It's never all or nothing. Picture your whole defense system as a literal defense (in my case, a castle :-) and you are not going to knock down the castle, you are just going to realize that it's your castle and you control the various defensive parts. You can decide when to open and close the drawbridge and whether to have alligators or swans in the moat!

Everyone has defenses, at all times. But think of the Great Wall of China versus a garden wall. Some of our defenses we've over-developed because we have felt attacked from that direction. So, they have become habitually "better" developed, kind of like the difference between a highway, a country road, and a path through the woods? Some of the defenses need balancing, the trash picked up beside the highway and a bicycle lane put in instead where the fast-track commuter lane was.

How did my T and I do this? Over time and with conversation back and forth. When I got scared, I took a chance instead of running and kept moving forward. I caught myself when I caught a feeling and blurted out what was happening, when it was happening. I named what I was feeling when I was feeling it. I recognized that T was at my side instead of "opposite" me; she wasn't a teacher/leader, but a friend of my growth who was with me but had to depend on me for direction.

I quit thinking about what T was thinking, doing, how she felt about me, etc. and how I felt about her and started to look at the work only and look at her in relation to the work. When I felt hurt by her, I did not take it personally, did not look at the "hurt" feeling but at what she had said. You know how when you point, the cat looks at your finger instead of where you're pointing? :-) I started to look at where she was pointing.

For example, she once said, "Not if you do what you usually do!" and I felt I was criticized as my stepmother had criticized me, telling me I couldn't do anything right and was going to fail again. But, I worked on that for 2-3 days nonstop, looked at the larger picture. My T got nothing from criticizing me and that was not her style. She was not harsh like my stepmother, did not "snap" in anger so, I reasoned, the words had probably not been meant as criticism. What else is there? I finally was able to picture it like the two of us on a white water raft trip through the gorge in a little rubber boat and T was helping spot the rocks that might capsize us. Can you see it? She had actually said, "Hey, watch that rock there, it got us last time!" See how that changes everything?