The Walling In That Backfires

This picks up where Part I left off — worth starting there if you haven’t yet.

In Part I we looked at the two basic functions of closing off: creating distance from entanglement so we can move freely, and building charge to create the momentum that overcomes indecision and hesitation. Both serve movement. Both were designed to be temporary.

In this part we look at what happens when they don’t stay temporary — how self-protective reflexes become chronic patterns, and why the strategy that was meant to help ends up making things worse.

What we hope the closing off will do — and can’t

Here is where the misunderstanding enters.

Because alongside these two real functions, we carry an unconscious expectation that walling in will do something else entirely: protect us from ever being triggered — from drawing up the mobilizing energy that was meant to move and protect us.

Not just reduce exposure. Not just build readiness. But prevent the inner reaction from firing at all. We hope it will stop us not just from crossing the threshold toward impulsive action, but from being triggered to mobilize energy in the first place.

This is the illusion. And it works just enough to feel plausible.

Think of bracing your muscles before a fall or an impact. It does something real — it stabilizes the body, organizes force, reduces certain kinds of damage. A stiffened neck absorbs some of what a loose one would have absorbed badly. It isn’t nothing.

But it doesn’t make us invulnerable. The bones can still break. The bruises still show. The bracing can only provide partial protection.

The wall works the same way. It can reduce permeability, create temporary separateness, buffer the intensity of what arrives from outside. But it cannot stop life from reaching us entirely, especially what is already inside. Our own thoughts still are running. Memory still surfaces. The feeling still arrives. And even externally — a crying child or persistently mean comments will get through eventually. The more stressed we become the less the walls are withstanding. Until at some point the trigger will fire and we will raise energy to empower us to overcome whatever pushes our buttons.

Walling in can buy time and reduce impact. It cannot create invulnerability. That distinction matters enormously — because the more we rely on it as if it could, the less available we become to what would actually help.

How the temporary becomes chronic

When activation fires and we are open, it has room to move, complete its natural arc, and settle. No harm done — energy passing through rather than accumulating. This spaciousness, and our gentle acceptance of it, is our natural capacity to hold intensity without being swept away by it: the ability to let charge calm down and move freely without interfering or escalating it into a self-feeding loop.

That process breaks down when we are walled in. As we saw in Part I, activation combined with walls creates tension that is meant to move us. The walls themselves are what turn ordinary activation into pressure.

Those walls can arise from two directions. Sometimes they are our immediate response to what’s happening outside — a dog growling, a difficult conversation, an unexpected threat. Other times they are already built into the system through past hurt and trauma, whether our own or inherited. This wiring teaches the nervous system to read ordinary uncertainty — and even its own inner risings, thoughts, emotions, impulses — as signs of constant existential danger. This second kind embeds the need for walling in so deeply that it no longer feels like a response at all. It simply feels like reality: a world that appears more dangerous than it is, filtered through unresolved wounds that never allow our defenses to fully relax.

Either way, the mechanism is the same. Energy rises to protect us, but inside a walled-in system it has nowhere to go. Instead of completing its arc, it accumulates. The charge that was meant to pass through stays, builds, and at some point can even begin feeding back into itself.

Once this self-regulating capacity — the spaciousness and ability to calm intensity — is compromised, activation becomes a very different experience. The problem is no longer just the initial energetic flash or chemical rush, but what follows. Without enough openness for the charge to dissolve naturally, each trigger can become a runaway process. The activation itself begins drawing in more energy, and that additional charge amplifies whatever it touches. Emotions become larger than the situation. Thinking speeds up and spirals. Impulse outruns discernment. The body locks into rigidity. We burn for days in distress, can’t sleep, can’t come down. Our own thoughts, emotions, and drives arrive like a tidal wave, leaving us feeling raw, beaten up by our own energy, and powerless over our inner life.

After enough experiences like this, we stop trusting our capacity to hold what arises. We begin to experience our own inner world as something dangerous. Thoughts, emotions, impulses, and the activation itself no longer feel like passing experiences but like threats we have to defend ourselves against. This is the crucial inversion: whether the walls first went up because of an external situation or because of an old wound, we continue believing we’re defending ourselves against something outside us, while the overwhelming intensity is largely being created by the trapped protective response itself. We rarely notice that the response intended to keep us safe has become the thing overwhelming us.

And once activation has fired, we cannot make it unfire.

We can suppress the charge — push it back down, hold the lid on, bury it in the subconscious — but the energy is already in the system. Suppression is not prevention. It is simply energy frozen rather than moving, with its own specific costs. What was activated still has to go somewhere. The more we interfere — trying to control, redirect, or manage the process — the more we obstruct a system that was designed to complete itself. Energy that was meant to move becomes trapped and intensified, and the system that was meant to return naturally to baseline remains loaded, reactive, and increasingly prone to repeating the cycle.

The loop that locks it in

Why does the trapped energy keep building instead of settling once the original trigger has passed? The answer lies less in the energy itself than in how we relate to it.

There is a difference in how we perceive activation that either lets it move through us or makes it get stuck. When we see it as a natural part of us moving through — something familiar, something harmless — it can complete its arc and pass, like sheep let loose on a vast field who graze and return to their stable on their own. The moment we see the same impulse as alien, as something dangerous that needs to be controlled, we mishandle it and it gets stuck. It becomes an enemy attacking us rather than something natural moving through us — not a harmless sheep but a wolf.

Once stuck, it starts to feel like a weight clamped on — something we didn’t choose and can’t put down. It clouds clarity, blunts presence, exhausts without releasing. And because that stuck state feels threatening in itself, we brace against it. Which tightens the grip. Which makes it feel even more threatening.

This is where the loop becomes self-amplifying in a way that can itself become threatening. We normally raise energy to overcome obstacles and threats. But once we begin associating this protective energy with tension, discomfort, and suffering, what was originally meant to help us starts to be experienced as something that creates pain. We begin to perceive energy itself as the threat — and that is where the same mechanism turns on itself: we raise more energy to fight the energy we just raised, in an ongoing short circuit that can build until we can no longer cope with it. We can literally ‘blow our own fuse’ with this feedback loop if we get completely entangled in it.

What follows is not fear of activation in the abstract. It is something more specific: the fear of not being able to regulate what has been triggered. That fear is what the entire architecture of closing off reorganizes itself around.

To avoid it, we wall in and brace harder. But more closed means more tension and more reactivity — the very thing we were trying to prevent. Opening from inside this state feels so counterintuitive that we rarely arrive at the idea it would actually help.

What was once a temporary tool becomes a permanent strategy. The walls stay up. The controlling attitude stays vigilant. The force stays as compressed tension behind the dam — not in readiness for action but as a chronic holding pattern.

Releasing starts to feel just as dangerous as holding. The energy that has accumulated is no longer proportionate to what the situation actually calls for — it has been intensified by being trapped. And when it finally moves, it comes out too large, too sudden, too charged for the moment. That disproportion is what makes acting on it feel unsafe. Not because movement itself is dangerous, but because we sense that what comes out will be too much — and being too much carries its own consequences. Others pull back, judge, label. And we do the same to ourselves: the guilt afterward, the shame of having been that intense, the self-rejection for losing the balance we were trying to hold. So we keep the lid on. And the holding itself tightens further.

And so lowering the wall starts feeling existential — like a life-threatening exposure.
Which leaves us with no perceived other choice but to keep the walls up, because coming down would require trusting our own capacity to regulate. And that no longer feels reliable enough to hold the experience of being fully alive. So we try to filter, dampen, suppress to keep the situation under control — and pay the price in our own vitality, and in the loss of our capacity for tenderness and intimacy.

Why the strategy undermines itself

This is where it backfires — and it does so on both fronts simultaneously.

The distance that made decisive action and self-centering possible becomes the thing that makes intimate connection impossible. We closed to function and survive. We stayed closed because we didn’t know anymore how to hold the charge openly — until the closing became the condition of life. The people around us stop reaching us — not because we don’t want connection, but because the wall that was meant to be temporary has become the architecture we inhabit.

The second front becomes just as corrosive.

The compression that was meant to create momentum now creates chronic tension instead. A constant low-grade state of readiness for a threat that never fully resolves. The lost confidence of being able to self-regulate paired with a back log of past experiences that were never allowed to finish their movement and now bleed into the way we experience our surroundings, inner as well as outward. And as we can’t take on any more charge without risk of overflow, the flow of energy needs to get reduced just to stay manageable. We instinctively brace and tighten — particularly around the pelvis and along the spine — and that physical contraction is what reduces the flow. Over time the bracing becomes chronic, and relaxing consciously doesn’t resolve it, because the physical tension is held in place by an energetic density that triggers the muscles to stay contracted. And once energy flow is blocked, awareness dims with it. Vitality flattens. Lacking the energy to stay present we become easier to trigger, and have a harder time settling afterward. The range of what feels safe to allow narrows more and more — until one day the closed state stops feeling like defense and starts feeling like personality.

The strategy that was meant to create activation and focus for peak performance ends up cutting us off from each other, dimming our vitality, and making overwhelm much more likely — until defensive-aggressive reactivity becomes the default and a paranoid outlook the very condition we mistake for reality.

The closing off is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Only the situation it was designed for now never ends.

The double bind

If pressure is the problem, the solution seems obvious: open up. Stop compressing. Let the held state move rather than containing it further. Don’t interfere.

And this does work — once the conditions for it exist.

But the conclusion is incomplete on its own. Because it doesn’t account for what’s actually on the other side of the wall.

The environment is genuinely disturbed. Other people are running their own version of these compressed states, their own activation, their own discharge strategies. The tension a sensitive person feels in a room is not imagined — it is an accurate reading of what’s moving there. Modern life runs at a pitch of chronic stress, driven desire, ambient aggression, and diffuse fear. What we open into when we lower the wall is a field that is itself dysregulated — and without the internal regulatory capacity to hold what arrives, opening doesn’t necessarily produce the relief we hoped for. It can just as easily produce distress, triggering, and flooding depending on our environment. It’s like staying home to recover from a cold and the moment we feel better and lower our walls to step out — we just catch it again, with nothing yet rebuilt to meet it.

So the real catch-22 is this: close down, and the dam builds pressure until the interior becomes the threat. Open up, and the disturbed field outside arrives faster and more intense than we are ready to metabolize it.

We remain stuck between a rock and a hard place until we develop our self regulating capacity that it can handle the world of today.

And it is not because the mechanism is broken. It just was never built for threats that do not naturally resolve and pass. The wall was never meant to stay up forever.

The closing off was designed for a pre-reflective nervous system. Awareness came later and doesn’t yet know how to stay out of the way. And that is what makes this catch-22 so difficult to exit. It is not about the mechanism itself — the mechanism is self-correcting, given the right conditions. But what keeps it running is the observer watching it and classifying it as threat, and intervening — and that intervention is precisely what turns a self-completing process into a feedback loop.

This is why the answer is never more effort, more control, more management. Every attempt to fix it from inside the loop only tightens it. What is needed is something the thinking mind cannot easily do: stop interfering with what was always capable of regulating itself.

The path back is regaining trust in our ability to remain open to what we experience without becoming triggered or overwhelmed. Regaining our natural capacity to self-regulate — opening up and tuning into the spaciousness and calming quality of awareness itself, which can ease and harmonize charge rather than amplify it, transforming it from a distress signal into real empowerment.

The mechanism itself carries no judgment.

Tension serves. Openness serves. Neither pole is wrong — and neither type of person is broken. The too driven and defended aren’t villains. The too open and dissolving aren’t victims. Both are running the same mechanism with the dial stuck at opposite ends — one sacrificing contact and by that empathy for momentum, the other sacrificing momentum and by that independence for contact. Unregulated, both cause harm — inward in one direction, outward in the other. But the pattern behind both is the same loss of range. And neither restriction is fixed — it is a bias, not a destiny. And when the unregulated extreme does cause harm, it is good to remember that whoever is caught up in it, even ourselves, doesn’t do it on purpose.

The work ahead then isn’t about finding the perfect middle. Our natural tendency may lean one way or the other — and that is fine. What matters is not losing access to the other side entirely.

The Buddha described it as a lute string: too loose and it won’t play, too tight and it snaps. But the string doesn’t stay at one tension — it adapts to what the music asks for. Soft passages and crescendos. Rest and full force and everything in between.

Rediscovering that range in ourselves is where this journey goes next.

The aftermath strategies

Once the closing becomes chronic, the strategies for managing what’s building inside take over and split in two directions.

Inwardly we suppress or ignore — pushing it underground, growing cold toward our own interior, narrowing the range of what we allow ourselves to fully experience and feel. The price we pay is numbness and an emotional and energetic weight that colors everything we perceive, wearing us down.

And what we can’t suppress we discharge outward — finding a carrier for what has nowhere else to go. Pressure relocates. Anger becomes blame. Shame gets redistributed onto whoever is available — often the most open, permeable, or emotionally available person nearby. The empaths we turn into scapegoats, lightning rods, and emotional containers.

The discomfort doesn’t disappear. It only moves to someone else. And all too often it returns multiplied.

Neither direction resolves anything. Both are avoidance strategies — ways of not having to feel the charge that has been activated. We push it somewhere we don’t have to feel it anymore, unconscious or outward, because we don’t know how to reestablish the spaciousness and gentleness that would allow it to dissolve on its own.

Knowing this changes where choice lives

We cannot control the impulse once it fires — by then it’s too late and the body is already moving. But what we can do is work with the mechanism before it reaches that point.

When we feel the walls going up and the pressure beginning to build, the counterintuitive move is to open. To intently soften the boundary that is about to brace — to widen the container enough that the charge has room to disperse rather than concentrate. Give the charge a large enough field and the pressure cannot build to the threshold that forces us to act. In that way the tension stays present but never becomes overwhelming. We have the benefit of the extra charge while remaining in contact with what is happening without being hijacked by it.

The same logic applies in the other direction. Closing off enough — centering, creating distance from the relational field — keeps us from getting drawn into entanglement that would pull us into reactions we didn’t choose.

So the choice is never direct. We don’t choose the impulse or refuse it in the moment it arrives. We choose earlier — opening wide enough that the charge disperses, or closing enough that we don’t get pulled in. The intervention is indirect. But it is real. And once we see the mechanism, we can begin to work with it rather than be worked by it.