The Trauma-Informed Leader: An Introduction to Your “Fearful Protector”
Why do high-achieving people like leaders (or anyone, for that matter) find themselves hindered by doubt, fear, anxiety, or other negative, even destructive, feelings?
I’d like to introduce you to an imaginary but incredibly useful heuristic device that I have used with myself and with clients to make sense of the fears and anxieties that can stem from trauma. I developed this concept to help leaders in the workplace but I am finding that the Fearful Protector is present in every other aspect of life as well! I hope it helps you!
“Why do high-achieving people like leaders (or anyone, for that matter) find themselves hindered by doubt, fear, anxiety, or other negative, even destructive, feelings?”
The Emergence of the Fearful Protector
When you incur a trauma (or any adverse experience, really), that’s when I believe your own personal Fearful Protector is formed inside you. It emerges because whatever negative experience you endured was so overwhelming that you needed to unconsciously create some powerful force to keep bad things from ever happening to you again.
But, unfortunately, since the Fearful Protector exists only inside you, it has no control over external events. All it can do to keep you safe is to control YOU and how YOU feel. So what ends up happening is that the Fearful Protector tries to keep you safe by making sure you outright AVOID any situation that even the slightest bit resembles any scary situation you’ve encountered before.
Although it is within you, the Fearful Protector nonetheless acts independently. Its mission is to keep you from moving in the direction of whatever it deems unsafe at any cost. It doesn’t care about your desires, goals, ambitions, or even needs. It is fiercely determined to locate even the remotest hint of threat and keep you from moving in that direction. And it’s very good at it!
Think of the Fearful Protector as a well-meaning and strong bodyguard. Sounds great, right? Who doesn’t need a bodyguard, especially someone who has endured trauma? Except this bodyguard has very poor judgment. It sees threats everywhere and overreacts all the time. Remember: it wants to keep you safe but all it has control over is you, how you feel, and what you do.
The Fearful Protector
Think of the Fearful Protector as a well-meaning and strong bodyguard. Except this bodyguard has very poor judgment. It sees threats everywhere and overreacts all the time. Remember: it wants to keep you safe but all it has control over is you, how you feel, and what you do.
The Nature of the Fearful Protector
From my interactions with clients (and with myself!) I have compiled lists of what your Fearful Protector IS and what it IS NOT. These are critically important to remember when you feel its forceful interference in your life.
I’d like to begin with what the Fearful Protector is NOT:
The Fearful Protector IS NOT accurate.
It loves to see threats that are not there. It makes them up. Even threats that have a small likelihood of being present it loves to enormously exaggerate. Like your brain, it has a negativity bias—it will always assume the worst and paint an extreme picture. And never a pretty one. For example, the risk of being attacked by a shark is extremely low. But if you happened to once see a TV show about a shark attack, the Fearful Protector is going to feel the duty to remind you of that right as you step into the ocean on your vacation. The only way that it knows how to keep you entirely safe from all sharks with certainty is to keep you out of the water. So it makes being in the water extremely uncomfortable for you.
The Fearful Protector IS NOT helpful.
Although it may seem like a great idea to have someone watching out for every possible danger on your behalf, the fact that it always overestimates the danger means that the Fearful Protector going to keep you from the things you want. You may be so excited at the prospect of a new job—the opportunity of a lifetime. But as you prepare for the interview, the Fearful Protector will step in and start telling you how terrifying that interview is going to be and how poorly equipped you are to perform successfully. It sees an interaction with your prospective new boss as threatening as the shark. So it wants to keep you at home where it’s safe. So, again, it will make the interview as uncomfortable as possible for you, hoping you just give up your dream.
The Fearful Protector is NOT smart.
The neurobiological systems that create the subjective experience I like to call the Fearful Protector are located in some of the most ancient and primitive parts of your brain—the parts you share with your reptilian ancestors. It takes a lot of sophisticated brainpower to determine likelihoods and make discernments about threats. But all the Fearful Protector is capable of figuring out looks something like this: Shark = Bad, Ocean = Shark, therefore Ocean = Bad in all circumstances. As I like to tell clients, your Fearful Protector is literally no more intelligent than a frog. If you wouldn’t let a frog make decisions for you, don’t let the Fearful Protector.
The Fearful Protector is NOT you.
The Fearful Protector is so worried about keeping you safe that it wants to take control of your life—your body, your mind, your behaviors, your personality. It wants to completely take over so that you don’t do anything that could pose any kind of risk. Except the truth is that everything worth doing in life comes with risk. I spend a lot of time asking my clients to separate the Fearful Protector from their actual REAL selves, which is not an easy task at times. Sometimes you can become so tightly held by the Fearful Protector that you worry that the fear defines your personality. I’ve seen clients full of talent and bright ideas seem to shrink and choke when they find themselves in the spotlight—a victim of their own fear. It’s so important to remember who you are without your fear. The Fearful Protector is something OTHER than your best self.
However, the Fearful Protector IS:
The Fearful Protector IS loving.
You have to remember that the Fearful Protector, no matter how unhelpful, is nevertheless committed to protecting you at all costs. It wants to keep you safe. In that regard, it’s on your side to the end. But while it may be effective at keeping you safe by messing with your perceptions of reality, it is not interested at all in your growth or your ambitions. It thinks that all risks are negative so, for the sake of keeping you safe, it will prevent you from taking all risks, including positive ones. Think of the Fearful Protector as a loving but fierce guard dog who, despite being helplessly devoted to protecting you, can’t tell the difference between friends and enemies and therefore doesn’t let anyone get close. Loving for sure, but what kind of life is it setting you up for?
The Fearful Protector IS powerful.
If the Fearful Protector were weak, it wouldn’t be such a problem. But it is incredibly powerful. It can keep you even from the things that you passionately desire. Many of my clients who suffer from self-sabotage realize that the villain is not themselves, but rather the Fearful Protector who is threatened by their success. What could keep a high-performing person from the success that they so desire and have worked so hard to achieve? Only a very powerful force such as the Fearful Protector. It can override your intentions and keep you a prisoner in your own home and your own mind. But, I think it’s so important to remember that a force this potentially destructive is equally potentially creative.
The Fearful Protector IS perceptive.
It’s fascinating to see what can “trigger”(I prefer the term “activate”) the Fearful Protector into action. It can be reminded of traumatic events from the past by any of the senses. We don’t realize how easily a smell can put us back in the past and get a reaction out of us. Or hearing a certain song at random. Sometimes the Fearful Protector can encourage us to immediately dislike someone we only just met because they too strongly resemble someone else with whom we’ve had a bad experience. It can also see similarities between situations that are not otherwise obvious. It may misjudge threat, but it can spot similarities with alarming precision. The trick is to develop a sense of discernment to make up for the Fearful Protector’s lack of it.
The Fearful Protector IS creative.
The Fearful Protector is an extraordinarily gifted storyteller! It can create a detailed and convincing story with no raw material other than fear. I’ve mentioned how it wants to take over your mind and when it gets a hold of your imagination, it can create some truly terrifying scenarios with astonishing believability. But we have to remind ourselves that, no matter how convincing the narrative, the Fearful Protector will tell us anything it can come up with to keep us from taking a risk—positive or otherwise. When it hijacks your imaginative capabilities, it can use its powers of perception that I just mentioned to create really vivid stories of what COULD happen. But are they real? Remember how inaccurate, and even deceptive, the Fearful Protector can be.
Other Aliases of the Fearful Protector
Just as explaining what the Fearful Protector is and isn’t is helpful in fleshing it out in greater detail, so too is understanding its similar forms. These may help further illustrate the complex nature of this powerful but unhelpful inner force.
The Fearful Protector IS ALSO:
The Fearful Predictor
Your Fearful Protector loves to make predictions and convince you that it knows exactly what is going to happen or how a situation will play it out. It will concoct the most terrifying outcome possible and convince you it’s a complete certainty. But remember, the Fearful Protector is highly inaccurate and dramatically negative in its bias. I suggest playing a game with yourself where you begin to notice how often and to what degree it is utterly wrong. Reality is so much better than the Fearful Protector/Predictor would have us believe.
The Fearful Preventer
Remember that the Fearful Preventer not only predicts that bad things are certain to happen, but it also prevents good things from happening. It will try to get you to “chicken out” of taking that positive risk that will help you get where you want to go, whether it is to interview for a job, attend a social gathering, start a new project, or even venture out on a first date. These all involve uncertainty which is why the Fearful Protector/Preventer gets freaked out and wants you to stay at home. But these experiences also all lead toward the things you want. Don’t let it prevent you from pursuing what you want.
The Fearful Predator
Lastly, even though it does love you and is charged with keeping you safe, the Fearful Protector does behave like a creeping predator. It stalks you like prey, watching your every move and thought, waiting for you to feel safe so that it can rush in to convince you that you’re surrounded by threats. It also lurks in your life, ready to strike whenever you find yourself weakened—perhaps when you’re sick, fatigued, upset, or otherwise not at your best. It sees those situations as an opportunity to seize control and really mess with your head. The Fearful Protector/Predator is sneaky, insidious, and merciless. Now you know to watch out for when you might be particularly vulnerable and more likely to fall for its unhelpful influence.
The Fearful Protector / Predator
The Fearful Protector/Predator is sneaky, insidious, and merciless. Now you know to watch out for when you might be particularly vulnerable and more likely to fall for its unhelpful influence.
I hope you found this introduction to the Fearful Protector a fun but insightful exploration of the complex role that fear can play in your life, especially for those who have incurred any kind of trauma.
In future articles. I’ll share some of the techniques that my clients and I have found helpful in loosening the grip the Fearful Protector can have over us and even how we can use its positive aspects to remind us of our own strength as we pursue the life we want.
Please let me know what you think!
Jesse Katen is a leadership coach and consultant at his firm, Jesse Katen Leadership Consultancy, based in Binghamton, New York. Visit his website at www.jessekaten.com or email him at jesse@jessekaten.com.