We spend our childhood building emotional armor and our adulthood trying to get free of it.  It serves to honor this armoring and any dissociative process that helped protect us from what seemed shocking or harmful.  When children lack clear guidance, they invent ways to cope -served then, not so useful as an adult.

Honor that your armoring was formed for a reason, a protection against unsavory people or parents’ pain, a defense against unbearable feelings, a response to being forced to cope beyond your understanding.  As you honor how it has served you, it can soften over time, allow your essential essence to shine through.  

What we resist, persists, so take time for your young selves who felt the need for armoring, to get safe and realize there is, finally, an adult on duty.  When they hear you’ve got this, they can relax, stop reacting to the world with shut-down or fear.  Then armoring can slowly dissolve.  

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