Life Beyond the Armor
You’ve spent years protecting the most sensitive parts of yourself. Now you’re ready to emerge.
Emerge into who you really are.
Life Beyond the Armor helps you remember who you were before the human condition taught you to hide your parts that matter the most to you— real human connection, and how you’re meant to contribute to the world.
What is Life Beyond the Armor?
Life Beyond the Armor is the first to distinguish “social hiding” as a powerful force in ALL our lives. We are courses, videos, tools, an ebook, a community — maybe even the start of a global conversation — for people who are tired of letting their normal, human social hiding dictate how they live their their lives.
Your armor kept you safe by stopping you from fully engaging in the “dangerous” world. Now it’s limiting your life.
It’s just human. When you’ve been hurt, misunderstood, isolated, left alone, in the course of normal life, your most basic survival instincts instantly, unconscously, kick in to create hiding behaviors that keep you safe from being hurt that way again. From that point on, in those same situations, your hiding behavior dictates how you show up — or don’t show up. Your life becomes smaller with every hiding behavior, and eventually your highest self feels out of reach. You:
feel like you’re meant for more
can’t quite access your full joy or aliveness
try any number of techniques to change but they don’t work
wonder what’s wrong with you (hint: there’s nothing wrong with you!)
The Safety System Your Brain Never Turns Off
Why do we all engage is social hiding? Though we might lose sight of it, being seen by, included by, loved by other people means everything to us. We learn to hide the parts of us that seem to get in the way of that. It’s even proven by science.
Neuroscience research shows that our need for connection is even greater than our needs for food, shelter, and other basics. Logically, social pain—hurtful exchanges, rejection, marginalization—etches itself into the brain — replacing our openness with protective patterns in response. These patterns immediately become powerful, yet invisible, leaving us thinking it’s just who we are; limited in ways that seem to come naturally for others.
What’s more, the answer to the question, “why do you care that you got yelled at in traffic?” is “because it hurts”. Neuroscience research also shows that our brains don’t differentiate between physical pain and emotional pain; the same brain center lights up for either kind. Getting yelled at in traffic hurts like stubbing your toe. There’s no way around it.
The truth is that everything we do is measured against “what will people think of me?” Even people who say they don’t care usually mean “I care what people think but I do what I want anyway,” or they’re being describing how they want to feel, because we are built to prioritize what people think of us. The need for acceptance never goes away, even when having it stop us in life gets really old.
Our internal dialogue is nonstop—so constant we don’t consciously hear it. But it’s always there, doing everything it can to keep us safe from social pain. So it is simple, human, and automatic to socially hide. And it is just as simple, human, and automatic to want to make our greatest contribution to the world and to those we love.
