Inside us all resides a simple compulsion that can cause us to blind our way through life - the desire to protect and defend our closed hearts. Cultivating awareness around maintaining an open heart, opening the heart more, and letting go of past hurt is terrifying. As a result, we close our heart more and more as we age. Hurts, slights, betrayals, griefs, jealousies, and wounds all justify why we need to maintain a closed heart to stay safe.
A closed heart seeks reasons to stay closed. An open heart is vulnerable, needy, and emotional. It’s messy to open our hearts. Many of us choose to live safe. In making this choice to maintain control over our heart, we do not realize that we are missing a vitality that can only be discovered when we let the heart do its job - the service of opening us to connection.
A closed heart keeps us in survival mode. We can put on our blinders, rationalize disconnection, and allow the world to be our enemy. Of course, our own experiences of wounding and inherent sensitivity combine together to create the space of our closed heart. The combination of feeling rejected or abandoned coupled with how we experience the pain of others cements a fear in us that is young and unsophisticated. As we age and life experience inevitably compounds the pain, we initiate complex reflexes to keep the fear away and avoid heartbreak.
Inside all of us is a partially dead and closed off heart that is concurrently yearning for connection and avoiding this need at all costs.
The Conscious Heart
When we enter into the realm of consciously opening our heart, we are going to have emotional releases. Emotional releases come in waves and may be overwhelming. We need to learn how to allow for emotional releases that are positive and healthy. We need to learn how we defend against more vulnerable states as we unwind our closed heart. To experience an emotional release that transforms the defended energy, we need to be witnessed by another and allow hurt to be replaced by connection and love.
Many of us do self work privately. This is not bad or wrong. Sometimes working alone in release provides the ability to withstand sensation and allow for flow. Private release can create a container of being able to tolerate being witnessed in emotionality. At some point, though, there needs to be movement and energy exchange between people. This is how we move from release into healing. Entering into healing a closed heart requires others.
You CANNOT heal your defended heart alone. The heart, above everything, needs connection to thrive.
Warning: The rest of this post requires what can boil down to unpleasant self honesty. I am mainly writing this post for people who study with me. If you are passionate about understanding blind spots and hidden defenses, take a moment here. Embody with deep breaths. Slow down. Move as you read this post. Let yourself feel. Consider that anything written that you feel “Isn’t you” or “Doesn’t apply” is most likely a sign of shadow and an unrecognized way of pushing against the world. Go slow and check in as you read this post to receive its full affect.
The Enigma of Control and Safety
This post is ultimately about control. Why control? Because the ways we avoid fear and heartbreak in our adult reality are complex….and controlling. We don’t want to get hurt in specific ways and we will initiate massive control reflexes to avoid what we consider our unbearable triggers. Control is the root of the methods we use to avoid hurt and keep ourselves safe.
How we control is steeped in what we are trying to avoid in connection and how we feel comfortable connecting. This inherent push/pull of desire versus avoidance is going to be present in our unique control paradox. We control through self sabotage and emotional lock down. We control through sexuality and manipulation. We control ourselves internally and also have a sort of Jedi mind when it comes to controlling others’ responses to us. In an effort to keep ourselves from being hurt we will follow familiar pathways to keep our reality safe from opening our own heart.
Our control methods are quite Machiavellian in nature. They will keep us feeling justified, secure, safely supported, and just enough disconnected to know that what we are doing is working. Of course, this disconnect is only felt if we pay attention to it. Otherwise it just silently influences all our decisions. These methods affect not just how we emote but how we move, act, and navigate life and all the relationships we find ourselves engaged in. Those who we keep on the outside of our hearts are likely to stay where they are and not feel the invitation to come further in. Those who we allow in experience the push/pull of our own desire to be less alone that pairs with our deep seated and unprocessed fears related to connection.
What we don’t really want to accept about ourselves is that we attract people who are either never going to challenge our closed heart or justify the heart remaining in its safety zone of varied defenses. Rather than go inward and confront the heart, it is going to be more reflexive to move outward and remain static in our heart’s chosen comfort zone. Over time, the people that we meet and the experiences that we have lead to rationalizing and reasoning our heart into a certain ennui of avoidance. This safety takes away the deep pleasure of connection so many of us experienced in our youth and during young love. We become jaded because we are unwilling to fully surrender to the eros of engaged interconnection.
The following is a list of the more sophisticated methods we use to maintain our heart in its comfortable degree of restrictions. As you read the list, see if you can instinctively feel which ones trigger you the most, not just the methods that resonate with you. Try to hold some compassion for yourself at how deeply unconscious control can be used to self preserve.
Weaponizing Emotions
Justifying Manipulation
Projecting Motivations
Avoiding and Running Away
Thinking Self Into Being
Holding Others Hostage
Sexualizing Connection
Embracing Boundaries
Now let’s look a bit more into each of these.
Weaponizing Emotions
We weaponize emotions that we view as being too negative to be tolerated by other people or our self. Inside every heart is pain. This pain can come out in really harsh ways that often, in the moment of release, are felt as 100% true and correct. Harsh emotional releases are kind of like expressing the thoughts of a poisoned dart inside us. Yes, the words we say in a release absolutely have merit. They express what has been deeply repressed or shut down. However, these vomiting purges of negative thought streams and emotions are not expressing the heart’s fear itself. These purges are expressing from fear. This part of us KNOWS that another person is not going to want to be with us after they hear who we really are, what we really feel, and what we actually think.
This is the purest push away energy we have in our hearts.
A release easily turns into weaponization. Weaponization occurs when we prove that our release is intolerable to someone else. Our push away energy wants to prove that our defense is justified and that we are too much, too mean, too fucked up for other people. Once this is proven in a relationship, we will start to hold back our emotions and then time their release to push someone away when we actually need to pull them in the most. Over and over we will self express in a way that overwhelms another person’s boundaries and justifies our own need to repress our “true” thoughts and feelings. We use the emotion, fuel it, and even act into it in a way that makes it strong. The overall result allows us to maintain our closed heart. We have effectively pushed someone away.
Asking yourself how you may be consciously exacerbating negative emotions to act out a negative pleasure role in specific relationships would point to how you weaponize emotions. Softening the heart involves softening the emotional response. How can your harshness turn into vulnerability to open the door for a more intimate exchange of two people sharing an emotional release together in support and expression?
Justifying Manipulation
Manipulating others can be one of the harder to follow or admit as a defense method. The justification process occurs reflexively and then the manipulation follows from there. The manipulation is often so quickly justified that it is hard to track who or what we are controlling and how we are manipulating the behavior of ourself and others.
When the heart is at risk of being vulnerable, rationalizing thoughts to keep others in a box that is most comfortable to us will follow.
There is an irony in manipulation. By not allowing the people around us to have authentic responses to the situations that they find themselves in, they are inherently going to be felt as unsafe or not worthy of our trust. Why? Because in not allowing people to act and react freely, we are creating a false illusion of relating that does not give anyone the ability to be themselves. When we manipulate others, no one can relax into being safe. We keep ourselves and others bound by a belief in the need to manipulate to relate safely while actually doing the opposite. Manipulation proves to us that others are not capable of alive, dynamic love and authentic connection.
It is normal to fear how another person might react. If you cannot handle anger or someone’s suffering and sadness, you will justify manipulation in situations that are likely to get another person angry or make another person grieve. This in turn cuts you off from having to feel your own fear or overwhelm. Justification points to a need to ask yourself what you are avoiding being expressed around you, what you fear coming at you and what you fear coming from within you. You have to be able to face the vulernabilities and fears that exist inside you before you can face other’s authentic self expression.
Projecting Motivations
Whenever we come across a person acting in a way that we do not understand or feel safe with, we reflexively enter into the game of answering why through projection. By trying to discern why a person is acting in specific ways without talking to them or asking them questions that deepen our own understanding of what is happening, we are projecting motivations from our own self into the other person’s reactions.
To understand another person’s motivations through projections means everyone in the relationship gets to stay in their own comfortable boxes and closed hearts. It’s a way we maintain the accepted status quo of a relationship without any messiness or actual curiosity.
When we project motivations onto another we are boxing them into our limited capacity of comprehension and reaction. Often we do this to avoid running into the actual content of another person’s inner world. To decomplexify another person’s emotional process, we project as a self containment strategy that rationalizes and avoids. There is a kind of rigidity in this form of projection. We are only open to what we can understand and have no real interest in understanding the other.
The antidote in this case is developing relational interest. Only by asking more about what is going on can you understand what is happening in the other person’s world. Only by being able to receive a person’s answers can you enter into dynamic relating using your own interest. Once you are able to listen and absorb the other, you then need to track your own reactions to the person’s response. This is when you enter into the more vulnerable state of confrontation and mutual relating .
Avoiding and Running Away
Every time we fear being overwhelmed some part of us is going to engage in avoiding and running away. Even in the most intimate and deep relationships, there are going to be aspects of ourselves that we do not feel we can express or that we fear expressing to an other. In a society where avoiding and running away is as simple as picking up a phone and scrolling or putting on a show, the behavior of running away and avoiding is compulsively unconscious to a scary degree. Most of us don’t even get to feel why we may avoid or run away very often. Now more than ever, running away and avoiding happens as an instinct that is cut off from an actual impulse.
Every time there is a desire to cut yourself off from another person, something is happening in the realm of fear. The heart cannot connect with anything when it is scared.
For a closed heart, fear is its ultimate expression of reality. Yet the heart needs and requires unconditional love to thrive. When we avoid or run away in any way, we are disconnecting from the deepest need of our heart and our inner being. Whether we are introverted or extroverted doesn’t matter. The heart needs safe connection to thrive. Avoiding and running away is a sign that something is not safe to us.
By spiraling into what is unsafe about you as a person, about other people specifically, or about the world n general, you enter into the possibility of feeling fear. Facing fear is, simply put, terrifying. Yet only through facing what you fear can you connect in the ways you long for the most. Inside the fear is the more intimate need to connect with your environment as your truest self. It is up to you to find the safety you long for through the fear, not through avoidance or running away.
Thinking Self Into Being
Who doesn’t form themselves into who they are supposed to be, think they should be, or want to be through thoughts? Rationalizing behavior, over playing positive thinking, and white washing vocabulary are all ways that we think as a defense to avoid the soft underbelly of our insecurities. Over and over again in life we are faced with the reality of choosing emotional avoidance through thought control. When we think as a method to control our reality, we allow the ego to take over emotional reactions. We become the programmed self we know and understand from our wounds, our childhood programming, and our idealizations of self.
There is no room for an open heart in the thinking brain. The thinking brain is the enemy of an open heart. The cut off line between feeling and rationalizing is thought control.
When we think ourselves into being, our ego is allowed to run rampant. We get to be who we think we are. We feel only on the basis of what is allowed, after understanding all angles of a situation. We feel after we think and feel what we allow ourselves to feel based on what we thought. We will then habitually allow any uncomfortable emotions to go unexplored.
Thinking is a way of maintaining our own rigid boundaries around ourselves and containing any emotions we do not want to feel.
When we think as a defended being, we are only processing situations in our defended - and thus closed and controlled - head. This can be appropriate in, for example, work scenarios where professionalism requires lack of emotion. In other areas of life, being free to do more than think creates room for positive experiences and inner genius to arise. It can be hard in the realms where we control thought to understand that we need room for both thinking and emoting. By thinking as a way of being, we are missing self expressing and discovering the part of us that we have rejected.
Intimacy arises when you let go of the thinking brain and thought control. Only when you feel your need for connection can you allow the positive emotional result of connecting to soften the brain. Whenever you go into a need to control your thoughts, you have to ask yourself what you are avoiding and what the result of this avoidance is going to bring to you. If the answer is safety or isolation, you may need to admit the choice to remain safe is driving the thoughts you think you are feeling. You need to question what the risk is that you need to take in this moment to find connection.
Holding Others Hostage
Holding other people hostage is a time honored method of control that is used to maintain power. Admitting not only that that a hostage situation is happening but also ferreting out the underlying toxic power dynamics takes bravery and attention. Holding another person hostage is rooted in an extreme and lonely negative emotion. This emotion can not be contained or acknowledged within and can only be expressed through threat. Finding this emotion may have to be unwound through some of other forms of control that I’ve mentioned in this article.
This extreme emotion that puts us in a hostage situation is expressed through a threatened action. The hostage action of choice can be threats against job security, divorce, betrayal, suicide, or simply affection. Sometimes the hostage action itself is used as emotional expression leaning more towards the weaponizing of an emotion while simultaneously acting out in a scary and powerful way.
The power dynamics at play here are often codependent and hidden. Rather than face the fear of the threatened action, an entwining happens. This entwining can be a place where shadow coils itself into a relationship so deeply that it can only be found years after being together. Not facing what cannot be withstood together creates a compliance to keep the feared behavior and negative emotion under cover. Yet what is kept hidden is being used for leverage, power, and control. The demand here is be in relationship only in the comfortable ways that keep the threat under wraps. Usually this means that the other person fears the threat and capitulates, while also acting out because there is a loss of self in the capitulation.
Only by freeing your own and other people’s freedom to react authentically can we dissipate toxic power dynamics and hostage holding.
Someone needs to quit playing into the dynamic. Quitting can look like leaving (which those of us with abandonment issues are likely to be held hostage by). Quitting is usually rooted in freedom to negatively emote. In this scenario there is a weaponized emotion in which the thorn never gets expressed and we learn to rely on the thorn as a torque point for power.
This is a dynamic in which support is needed, preferably professional, to explore and unwind. Whenever there are threats, there is the possibility of real hurt happening. If you engage in hostage dynamics with people, somewhere inside you is an emotion that you do not believe you can ever express, feel yourself, or even let another person see. You may even think that expressing it will kill you or kill another person. This is the root of your deepest loneliness. You need the support of someone who can handle the darkest emotions coming out of you without judging you or separating from you. Only certain people can withstand the darkness of another person and love them through it. Here is the space in you that needs the deepest compassion and the most unconditional love for your heart to feel safe.
Sexualizing Connection
Sexuality is a perfect smokescreen for both control and connection. We underhandedly communicate with our sexuality to get our way. Here is the place where we can fake having it all. We receive endorphins even in energetic sexual connections. We experience pleasurable release in physical sexual connections. We have power in our right to choose who we connect with. Everything here is a recipe for disconnected connection.
Being attractive to other people ostensibly fits the connection need of the heart without that messy vulnerability the heart connection creates.
For those of us who easily experience our sexuality, sexualizing connection can fill a void without us ever having to admit that a void exists. For those of us who do not experience our sexuality easily, the sexualization of connection may happen more in the realm of fantasy, where we feel unfulfilled but are comfortable with that feeling being a launch point for the unattainable.
Where ever we believe that we cannot have a sexual connection and a loving trusting relationship, we are likely to sexualize connection in some part of our being.
Sexuality is another place where shadow control and power dynamics lie. Sometimes it is easier to take than to ask. Sometimes it is more simple to remain quiet than to talk. Sexualizing a connection can replace the more difficult aspect of self work that requires assessing and understanding needs. It is easier to make a need sexual and act out of desire and lust than it is to make a need vulnerable and seek another person softly understanding our weak underbelly. Remaining in the illusion of power avoids that scary need to submit with trust or surrender our will to another.
We are born completely vulnerable, unable to address any needs without connection. I sometimes wonder if we humans mature too fast and it is because of that lack of slowing down in infancy and early childhood that we tend to struggle so much with understanding how to deeply connect. Sexual connection is a place where we can let off steam and pretend. Without a heart connection, it is a lonely and empty connection that does not nourish our deeper needs.
Whether or not a relationship is physically sexual does not actually mean anything. What matters is looking at the ways you seek sexual pleasure - imagined, energetic, or physical - to avoid intimate connection from your heart and with the heart of someone else. The endorphins that come from a heart connection take cultivation. Sexual connection is a easy way to band aid your deeper need for intimacy. The longer lasting sustained pleasure of deep connection is full bodied, not just genital or regional. Actively seeking the fulfillment of a heart based connection takes work, not just play.
Embracing Boundaries
Boundaries can be on the surface, further away from us or deeply embedded and undercover. It is actually healthy to have some sort of boundary around the heart space. Self protection and building self trust requires understanding when to have a boundary, when to strengthen a boundary, and when to soften a boundary. Embracing boundaries is an over strengthening issue - when we use our unprocessed fears as a reason to wall ourselves off from other people and the world.
Boundaries keep others out. They also keep our self locked inside.
It is too easy to get caught up in reasoning and rationalizing why stronger boundaries are needed and forget all about what softening may bring. This is especially true for people who need a solid sense of self to feel safe or who have an underlying fear of being abandoned or rejected. For those who lose the self through merging and caretaking, softening seems like caring and hides the boundary underneath our actions. Lonely hearts need soft boundaries but will fight softening like a cornered beast.
Strengthening and softening both need to face the negative. In strengthening we face the negatives of hurt, betrayal, lack of forgiveness, and grief as a method of avoidance. When we soften, we allow for imperfection to be a safe reality. We meet these same negatives as a reality of being alive and trust our capacity to move through the hurt and come out the other side stronger and more able to connect.
Your capacity to admit and feel loneliness is related to how strong you think your boundaries need to be and where they reside inside you. First comes the ability to understand that the protection of the boundaries you consciously fuel and embrace are meant to keep a part of you separate and alone. Then comes the ability to feel the sensations and emotions around your own loneliness. Last comes the step into the unknown, asking for someone to meet you right where you’re at and let you feel both you and them simultaneously without any loss of self. Letting someone come into a soft boundary has to happen slow and without force, consciously tracking and allowing yourself to have a clear “yes” and a strong “no” as required.
What To Do…What To Do…
Challenging the shadow side of control can be especially difficult where there is lack of desire for conscious awareness. Because of this, I suggest that you enter into the realm of first addressing the physical to support movement of shadow. When you shift the physical through stretching and movement, you allow for sensations that you have blocked to arise. This in turn allows for repressed emotional content to surface. With emotional release comes the ability to face and work with shadow.
Here are a few suggestions to try:
Lay on a pile of pillows so that your heart stretches open.
Practice breath work focused on the heart and upper chest.
Do aerobic exercise followed immediately with meditation while your heart is still beating strong.
Thump your chest and let noises out of your mouth improv style. Flow.
Another place to work on shadow is to begin to track yourself on the level of impulsivity. Notice impulses and question them. Any impulse to disconnect is an impulse towards keeping your heart safely quarantined in its safe space.
In spiritual awareness work, making new and unfamiliar decisions is a consistent life long practice. Simply challenging yourself NOT to follow a familiar impulsive response is a choice towards change. True, it may temporarily mean feeling uncomfortable, more closed, or more controlled. Be patient. Transformation occurs over time. When you can tolerate your own impulsivity and not respond to it in familiar patterns, something different is happening. Questioning impulses have to happen consciously with what arises out of a change in behavior.
For those of you who are interested, I’ve recorded a bit about the energetic component. What energy comes with control and control feels and looks like from both the perspective of the controller and the person being controlled. You can listen below.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to mindfullynessa to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.