The Retirement of My Protector: A Journey Through Healing & IFS Therapy Model

If you, just like me, question your inner conflicts sometimes, this post may be for you.

This is a story of the retirement of my oldest friend who retired after 33 years of service.

It's not a colleague friend or co-worker—this friend had quietly lived inside me without my awareness of his existence. He was the part of me that stepped in whenever life became too overwhelming and secretly "ran the show". After his interventions, he'd go to rest and leave me puzzled and frequently very hurt.

I'd ask myself why I behaved in different ways, and why did I not feel what I was feeling after he was gone. After about six months of therapy, he and I "met I came to know him as The Protector.

Our brains are astonishing and one of their most extraordinary abilities is shutting down emotions when they become too overwhelming to process. It’s a survival instinct—designed to protect us but with time, these once-helpful defences can become barriers, preventing us from truly connecting with ourselves and our loved ones.

I didn’t know that this entity called The Protector even existed until one Friday in 2023. that day during a therapy session with my counsellor, Emer, as we were working on “Inner Child” healing, I was speaking about my tendency to emotionally shut down in moments of stress.

She gently said:

—That’s when the Protector comes in and makes sure you don’t have to feel a thing.

That sentence lit something up in me. It was like someone turned on a light switch in a dark room. In this moment, the patterns in my life made perfect sense.

For as long as I could remember, I had these episodes where I would shift from feeling deeply to feeling absolutely nothing. Numbness would stay with me for days. Then, like a flipped switch, I’d snap back after a few days—only to feel waves of unbearable pain. What I hadn’t realized until that session was that this pain wasn’t always from the present moment. Often, it was old pain—an echo from when I was around five years old. So in these moments I was again and again reliving the emotional weight of my childhood wounds.

It was through the Internal Family Systems Therapy model that I began to understand what was happening inside me.

Internal Family Systems Therapy in a Nutshell

As I learned afterwards, the IFS Therapy was developed by Dr. Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s, this transformative therapeutic model is based on a simple but powerful concept:

-We are not one unified personality, but rather a system of different "parts"—each with its own perspective, voice, and role.

And at the centre of this system is the Self: the calm, compassionate, curious core of who we truly are.

According to IFS, our inner system includes:

• Managers – parts that try to maintain control of our day-to-day lives to avoid pain and keep us functioning.

  
  

• Firefighters – parts that react impulsively to distract us from emotional pain, often through avoidance, overthinking, or unhealthy coping.

  
  

• Exiles – the wounded inner parts, often carrying trauma, shame, fear, or sadness. These parts are usually suppressed or "exiled" to protect us from overwhelming feelings.

  
  

• The Self – our true essence, capable of leading the system with compassion, curiosity, calm, and courage.

  
  

What I had come to know as “The Protector” was a Manager—his job was to control my emotional exposure and ensure I never felt too much. He had served this role dutifully since my early childhood, creating emotional distance whenever stress or pain came too close.

During my session with Emer, I and The Protector had a little chat and he made me understand that he wasn’t trying to hurt me—he was trying to help, but he didn’t realize that I was no longer a child, and the danger he’d been created to protect me from was long gone.

During that session, Emer helped me visualize a dialogue between my adult Self, my younger inner child, and The Protector. In my mind’s eye, I saw the Protector clearly. He appeared as a masculine presence made of grey fog—like a father figure I never had. He had stood guard for 33 years, scanning the world for threats, and shutting down my feelings whenever a discussion or a feeling became even a little difficult to handle. You may think that nothing is wrong with that, and so did I until I realised that he had done his job so well that he also blocked love, intimacy, and vulnerability.

The Protector kept others at a distance "just in case". He filtered every relationship, every interaction, through the lens of risk. And as a result, I often felt chronically sad, disconnected, and like I never truly belonged anywhere.

But that day, we talked.

I told him I was grown now. I no longer needed him to protect me in the same way. I could handle hard emotions. I could care for that five-year-old girl within me. I thanked him for his service—and to my surprise, he acknowledged that his function was no longer serving me and that he was ready to retire.

After that therapy session, something shifted deeply in me. I never shut down from stress in the same way again. I still experienced hard moments—fear, anxiety, discomfort—but I stayed with my emotions instead of escaping them. And by doing all that, I stayed present with others, too.

For the first time in my adult life, I could fully feel. It isn’t always comfortable, but it is real. And in feeling fully, I can connect more deeply—with my family, my friends, and most importantly, with myself.

Hidden Corners of Subconscious Mind

The IFS model may sound unusual—conversations with inner parts, revisiting childhood memories—but it works. This form of Therapy is not about imagining things that aren’t real. It’s about meeting the parts of yourself that have always been there, giving them space to speak, and helping them understand that they’re no longer alone. At times rewriting their story and helping them to get out of being stuck in their past experiences.

Thanks to Emer and this part of the work, I stopped over-analyzing people’s behaviour and stopped anticipating danger where there was none. My energy returned. My anxiety quieted. My relationships deepened.

Emer, my counsellor, played a crucial role in this journey. She had a gift—a way of gently guiding me into the inner world where these parts lived, helping me find healing without getting lost in pain.

If this story resonates with you, if you’ve felt numbness, disconnection, or patterns you can’t quite explain—I encourage you to explore IFS therapy. Sometimes, what protected you in the past is what’s holding you back now, but healing is possible. You can meet these parts of yourself with compassion. You can rewrite your story.

With courage 🫶🏽