The Psychology of Self-Sabotage and Protector Parts | Alison Answers

If you’ve been trying to stop a behavior, break a pattern, or change something about yourself but it keeps coming back, this episode is for you.

Maybe it’s people-pleasing.
Over-explaining.
Avoidance.
Anger.
Perfectionism.
Shutting down.
Or a behavior you keep promising yourself you’re done with.

But no matter how much you understand it, hate it, or try to force it away, a part of you still goes back to it.

In today’s solo episode of Alison Answers, Alison Lager breaks down the psychology behind why some behaviors are so hard to stop, and why what looks like self-sabotage may actually be a protector part trying to keep you safe.

This episode invites you to stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking a deeper question:

What is this protecting me from?

Alison explains why certain behaviors become survival strategies, how the nervous system can mistake change for danger, and why trying to remove a coping strategy too quickly can cause another pattern to take its place.

You’ll learn why your body may choose protection over happiness, why willpower alone often isn’t enough, and how to begin meeting these parts of yourself with curiosity instead of shame.

By the end of this episode, you’ll understand:

- Why “bad behaviors” can be hard to stop even when you want to change
- How protector parts form around pain, shame, rejection, and fear
- Why your nervous system may resist letting go of old patterns
- How people-pleasing, over-explaining, anger, avoidance, and perfectionism can become protection
- Why attacking the behavior can make shame worse
- Why removing a coping strategy too early can backfire
- The question that can help you understand what the behavior is really protecting
- How to let your adult self, higher self, or grounded self lead instead of the scared part
- Why healing begins with safety, not self-attack

If you’ve been beating yourself up for the same pattern over and over, this episode will help you see it differently.

Maybe the behavior is not the whole story.
Maybe the pattern has a purpose.
Maybe the part of you you keep fighting was once the part trying to save you.

Watch the full episode of Alison Answers to understand the psychology behind why you can’t just stop bad behaviors, and what your nervous system may be trying to protect.

In this episode

00:00 Intro
01:05 What protector parts are
02:36 Why attacking the behavior can backfire
03:26 What happens when a protector is removed too soon
05:49 Why coping strategies need to be understood first
06:26 Why the protector part is rarely the enemy
06:53 Protector parts as exhausted bodyguards
09:04 How unhealthy behaviors can regulate the nervous system
09:27 Perfectionism, anger, people-pleasing, over-explaining, and dissociation
10:32 Why there may be nothing “wrong” with you
11:20 What to do instead of attacking the behavior
12:23 Questions to ask your protector part
13:15 Why the goal is not to destroy the protector
14:51 Using visualization to understand younger parts
16:03 Letting the adult self lead
18:07 Why the behavior is not the whole story
18:40 Getting out of the thinking brain and into the body
20:29 Awareness without judgment
21:20 Learning to ask yourself better questions
21:45 Becoming steady, grounded, and peaceful

Connect with Alison:

• Instagram: @alisonanswers | @lagercounseling
• Website: LagerCounseling.com
• YouTube: Alison Answers
• Facebook: Alison Lager Lcsw Casac
• Purchase Alison’s book: “The Wake Up Call”
• Alison Answers Facebook Group: Join HERE
• Women of Excellence FB group: Join HERE

⚠️ Crisis Resources:
Lager Counseling Services
Call: 516-221-2123
Text: (914) 363-0381
Wantagh: 3408 Park Ave. Wantagh, NY 11793

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (24/7, free, confidential)
Call or text 988 | Visit 988lifeline.org

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So many of us are doing things and then we feel bad about the fact that we're doing it. Anything tries to remove that behavior or you try to remove it too quickly, the nervous system interprets that as danger. You never want to remove a coping strategy until you understand what catastrophe the nervous system believes is preventing. Most self-sabotaging behaviors are considered what would be called protectors. It's rarely our enemy. When we label it as usually often just really exhaustive bodyguards, and parts of our skulls are really small and scary. If one of our protectors is taken away prematurely without understanding it and without building the right structure for it to be removed, another protector can just quickly come into place. That can be another sabotaging behavior. Hey guys, how are you today? It is Allison from Allison Answers and Lager Counseling Services. What I want to talk to you today about is amazing and will change your life. So I want you to think about any behavior, any pattern that you have in your life that you don't like, something that you would say is maladaptive, or something that someone else is doing that you would say is a behavior that you do not like. Now, typically, when people talk about in therapy, about like, oh, I want to stop this behavior, or I want to, I want to stop doing this or that, what ends up happening is then they work with a therapist to change the behavior. The issue with this, and then I'm gonna send you on a little twist with this, and then if you look at a concept, which many of you have heard of, it's internal family systems. And basically the clinical point in relationship to this, and I don't want to lose just people who are just not therapists, just hear this out. In regard to any, most self-sabotaging behaviors are considered what would be called protector parts. And what they are, they are a part of us that is trying to prevent another part of us, possibly even a younger part of us, from experiencing pain, shame, rejection, or a loss of control. And in terms of like the brain, what the brain will do is it will prioritize protection over happiness. And protective responses become automated throughout repeated survival learning in our limbic system. But what will happen throughout our lives is that we will practice behaviors that other people might call maladaptive or self-sabotaging or a problem behavior. But these are actually our astute and strategic ways of managing and regulating our emotional life and our survival. Because if we have a part of ourselves that is very ashamed, and most of us do, by the way, that's like a really big issue for most of us. So if there's a part that we need protected, a part of us that's like, oh, you know what? I cannot ever let anyone see this part of me. And one of the things that can pop up is a protector part could be as simple as people-pleasing behavior, overexplaining, and I'm gonna get into the rest of that. So if a therapist or someone else calls you out and you know, calls out the protector part before understanding, and before you understanding its function, before you honoring it, that it why why did this part of you develop? What is its kind purpose? What ends up what could happen several things clinically could happen in the room with a therapist, the client can become more symptomatic. So, like you could have, like if somebody calls it out and then you feel like, you know, someone notices your protective part almost like as a shame-based behavior that then has to be changed. So many of us are doing things and then we feel bad about the fact that we're doing it. Instead of identifying what is happening inside of our body, what was the strategy developed within us that is there to protect us? So, what can what can happen is that if one of our protectors is taken away prematurely without understanding it and without building the right structure for it to be removed, another protector can just quickly come in and take its place. And what I mean by that could be another sabotaging behavior. The nervous system experience could experience the environment that's taking away this behavior. It could be a therapist, it could be just a relationship or whatever, and it could experience it as unsafe, maybe not consciously, but unconsciously. The, you know, another thing is that when a part of us is removed that isn't ready to be removed, that is um not understood, we may intellectually really get it, but emotionally we might resist it. Shame can increase because the client, the client or the person, like you or I feels bad for still needing this behavior. I mean, how many of us have behaviors that then we beat the crap out of ourselves for having? You know, from like an internal family systems perspective and neuroscience perspective, the protector parts formed for survival. You know, even like very maladaptive behaviors like avoidance, anger, perfectionism, addiction, dissociation, overexplaining. How many people overexplained? People pleasing, these are often intelligent adaptations to overwhelming and emotional states at one point in time. So, how come somebody becomes a people pleaser? You know, they want to avoid rejection, right? How come somebody overexplains? They don't want to be misunderstood, they don't want to be in trouble. There's a lot of variables involved, and we want to be able to instead clearly there's behavior we don't want to be there. So we agree on that intellectually, but if there isn't an understanding, a meeting of that behavior to say, hey, I understand why you came and thank you. So, like if therapy prematurely strips away that protector, or if anything strips it away prematurely, sometimes like in a relations, a relationship where somebody's kind of like, you know, I'm gonna use the term busting your chops to get rid of a certain behavior too quickly, right? The nervous system can lose its regulation before like enough internal, sufficient safety is built. So think of it this way. When you're like you never want to remove a coping strategy until you understand what catastrophe the nervous system believes it's preventing. It doesn't mean it's a real catastrophe. It just means that the protector part rarely believes that it's not a catastrophe. So it's like the protector part is like it's rarely our enemy, but we label it as such. You know, I keep doing this thing, I keep shovershopping, I keep um I keep um going for alcohol, I keep um lying. There could be a million reasons, like how come people lie because the truth isn't good enough, right? So now the protective parts are not our enemy. They're usually often just really exhausted bodyguards from parts of ourselves that are really vulnerable, small, and scared. So the protectors in our nervous system, the protector behaviors are like nervous system strategies designed to prevent overwhelm, emotional pain, shame, abandonment, a helplessness, a loss of control, right? Um, we want to honor them and we want to teach ourselves how to protect the protector part and the part it's protecting, right? So think of it this way. I like to picture it as like little kids. So if you have like a two-year-old in the corner, like part of you that's just terrified or or is just riddled with shame. And then you have a protector part that's there to protect you from abandonment, to protect you from being misunderstood, to protect you from being um uh shamed, to protect you from being seen. What that protector part can do is does all these different things to keep that part of you safe. The reaction prevents the danger. Like this role protects the part of you that's scared from emotional pain. Over time, the behavior becomes just automated. And it's like it's it do you develop neural pathways and procedural memory. So when like anything tries to remove that behavior too quickly, or you try to remove it too quickly, the nervous system interprets that as danger. The sympathetic activate activation and our sympathetic nervous system increases. It can be feel like fight or flight, like I gotta run, or our like dorsal vagal nerve shut down. It's like more to like freeze and disconnect. So what we want to do is like you might notice if you if you feel like you have to get rid of a protector part, or you feel ashamed about it, you might become defensive, you might dissociate, you might intellectualize, like I know, and you might just become angry or unconsciously create chaos. So what we want to do is we want to think about the protector part, which is this is sounds so counterintuitive, but what it will do is it often helps. Trust me, this is weird. The protective part often is helping to regulate cortisol, adrenaline, emotional flooding. It's helping to put, you know, to like regulate this attach this attachment fear. It's helping to regulate autonomic arousal. And even unhealthy behaviors can cause temporary nervous system stabilization just because of repeated usage and that our bodies, the behavior is the thing that stops your amygdala or the fire alarm inside of you from saying, danger, danger, danger. So, like perfectionism, it reduces uncertainty, right? It reduces the possibility of being ridiculed or criticized or failing, which may be something that is just so embedded in you as shame. Anger creates a sense of power against a sense of helplessness or feeling small, right? People pleasing, what does that do? It reduces our abandonment, uh fear of abandonment, right? Overexplaining. This is an attempt to prevent rejection, right? Dissociation reduces like unbearable emotional intensity. So if something feels really big, people can just shut down, dissociate. And the body becomes dependent on this kind of strategy of regulation. So what we want to do first and foremost, just as human beings, stop telling yourself there's something wrong with you. Stop beating, stop beating yourself up for having these like these nuances that you do, like, oh gosh, I can never say no. I don't know what's wrong with me. Well, maybe you do know what not saying no means or what saying yes when you mean no means. What is that doing for you? It's protecting you. And what part is of you is being protected? The part that somehow has connected the idea of saying no to people, places, and things as a dangerous concept or as a possible abandonment. And you could have been taught that in childhood, right? So, what like what should we do about it? Like, what should, you know, in like one of the things I teach the therapist is what should a therapist do about it? They should get curious about it. And we don't want to attack the the behavior and say, we have to get rid of that behavior. You know, you're doing that again. No, we don't do that. So, and you don't want to do that to yourself, and you don't want to do that to a friend of yours. Or, like, I don't know, you're back in that situation again. I don't know why you keep doing that shit. That's not really helping the person, by the way. Fun fact. Okay. So you want to respect its function, you want to understand what fears would happen without it. Like, what is it a what is it preventing for you? And you want to build within yourself or your client, if you happen to be a therapist, you want to build a build the nervous system safety protocol first and help yourself develop a new, like new regulation pathways before removing the old ones. One of the things that's super, super cool that I love, love, love. Like, um, I ask myself, you know, when I have like this, like a behavior or a feeling, like I want, I want to like overexplain or I want to people please. I would ask myself, what is this protecting me from if I did it? Right? When did this strategy become necessary for me? What would feel dangerous if I didn't do it? Like what does it feel like would happen if I did if I said no? Right? I mean, you might feel like everything in your body, and it's really, really cool. You want to go in your body and find out where do I feel that? And that is a powerful move. You can breathe into that part of yourself and really, really like bring peace to it and seek the wisdom internally. You know, I seek God internally, but I'll also seek like my highest self, you know, the person that God's creating me to be, right? The goal is not to destroy the protector, the goal is to help the nervous system realize it's it's no longer has to work so hard to survive. So you want to like teach your body that and a very and you like you what you want to do is you symptoms are not actually the problem. They're like our bodies' attempt to bring a solution. So it's an attempted solution. And check this out. So let's say you have a protected part, which is fear, shame, like terror. It could be come from trauma. It could be, you know, maybe you were beaten as a child, right? So it's that little child in the corner who's crying and scared and knows it can't cry, knows it can't put stick up for itself. And then here comes in a protector who may, you know, help you fly under the radar and just be quiet. Or it might help you um, you know, please the person in front of you in such a way through compliments or through, you know, distracting them from, you know, the behavior, you know, the the the part of you that's ashamed. It could be all the things that I'm describing, right? It could be addictions, right? So this is the key. And I love this so much. So if you don't do it right away, don't get discouraged because it takes practice. Like all of this stuff just takes practice and getting used to because it's it doesn't come naturally for us. But think of it this way. So now you have if I like to visualize it, like, okay, let's pretend we have an eight-year-old inside, and this is just me using a visualization because it helps me to picture it. You have an eight-year-old inside who's going to protect the little two-year-old inside or the four-year-old inside by over-explaining. Okay, so let's just look at that. So what you want to do is seek your highest self or go to you know your higher power or whatever, and say to the protector part, instead of saying, get away, what are you doing? Now that's going to cause more terror, right? If you say to the protective part, what's wrong with you? Why are you here? Instead, you do the protective part, and there's a whole other thing we can do just to interact with the protector part, but to understand it, right? And then what you want to understand is kind of what its age is and what is it protecting and all of that. But then what you do with the protector and the protected is then you come in as the adult, you come in as your highest self, and you come in as the one who is going to make the good decision, will provide the communication to an external person, or bring in a mature solution so that the protector is protected, and so they can just relax and they can let go of their exhausting behavior of trying to protect that smaller part of you that's so frightened. So, what you know, one of the things I'll do is I'll say, hey guys, listen, like I'll say, you know, I know what you want to do is you really want to say yes, or you really want to overexplain, or you really want to defend yourself. But hey, why don't we try this? I'm gonna go to the person and I'm gonna say, What I've thought would be a good idea. And then you just tell the person, you know, this is not going to work for me, even though this is a lovely idea that you have, it's not going to work for me today. So I'm not going to be able to attend. But thank you so much for inviting me. That's just an example, right? Or if someone says something that you feel like you have to defend, you know, you may want to ask yourself, what is it that I really need to defend? Is it that I don't want to be misunderstood? I don't want someone to think badly of me. And what would it mean if they did think badly of me? And, you know, one of the things I might do in my higher self is I might say, hey, from what you you said here, I think there probably is a misunderstanding between us. Um, I think that possibly the way that you're seeing me is not um the intention that I actually have. Now you see, the way that I handle it is I'm not over-explaining, like, no, I didn't mean that, blah, blah, blah. It's it's me acknowledging that person's perception, but also taking over for the protector and not falling into the behavior, but creating a sense of safety for myself. So this is just a small tidbit that I want you guys to consider in any of the behaviors that you're doing that are making you really feel bad about yourself. What I try to tell myself, and it's taken me a long time to get there, is that there's nothing wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with you. We've developed a lot of skills to prevent things that we believed could happen in our childhood, and we and our brain just wants to rev up and protect us. Another thing that I do is that we have, you know, our brain, and then we have the similar components of brain of a brain in our heart and in our gut. So what I will do is I will instead of seeking out the advice of my brain, we tend to do that. We overthink and we think, we try to think our ways out of the feeling or the problem that we have. But what we're doing, like Einstein says, is we're using the thinking that has created the issue to begin with. So what's really cool, I've done it, and you know, I wasn't sold on it until I really started actively pursuing this other way of doing it. And I would go, I would breathe and I'd go into my body. So I'd go into my solar plexus, I'd go into the different, you know, centers of my body, maybe my belly or different or my heart, my throat. And I would, wherever the feeling was located, I would go in there and I would silence thought and I would allow wisdom to come to me. Like, you know, I feel this pain here, you know, God Almighty or highest self or my higher power. Would you bring the wisdom of this situation that does not include utilizing my terrified brain? And magically, it actually does. It works when we silence ourselves down. We understand that we can be the adult in our life, that if we slow down, that's a big part of it, slow down, breathe. We don't have to jump in like a protector will and solve the issue immediately. Because that way of solving it doesn't solve it. It just is an ongoing pattern of the same thing over and over again, right? Instead, to just be aware of it, like wow, I'm awake and aware in the now without judgment. So I'm awake to the fact that I'm scared, I'm awake to the fact that I want to overexplain or I want to, you know, make this go away. I'm aware of the fact that I want to avoid you and never talk to you again. I'm aware of the fact that I'm I'm I want to rage or I'm angry or whatever it is. I'm aware of it without judgment. So I'm awake to it. I'm aware without judgment in the now. And I just breathe into it. And I, and I'm, I ask questions. I ask astute questions like you would a child. Most people dismiss children. They don't ask them the right questions, like, hey, what's going on? We immediately want to stop the behavior. Be quiet. Why are you doing that? How about, you know, hey, you know, I could see you're frustrated. What's happening? They may have never been asked that question. You may have never asked yourself that question. But these are the things that will make you trust yourself and you will become the hero in your life, the one who comes in and doesn't that can be you can be steady, grounded, peaceful, that requires no wild protection. It requires trust, serenity, you know, like knowing that all is well. It is well with my soul. There is a stream of well being that flows. I can resist it or I can allow it. It flows just the same. See you next time.