I call them the Guardians of Goodness for a reason. It may seem that our guardians protect us from a sea of despair, a volcano of anger, or a pit of writhing serpents. Dick Schwartz, founder of Internal Family Systems, refers to this as the “veneer theory of psychology,” which prevailed over much of the last century. The veneer theory goes that our ego rightly represses our deeper animal or primal nature, which would be unreasonably hedonistic and destructive if we let it loose. Well, if you cage and mistreat an animal for centuries it will have built up some steam!

So often our healing turns into a long and windy road where the destination is shrouded in fog and we keep finding ourselves on ground we’ve already covered. What’s happening here? Is this a hard fact of life or are we delaying matters or getting in our own way? Well, I’ve seen healing happen quickly and powerfully and stick. When we let it, the unconscious mind knows how to heal itself in the same way your body knows how to heal from a wound.

Today we meet the Escape Artist. This guardian comes to the rescue when reality is boring, confining, depressing, or just too much for us. Ultimately, the Escape Artist is running from inner deadness. By escaping, it brings us back to life for a moment.

The escape artist fixates on the next escape and obsesses over the details of the escape-world. Escapes can take the form of substances, sex, extreme sports, travel, video games, or anything obsessional or underground. They are physical or psychological escapes, or places where we venture out near the edge to flirt with novelty and danger.

Today we meet the emotional jellyfish. Unlike most of the guardians on our list, this thin-skinned creature feels deeply and is easily swept away by overpowering emotions and relational experiences. It has porous boundaries and soaks up the energies and emotions of others around it. It floats high like a butterfly in social and emotional currents and then stings like a bee when things finally get too much.

Today we meet the Perfectionist. This meticulous little master takes great pleasure in directing a narrow laser beam of focus on a micro-square inch of reality. The perfectionist doesn’t cope well with changes. It implicitly assumes that the world is stable enough to perfect something. It screens out most of reality, focusing on a small domain where an illusion of control and certainty can be maintained.

We now get to an extremely convincing protector, the doubter. This imposterish chap does not feel at home in the world. He is disconnected from the emotional core that is the true source of confidence and is armed to the hilt with rationalizations that “prove” our inferiority.

Meet the quick-fix junkie. This opportunistic gambler has a short attention span and chooses shortcut approaches or gives up when it hits the first signs of difficulty. There is an obvious overlap here with ADHD, which operates through dopamine insensitivity. This insensitivity requires quick-fix junkies to desperately seek stimulation and novelty in order to get a rationed hit of dopamine. This neural circuit tends to dominate in quick-fix junkies, which means avoiding the work of healing, growing, and developing authenticity. They are often sent to therapy by parents and significant others.

Meet the tortured soul, kissing-cousin to the dreamer. This pained creature won’t prioritize healing because it’s identity is tied up in another very, very special pet project to which it has pledged its undying allegiance. The tortured soul holds onto the myth that the grain of sand, or impurity, leads to the pearl. Important aspects of life are neglected in the intense pursuit of this mythical pearl.

For the past week, I sat on a small pillow on the ground, just a few feet in front of Peter Levine as he worked with about 12 clients on the topic of chronic pain and syndromes. So for starters, let’s just say there was a LOT of energy in the room. The sessions were magnetic and entrancing. These folks REALLY wanted to heal and there was a lot going on in each of them. A big part of the event was having one hundred empathetic nervous systems witness each human struggle unfold.

Meet the dreamer. This head-in-the-clouds psychonaut is extremely high in trait openness and gifted in the arts of the mind. The dreamer has no problems accessing rich visualizations and active imaginations. Internally and in conversations, the dreamer likes to follow flights of fantasy and flourishes of whimsy. There can be magical thinking that the dreams, and the way of dreaming life into being, will pay off one day in grandiose terms.

Meet the intellectualizer, a grandiloquent gentleperson and a most rare and fine specimen. Its central problem is that in creating mental maps of intricate complexity, it inevitably loses touch with felt experience. Like Descartes, it identifies with thinking as the source of identity rather than experience or feeling. Since the role of experiencing is to update thinking, the intellectualizer tends to become out of date with themselves and the environment.

The moving target is an agile taskmaster adept at staying staying productive. This protector only feels safe if it keeps moving, as if it is forever being chased by an invisible predator. Dreams and fantasies of being chased by a monster are common. A client once expressed, “I live my life like my hair’s on fire!” Facing challenging feelings in stillness can feel like trying to put out a wildfire with glasses of water.  Better to keep moving.

Meet the underinvestor, a miser toward self who won’t spend the time or money to resolve issues, heal wounds, or care for the greater system. It often arrives to therapy burned out like a piece of charred toast.

Meet the monster under the bed, a beast of darkness that represents a shameful, frustrating, or inconvenient protector, what IFS calls an “exiled protector.” Our managerial parts just can’t accept the reality of this part and try to keep it locked up. As a result, we stay conflicted in an inner civil war, with the unaccepted part slipping out of our control every once in a while.

Our journey begins in extreme intensity. Permanent hyperdrive. A place where few mortals can last for long. It is here that we meet the Pressure cooker, a relentless overachiever that has found its adaptation in harsh places. It survives these places by creating a world of extreme internal pressure.