The 6 F’s of Working with a Protector
A practical sequence: Find, Focus, Flesh out, Feel toward, beFriend, Fear.
Description
Richard Schwartz’s shorthand for approaching a protector. Each F is really a checkpoint for whether you are still in Self:
- Find the part.
- Focus attention on it.
- Flesh out the details — how it feels, how old it seems, what it does.
- Feel toward it, and notice honestly what you find.
- beFriend it, respectfully and without a schedule.
- Fear: ask what it is afraid would happen if it stopped doing what it’s doing.
Two notes from using it a lot. The fourth F is the real gate: if what you feel toward the part is irritation, you have found another part rather than Self, and the honest move is to work with that one instead of pretending to be warm. And the last F is the one that pays — “what are you afraid would happen if you didn’t do this?” is close to the single most useful question in the model, and it is at the end, which means people run out of time before reaching it.
Also, yes, the mnemonic is a bit tortured. “beFriend” is not really an F word and we have made peace with it.
What The 6 F’s of Working with a Protector is NOT:
Not a rigid script, and not a checklist you can run while thinking about something else — a part can tell the difference between being asked and being processed. Also not a way in: it is a way of being with, and if you are doing it in order to get past the protector, it won’t work.
Examples:
You notice a critic, discover it is braced for humiliation, and thank it for the watch it has been keeping.
A perfectionist admits it is guarding against rejection, and then, unprompted, softens.
You stop and go no further, because it does not yet feel safe to.