t be real or multiplied. It’s understandable that you would have these doubts.
In order to have and experience the fullness of your sexual self, you will have to set aside these doubts, lay down your armour and surrender to a new experience. You will have to allow yourself to be a fully multi-dimensional sexual person.
This surrender is uncomfortable and may even feel unnatural, yet it is the medicine of this part of you. It is the other side of the sexual vigilance you have learned, always waiting for disappointment, or to be hurt again.
The truth is that you will be hurt when you get vulnerable enough to truly surrender. It’s a feature of the territory. The rewards are often worth the risk required. You are no longer the young one that built that fortress around yourself for protection.
You are a grown-ass adult who has survived so many things, and who is ready for a new life experience, and who has developed skills to handle things differently. The ability to care for yourself allows you to surrender to your own arms, to be held in your pleasure and ecstasy, in the wholeness of who you are in this beautiful human body.
Can you face the risk of full sexual expression? Of knowing this part of you deeply, passionately and unabashedly? Can you meet your most honest desires with welcome and curiosity and lay down your sword? This is critical to your sexual healing.
Making peace with the part of you that armoured up and vigilantly protected you from harm means loving yourself for the courage it took to fiercely guard the doors. It means being tender with your most hurt parts, and consoling the part of you that desperately wishes it could have been different.
It means taking your innocent child self in your arms and holding her with love and tenderly stroking and kissing her head–that wildly vigilant mind that needs to let go and believe a different future is possible. It means telling her it’s okay to be upset and that it wasn’t her fault.
It was the ignorance of others that hurt her, and she can heal that hurt and break any cycles of abuse she may have experienced.
She can heal–everyone has the right and ability to heal.
She can be open, excited and vulnerable again about sexuality.
She can have the new experiences she longs for.
She can have a totally new relationship to her body and sexuality on her terms.
They belong to her and always have, even if it didn’t feel that way, or she was told otherwise.
This is her reclamation, her opportunity to write the story in first person, instead of being told who to be, how to be, what to do and everything not to do.
She can honor her protector and find ways to move forward.
She gets to make the choices that will serve her most glorious becoming.
She gets to be the sexual self she has always longed for.
It is written on her body and it is her birthright.
