The Walling In That Backfires

Most human suffering is not just the natural pain that comes with life. Much of it comes from the exhausting, ultimately self-defeating effort to avoid pain altogether.

For that we close off. We build inner walls and brace our bodies. We stop letting things in. And most of the time the closing that was meant to protect us ends up becoming just another source of injury.

But to understand why it backfires, we first have to understand what it was actually built for. Because the closing off is not doing what most people think it is — and that misunderstanding is where the trouble begins.

What we think the closing off is doing

The most natural way to understand our own defenses is this: keeping bad things out. Staying safe. Not letting life hurt us.

And on the surface that seems to make sense — until we notice that it can’t actually work in the way we hoped it would.

Closing off cannot stop a difficult relationship from being difficult. It cannot prevent loss, failure, or the friction of being around other people. It cannot stop physical pain — even bodily tension from bracing cannot prevent bruises, broken bones, or cuts. And it cannot reach the thoughts and feelings already running inside us — the memory that surfaces uninvited, the anxiety that arrives before we’ve registered any visible threat, the hurt from years ago that still quietly shapes what we do today.

Whatever the closing off is doing, it isn’t keeping life out. Life is already in.

So what is it actually doing?

The two real functions

The closing off is doing something much more specific than most people realize. It has two distinct functions — and both of them serve the same underlying purpose: keeping us capable of movement.

1. Creating distance

Imagine a puffer jacket that dampens the impact of the surroundings. The heat stays in, the cold stays out.

The first function works like this. Walling ourselves in creates temporary distance from what we are emotionally entangled with — loosening the bond enough that we can act from our own center rather than being pulled by what surrounds us. It is a centering function as much as a protective one.

A surgeon in the operating room cannot afford to feel the full weight of what is happening emotionally around them. The fear in the room, the tension of the team, the bond with the person on the table — if any of that gets in too far it becomes distraction, and distraction at that level costs lives. They need to close off and detach enough to function. Not because they don’t care. Because caring too much in that moment makes precise action impossible.

The wall here is not about coldness. It is about staying free enough from the relational field to keep moving through it cleanly.

2. Building and storing force

The second function is less visible — and probably the deeper and more survival-oriented one.

Walling in doesn’t only block contact. It also creates a container. A sealed space in which charge accumulates until the pressure is high enough to force action.

Imagine you round a corner and a hungry dog is blocking the path — growling, locked onto you. The body doesn’t wait for a decision. Everything contracts. The walls go up, the breath shortens, the stomach tightens — it feels like sealing yourself in. And once that space closes, whatever activation is running inside it begins to build. The smaller and more defended the container, the more concentrated the pressure becomes.

Think of a champagne bottle with someone holding the cork down and shaking it. Pure tension waiting for release.

At some point it becomes too much to hold. Something trips it — and the body moves before the mind can veto anything. You grab the stick beside the path and throw it, or you turn and run — fast, decisive, without deliberation. Either way the system did its job. The charge that was building as tension releases as force in motion.

That is the mechanism completing itself — walls closed, charge built, threshold crossed, body moved.

The purpose of the contraction was never stress. It was readiness. Without it we hesitate, freeze, get lost in too many possibilities. The tension is what overrides that holdback. So much charge that the body simply has to act.

When either function gets stuck

Both functions were designed to be temporary — situational, short-lived, followed by opening and release. The problem begins when they become permanent.

The surgeon who never leaves the operating room, who has closed off so completely and for so long that warmth, intimacy, and aliveness have gone quiet is one side of the issue. The distance that was meant to be temporary has become the only register available. Still functional but no longer able to relate.

The highly sensitive person who never manages to hold a boundary, who absorbs everything, loses themselves in every room they enter, gets pulled into loops they didn’t start and can’t easily exit is the other. Too open to act from their own center and too entangled to move freely.

One is a wall that never comes down. The other is no wall at all.

And on the charge side there is also another issue. The one where the action never comes. When the body closes in, the pressure builds — and the release doesn’t follow, we are left with the stuck charge. The charge that was meant to discharge through movement stays compressed, hardening gradually into something that no longer feels like readiness but like a permanent weight. Rigidity rather than potential. A brick wall around us that holds us back rather than a spring that moves us forward.

When polar bears are tranquilized and wake up, they instinctively shake their whole body before doing anything else. Not a learned behavior — a reflex. The system knows it needs to move what got stuck before it can return to baseline.

The balance between open and closed isn’t a fixed position. It’s a capacity to adapt. Wall in when the situation calls for it, release when it’s over, return to ground. The trouble is not that we close off. The trouble is that we forgot how to open again.

Continue reading in The Walling In That Backfires Part II — How the temporary becomes permanent