When Love Hides Behind a Plan or a Disappearing Act
Dance of the Protectors.. closing out March
This month we've been sitting with the Dance of the Protectors watching the ways our protective parts step in to keep us safe, and how those same parts can quietly, unintentionally, keep love at arm's length. We've looked at the Pursuer and the Distancer, the four horsemen, and what happens when someone's nervous system has made a permanent home in either urgency or shutdown with the Hare and the Tortoise.
This week we're finishing the month with two more pairs .. two more protective strategies that made enormous sense at some point, strategies that kept someone emotionally safe, or at least safe enough, when the alternative felt too frightening. The goal of IFS isn't to get rid of them. It's to understand them befriend our protectors and find a Self to part relationship… So lets get curious!
The Pleaser and the Controller — different armour, same fear
The Pleaser and the Controller look very different from the outside. One softens, accommodates, and says yes when they mean maybe. The other organises, takes charge, and makes sure things run smoothly often because smoothly feels like safely. But underneath both of them, IFS would suggest, something similar is happening: feelings are being managed rather than felt.
The Pleaser's protection is relational keep the other person comfortable, keep the peace, don't take up too much space. Conflict, for this part, can feel genuinely dangerous. Not inconvenient. Dangerous. So it pre-empts it at every turn, often without the person even noticing. The cost is that their own needs become invisible sometimes even to themselves.
The Controller and I want to be clear here about the version we're exploring this week is not the critical, disciplinary controller. This is something more benign and arguably more common: the part that manages anxiety by managing the environment. The schedule, the logistics, the "right" way to load the dishwasher. There's often deep care behind this part. It genuinely believes that if everything is in order, everyone will be okay. But it can leave a partner feeling controlled without anyone meaning to control them.
Terry Real writes about this in terms of what we're protecting against .. not just the other person's reaction, but our own interior experience. When we manage outward, we don't have to sit with inward. Both the Pleaser and the Controller, in their own way, are doing exactly that.
What would it look like for either of these parts to relax, just slightly, and let the person's Self come forward? In IFS terms, that's the direction of healing — not replacing these parts, but building enough trust with them that they don't have to work quite so hard.
The Anxious Planner and the Freedom-Protecting Avoider — when anticipation meets escape
The second pair this week is one I find particularly poignant, because both parts in this dance are, in their own way, trying to get to something good. The Anxious Planner wants security wants to know that the future is held, that love is reliable, that nothing will catch them off guard. The Freedom-Protecting Avoider wants space — wants to breathe, to not feel hemmed in, to trust that love won't swallow them whole.
The problem is that when they find each other, they tend to amplify each other's fear. The more the Anxious Planner reaches for certainty, more plans, more check-ins, more future-mapping, the more the Freedom-Protecting Avoider retreats. And the more the Avoider retreats, the more anxious the Planner becomes. Neither is doing anything wrong. Both are doing exactly what their protective parts have learned to do.
In polyvagal terms, we might recognise the Anxious Planner's nervous system as mobilised scanning for threat, trying to exert some influence over an unpredictable environment. The Freedom-Protecting Avoider may be closer to a dorsal vagal response a kind of collapse into withdrawal when the demand feels like too much. Deb Dana's work on neuroception helps us understand that neither person is choosing this. The body is leading, and the mind is following.
What both parts share and this is worth sitting with is that underneath the planning and the avoiding, there is longing. The Planner longs to feel safe in love. The Avoider longs to feel free enough to actually show up in it. The dance keeps both of those longings just out of reach.
The question underneath all of it
Across all four protectors this week — the Pleaser, the Controller, the Anxious Planner, the Freedom-Protecting Avoider.. there's a question worth carrying: what is this part trying to protect me from feeling?
That's the IFS inquiry that tends to open something. Not "why are you like this" or "how do I stop doing this" but genuine curiosity about what the part is carrying, what it learned, what it's afraid would happen if it stepped back for a moment.
This is slow work. It's also, I think, the most compassionate work available to us in relationships turning toward our own interior with the same warmth we'd ideally bring to a partner.
If you want to go deeper — some books worth reading
If this month's content has stirred something and you want to keep exploring, here are some books I genuinely return to:
No Bad Parts — Richard Schwartz. The most accessible entry point into IFS, and a genuinely moving read. Schwartz walks you through the model as it applies to your own interior world, not as a clinical framework but as a lived practice.
Us — Terry Real. RLT distilled into something readable, honest, and occasionally uncomfortable in the best way. Real is direct about what keeps couples stuck and what it actually takes to shift.
Polyvagal Theory in Therapy — Deb Dana. If the nervous system language in this month's content has resonated, this is the place to go next. Dana translates Porges' science into something genuinely usable for understanding how we connect — and disconnect.
The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk. Not specifically a relationship book, but essential background for understanding why these patterns live in the body, not just the mind. Illuminating on why "just talking about it" is often not enough.
April brings a shift in focus we'll be stepping back to revisit some of the foundations of IFS and relational theory, making space for those who are newer to this work before we go further into the more complex dynamics. If you've been following along this month, thank you. It means a lot to know this content is landing somewhere.
And if any of this is bringing up something you want to explore more do join one of the IFS Drop-In Circles running across Gloucestershire this year.
With warmth, Natasha
Bibliography
Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Real, T. (2022). Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. Rodale Books.
Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Sounds True.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking Penguin.