The Strangest Psychological Insight I’ve Ever Heard
And My Fav C.S. Lewis Story
The ego—or personality—as it’s been explained to me by my therapist friend, is basically: “how we protect ourselves from people.”
Modern psychology, in many ways, stands on the shoulders of Jungian theory. Jung talked about the "persona"—the social mask we wear—and the "shadow"—the parts of ourselves we hide, even from ourselves. Building from his ideas, more recent therapeutic frameworks (like inner child work, parts work, or even Internal Family Systems) suggest that we develop coping mechanisms in childhood in response to early wounds. Some therapists talk about the Five Core Wounds: abandonment, rejection, betrayal, humiliation, and injustice. Whether or not your parents meant to hurt you doesn’t really matter. The point is: they did. Or rather—life did.
If you sleep train your baby, you create trauma. If you don’t sleep train your baby, you create trauma. Every “no” is trauma.
So trauma becomes this thing that's basically unavoidable—it’s the only constant in life.
And here’s where it gets interesting:
Each child learns to self-soothe differently to the same types of wounds. One kid gets loud. One kid gets quiet. One becomes the overachiever, one becomes invisible. So even though the core wounds are common, the personalities that form around them can look wildly different.
The concept is fairly simple. Since our first experiences of pain come from the people we depend on most, we start building strategies to protect ourselves—even as babies. And those strategies don’t disappear. They grow up with us. They become the armor we wear, the mask we show the world, the weapons we wield when we feel unsafe.
Personality is protection. It’s how we manage connection while avoiding hurt.
Have you ever run into guys from high school years later, and you suddenly find yourself acting like you did back then?
Even though that version of you is long gone—or so you thought?
Yeah. You’re slipping back into the armor you wore back then. The one that kept you safe in that specific social jungle. And afterward, you get in the car like, “What the heck was that?”
That’s the protective self. The personality. It reappears like an old costume hanging in your mental closet—and when the moment calls for it, you put it back on without even realizing it.
The best work of therapy isn’t to shame that costume or try to destroy it. It’s just to notice it. To recognize how it served you. How it protected you. And then to ask if it’s still needed. Because not every environment is hostile. Not everyone is trying to embarrass you.
Maybe you don’t need the same armor in your marriage that you wore in college.
You can actually thank that old version of you—the vigilant one, the sharp one, the funny one, the closed-off one—for doing such a good job keeping you safe when you needed him. But now?
He can take a long vacation.
Because you're not in danger anymore.
So here’s the radical idea that a genius therapist friend shared with me, and I’m gonna explore it further in a theological context:
