"Courageous love involves accepting all parts of the other
because there is no longer a need to keep the other in the confining roles of parent/redeemer/ego booster/protector."
Conversation
"For reasons that will be discussed at length in the pages
to come, your partner cannot succeed in making you feel good in a lasting way."
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"When that love stops flowing, even momentarily, we
get scared and go to work on one of three projects. The first two of these are designed to get our partner back into that loving redeemer role. The third project is to give up on that endeavor and find alternatives."
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"The first, and most common, project involves directly
trying to force our partner to change back.... We plead, criticize, demand, negotiate, seduce, withhold, and shame—all in an effort to get her to change. Most partners resist our crude attempts to perform open-heart surgery"
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"The second project is to... use self-criticism and shame to cut out parts of our personalities... hoping that if we please him, he will love us. Because this self-transformation project isn’t authentic—and instead is focused on manipulating our partner—it usually backfires, too"
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"The final project kicks in once we give up.... At that point, we begin to close our heart to him and: (1) search for a different partner, (2) numb or distract from the pain and emptiness enough to stay with the original one, or (3) numb and distract enough to live alone."
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"[I]t isn’t hard to discern some combination of these three projects behind [a couple's] dysfunctional patterns of interaction. This is because virtually all of us carry inner vaults full of pain, shame, and emptiness, and none of us know how to deal with these emotions..."
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"I call these often-quarrelling subpersonalities parts because when I first started doing this kind of work, that is how my clients referred to them. “Part of me wants to stay married and faithful, but another part wants to be free to get laid...,” a client might say."
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"The critical voice that harangued Debbie Ford with so much self-loathing is an example of one common type of part called a protector, which tried to keep her from taking risks by running down her confidence."
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that is an extremely different meaning from protector in plurality circles (a caring, parental part, that comes out when the system is threatened or in distress to either calm, mediate or fight) and it's confusing lol
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oh that is also a kind of thing that protectors can do! feels like a subtype imo (could also be Self depending on how it works). protectors can do unintuitive things but inner critics actually are trying to protect you from stuff