Reframe self-sabotage as protection: Jessica Baum’s SAFE reveals why patterns shield childhood wounds like abandonment. Welcome protectors with curiosity, inner dialogue, anchors, and gratitude to heal overworking, people-pleasing, and emotional blocks for true freedom.
You know you work too much. You’re aware that burying yourself in tasks is destroying your relationship and your health. You’ve tried to slow down a hundred times, made resolutions, set boundaries. Yet here you are again at midnight, responding to emails that could wait until morning, while your partner sleeps alone in the next room. You feel like a failure. Like something is fundamentally broken in you that you can’t just stop.
But what if the problem isn’t that you’re self-sabotaging or lack willpower? What if that compulsive work pattern is actually a brilliant protection system doing exactly what it was designed to do—keeping you from drowning in pain you’re not yet equipped to feel?
In SAFE, psychotherapist Jessica Baum introduces a revolutionary perspective on the behaviors we typically label as self-destructive, addictive, or dysfunctional. She calls them “protectors”—adaptive responses developed in childhood to shield us from intolerable emotional pain. Rather than battling these patterns, Baum argues that healing begins with welcoming them, understanding their purpose, and only then gently working to address the wounds they’re protecting.
The Problem with “Just Stop”
Most approaches to changing unwanted behaviors focus on the behavior itself. Stop overworking. Stop overeating. Stop picking unavailable partners. Stop drinking. Stop scrolling social media for hours. Just stop.
But this approach consistently fails because it misunderstands what these patterns actually are. They’re not random bad habits or moral failures. They’re sophisticated protective systems your inner world developed when you couldn’t get what you needed as a child.
“For many years of my life, I was a ‘Yes’ girl,” Baum writes about her own protective pattern. “I took great pride in my ability to be there for anyone who needed me, even at the drop of a hat. As a result, I took on way more than I could possibly handle. My schedule was always packed. I didn’t realize it then, but my need to always be on the move was an attempt to avoid my inner pain and suffering.”
The frenetic busyness wasn’t the problem—it was the solution. The actual problem was the ocean of abandonment pain underneath that felt so intolerable that constant motion was the only way to stay above water. Telling Baum to “just slow down” would have been like telling someone treading water in the middle of the ocean to “just relax.” Without addressing what she was swimming away from, slowing down meant drowning.
Understanding Your Protector System
When you’re a child and your emotional needs consistently go unmet—whether through neglect, dismissal, unpredictability, or abuse—you face an impossible situation. You need connection to survive, but the people you depend on can’t or won’t provide the safety and attunement you need. The pain of this abandonment is genuinely unbearable for a developing nervous system.
Your psyche does something brilliant: it develops protectors. These are internal strategies that keep you from feeling the full weight of that abandonment until you have the resources to process it. Every person develops their own unique combination of protectors based on their temperament, their specific wounds, and what adaptations worked in their particular family system.
Common protectors include:
- Overworking/over-achieving: Keeps you busy and provides external validation to fill the inner emptiness
- People-pleasing: Attempts to control others’ responses and prevent abandonment by being indispensable
- Emotional withdrawal: Disconnects you from feelings that seem dangerous or overwhelming
- Perfectionism: Attempts to earn love through flawless performance
- Addictive substances or behaviors: Temporarily numbs pain or fills the void
- Intellectualization: Moves experience from the body into the head where it feels more manageable
- Controlling behaviors: Attempts to prevent unpredictability that triggers old wounds
- Self-criticism: Beats you up before others can reject you
“Our protectors are actually our system’s attempt to shield us from emotional pain and uncertainty,” Baum explains. “Many of them, including avoidance and those critical internal voices in our heads telling us to move quickly and do what society or family expects of us, operate out of our left hemisphere.”
Why Your Protectors Deserve Respect
Here’s what most approaches to behavior change miss: your protectors are not your enemies. They’re the reason you survived your childhood with your psyche intact. They kept you functional when you might have otherwise collapsed under the weight of unmet needs.
Baum describes working with a client named Mitchell who had debilitating headaches. As they explored the headaches’ origins, they discovered a harsh internal voice that would tell him “Shut up and don’t rock the boat, you idiot!” whenever he felt excited or enthusiastic about something.
Mitchell’s immediate response was to hate this voice and want it gone. But Baum guided him differently: “As we felt our way into the world of this protector, it was easy to feel gratitude for the way he tried to make sure Mitchell wouldn’t lose precious connections again.”
Mitchell’s natural childhood exuberance had led to his parents withdrawing their love. The critical voice developed to keep him in line, ensuring he wouldn’t risk further abandonment. It was doing its job perfectly—the problem was that Mitchell no longer needed that level of protection, but the protector didn’t know that.
The Cost of Protection
While protectors serve a crucial function, they also come with significant costs. The same pattern that keeps you from feeling childhood abandonment pain also prevents you from being fully present in your current relationships, from feeling joy, from living authentically.
Baum describes her own experience: “Inevitably, the void I felt inside would catch up with me and I’d realize that I actually had no safe place to turn. When this happened, I’d quickly go back to working like a little machine.”
The overwork protected her from feeling the void, but it also kept her in a chronic state of stress, damaged her relationships, and prevented her from accessing the very support she needed to heal. Eventually, her body forced the issue: “I landed in the emergency room because I thought I was having a heart attack.”
This is what protectors do: they keep us functional enough to survive, but they also keep us stuck in survival mode. We can’t heal what we can’t feel, so protectors—while necessary at one point—ultimately prevent the healing that would make them unnecessary.
The Left-Hemisphere Connection
Baum draws on the work of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist to explain why so many protectors involve disconnection from emotion. Our right hemisphere is where we store traumatic implicit memories and where we connect with others in warm, safe ways. Our left hemisphere is where we analyze, categorize, and disconnect from emotional experience.
When childhood wounds live in the right hemisphere and feel overwhelming, one protective strategy is to shift into left-hemisphere dominance. This is why so many people with attachment trauma become intellectualizers, workaholics, or perfectionists—these are all left-hemisphere adaptations that create distance from right-hemisphere emotional pain.
“As Archie and I began to explore her inner world more deeply, we took note of the sensations that were showing up in her body,” Baum writes about a client. “First, her inner father arrived to let her know what he expected of her. Her body began to share its story of shame through her lowered head and shoulders. Before too long, her deeper inner world began to let us know how utterly alone she had felt all her life.”
For Archie, the protection of striving for achievement kept her from feeling the profound loneliness underneath. But it also meant she lived her life in a constant state of anxious doing rather than peaceful being.
The Cultural Dimension
Western culture actively reinforces left-hemisphere protectors by valorizing independence, self-reliance, achievement, and emotional control. We celebrate workaholics as “driven” and “successful.” We admire people who “don’t need anyone.” We tell children that “big kids don’t cry.”
This means many people’s protectors are actually supported and rewarded by the culture, making them even harder to recognize as adaptations to pain rather than healthy ways of being.
“Our culture believes that independence and self-reliance are the gold standard for healthy maturity,” Baum writes. “Nothing could be further from the truth. As the brilliant American psychologist and researcher Stephen Porges says, ‘Connection is a biological imperative.'”
When your protective pattern of self-reliance earns you praise, promotions, and social validation, recognizing it as a wound-driven adaptation becomes incredibly difficult. It looks like success, so how could it be a problem?
Meeting Your Protectors
The first step in healing isn’t trying to eliminate your protectors—it’s actually getting to know them. Baum introduces a practice she calls “welcoming your inner protectors” that involves approaching these patterns with curiosity rather than judgment.
“Instead of wanting to make them go away, Archie and I began to say to them, ‘Everyone is welcome here. Tell me your story. What would have happened to me without you? What kind of pain and fear are you protecting me from feeling?'” Baum writes.
This welcoming stance represents a fundamental shift. Rather than seeing yourself as broken because you can’t stop overworking, you begin to appreciate that overwork has been keeping you from collapsing into childhood abandonment. Rather than hating yourself for choosing unavailable partners, you recognize that the pattern protects you from the vulnerability of real intimacy that was dangerous in your family.
When you can genuinely thank your protectors for their service, something remarkable happens: they begin to soften. They were developed in an environment where it wasn’t safe to feel, but your acknowledgment itself creates a small space of safety. The protector can relax slightly because it’s being seen and appreciated rather than battled.
The Practice of Inner Dialogue
Baum guides readers through a practice of actually dialoguing with protectors, treating them as parts of yourself with their own perspective and purpose:
“Ask yourself which protector would like to come forward. This part of you is more like a person than a thing, and with practice you’ll find that you can have a conversation with them. It can be very helpful to begin with a gesture of welcome if that feels natural to you. ‘Thank you for coming’ or ‘Hi there, glad you’re here.'”
This might sound strange if you’ve never approached your inner world this way, but the practice of internal dialogue is supported by Internal Family Systems therapy and similar modalities. The protectors really are like sub-personalities—they have their own logic, their own concerns, and their own ways of trying to keep you safe.
When Mitchell dialogued with the critical voice that gave him headaches, he discovered it was desperately trying to prevent him from being rejected again for his natural enthusiasm. When Baum spoke with her “Yes girl” protector, she understood it was trying to fill the void of abandonment by making herself indispensable to others.
Protectors as Gatekeepers
One crucial insight Baum offers: your protectors are also the gatekeepers to your deeper wounds. They’re standing guard at the door, and they won’t let you through until they trust that you have the resources to handle what’s on the other side.
“By recognizing these parts of herself as allies, we began to reduce the inner battle to more manageable proportions,” Baum writes. “These parts of herself were also the gatekeepers of her deeper inner world, so befriending them meant the source of her upset was going to become more available to us.”
This is why battling your protectors never works. The harder you fight against them, the more convinced they become that you’re not ready to face the wounds they’re protecting. They dig in deeper, become more rigid, more controlling of your behavior.
But when you approach them with respect and curiosity, when you genuinely acknowledge the impossible situation they were developed to handle, they begin to trust. They start to believe that maybe you do have enough support now—enough anchors, enough safety—that feeling the old wounds won’t destroy you.
The Role of Anchors in Softening Protections
A crucial piece Baum emphasizes: you can’t heal protectors alone. Remember, the wound underneath is often the absence of safe accompaniment. The protector developed because you were alone with intolerable pain. So the presence of safe others—what Baum calls “anchors”—is essential for protectors to feel safe enough to relax.
“When we have the right support to explore our childhood wounds, our system wisely tucked away these memories of pain and fear in our bellies, hearts, muscles, and more, just waiting for the right support to come forward so they can receive what they need and be healed,” Baum explains.
As you build relationships with anchors—people who can be present without judgment or agenda to fix you—your protectors gradually recognize that conditions have changed. You’re not that alone child anymore. There are people who can help you hold what feels overwhelming.
This is why Baum emphasizes the importance of therapy, listening partners, and trusted friends throughout the healing journey. Your protectors need evidence that you won’t be alone with the pain before they’ll allow you access to it.
When Protectors Start to Soften
As your anchors hold space for you and you practice welcoming your protectors, something shifts. The compulsive quality of the protective behaviors begins to ease. You still might work hard, but there’s space around it—you can choose to take a break without the urgent feeling that you’ll fall apart if you stop.
You might still prefer some emotional distance, but you can also access vulnerability when the situation calls for it. You might still have moments of people-pleasing, but you can also say no when needed without the terror that the person will abandon you.
The protectors don’t disappear entirely—they become right-sized. They’re available when you genuinely need them, but they’re no longer running your entire life on autopilot.
Baum describes this transformation in her own life: “Looking back on this experience, I am grateful for the perspective that meeting these tender younger parts of myself was both necessary and transformative. As deep as the pain was, I felt as if I was sewing back together the rough edges left by all the losses, and reconnecting with my fundamental faith in the power of nurturing relationships.”
The Paradox of Letting Go
There’s a beautiful paradox in this work: the more you welcome your protectors and appreciate their function, the less power they have over you. When you stop fighting them, they stop having to fight to maintain control.
This is counterintuitive in a culture that emphasizes willpower and “just do it.” We’re taught that if we want to change, we need to force ourselves, use discipline, override our impulses. But with protectors, that approach backfires because it confirms their belief that the inner world isn’t safe enough yet.
“Welcoming our protectors because we experience them as necessary adaptations, rather than hindrances to getting better, is crucial to our healing,” Baum writes. “We all have them even if we are not aware of them or precisely what they are protecting.”
When you approach a protector with genuine appreciation—”Thank you for keeping me functional when I had no other options. Thank you for helping me survive my childhood. You did an amazing job”—the protector can finally exhale. It’s been waiting your whole life to be acknowledged rather than rejected.
The Long View on Protective Patterns
Baum is clear that this work takes time. Your protectors were developed over years in childhood and have been reinforced through decades of use. They’re not going to disappear because you spent twenty minutes dialoguing with them once.
But with consistent practice—regularly checking in with your body, noticing when protectors are active, welcoming them, and addressing the underlying wounds with support from anchors—the protective patterns gradually lose their grip.
“As we transition from the euphoria of the honeymoon stage to the next stage of the relationship, we find ourselves at a fork in the road,” Baum writes about how protectors show up in relationships. “For Louisa and Andre, the only path was breaking apart. But the inevitable conflict in relationships doesn’t have to spell the end for the partnership.”
The difference is whether both people are willing to work with their protectors compassionately rather than acting them out unconsciously. When you can recognize “Oh, I’m overworking right now because I’m scared of feeling the loneliness from childhood,” you have choice. When you’re unconsciously driven by the protector, you don’t.
Liberation Through Acceptance
The ultimate promise of this approach is profound: the very things you’ve been trying to eliminate through willpower, the patterns you’ve judged yourself harshest for, the behaviors that have made you feel most broken—these are actually evidence of your psyche’s wisdom and resilience.
Your protectors aren’t signs of weakness. They’re signs that your inner world was strong enough and creative enough to find ways to survive circumstances that could have shattered you. Every compulsive behavior, every avoidance pattern, every protective strategy represents your system saying “I will find a way to keep going no matter what.”
That deserves respect, not contempt. And when you can offer that respect—to your protectors and to yourself—the healing journey truly begins.