What If It Was Never the Enemy?
On fear that's been there since childhood, and what changes when you stop fighting it
On Friday’s call, we opened with a group release on the background tension most of us carry without noticing — that quiet bracing for something that hasn’t happened yet and may never happen. Not a specific fear. Just the body, on alert.
Someone was the first to step up afterward. She laughed and said she’d read the topic the day before and immediately contracted. “Dude, I think I was born, I think I literally came out of the womb with a shoe hanging on to drop.”
As we worked with it, a memory surfaced. The bracing had been there since she was six or seven. Her body knew it well. And what she said next was honest in the way that matters: “I don’t know how not to have a shoe drop.”
That’s where most of us stop. We locate the pattern, name it, and then try to get rid of it. The whole weight of the effort goes into making the bracing go away.
But here’s what I’ve noticed, again and again, in this work: the thing we’re fighting hardest to remove is almost always something that once saved us. The hypervigilance that now exhausts you at 3 a.m. is the same mechanism that kept a six-year-old safe. It’s not a defect. It’s a superpower that got out of control.
You’re no longer at war with yourself. You’re not broken and trying to fix the broken part. You’re standing in front of something that has been working overtime on your behalf — for decades — and you’ve never once said thank you.
When I asked her if she could turn toward the bracing with love — with actual gratitude for what it had been doing all this time — the whole thing started to unravel. Not because gratitude is a technique. But because the war stopped. The part that was bracing didn’t need to defend itself against her anymore.
She felt it in her body. The holding started to loosen. And then something else emerged underneath — a tenderness she hadn’t expected. The bracing had also been keeping something at bay: the vulnerability of not being on guard. Of letting people close.
She quoted a line she remembered: “I want to be loved, so nobody come near me.”
That’s the structure. The protection and the longing, running side by side. The bracing keeps you safe. It also keeps you alone. And you can’t release it by fighting it, because fighting is exactly what it knows how to do.
You release it by recognizing what it’s been doing. By thanking it. By letting the war be over: not because you’ve won, but because there was never an enemy.
If something in you has been bracing for a long time, so long you barely notice it anymore, you might try this: instead of asking it to leave, ask what it’s been protecting you from. And then see if you can offer it something it may never have received.
Not a correction. Not a strategy.
Just a quiet thank you.