What Protects Us Can Also Imprison Us

This week I watched a documentary that has stayed with me ever since the credits rolled.

It was on Netflix and was called The Fall and told the extraordinary story of Victoria Cilliers, the British Army physiotherapist who survived a 4,000-foot fall after both her main parachute and reserve parachute failed to open.

It later emerged that her husband had deliberately sabotaged both parachutes in an attempt to kill her. It wasn’t his first attempt. Months earlier there had been a suspicious gas leak at their home, which prosecutors argued had also been an attempt on her life. He is now serving a life sentence.

It was an extraordinary story.

But it wasn’t the attempted murder that fascinated me most.

It was Victoria herself.

During the first trial she changed her evidence, despite overwhelming forensic proof against her husband. Detectives later spoke of their disbelief as they watched her apparently abandon the case against the man they believed had tried twice to kill her. Thankfully there was a retrial and justice prevailed.

As I watched, I found myself asking the same question over and over again.

How could such an intelligent, articulate woman ignore what seemed to be overwhelming evidence?

Looking back, there had been warning signs everywhere. The unexplained gas leak. The affair. The thousands of pounds spent on prostitutes. The lies.

How could she not see it?

Then another possibility occurred to me.

Perhaps she did.

Perhaps the truth was simply too unbearable to live with.

To accept that the father of your children, the person you loved and trusted, had twice tried to end your life would shatter almost everything you believed about your world. Faced with a reality that devastating, perhaps the mind does what it has evolved to do. It protects us.

Not by confronting the truth.

But by rewriting it into something we can bear.

That thought stayed with me because, although few of us will ever experience anything remotely as extreme as Victoria did, I think many of us have experienced our own, much smaller versions of the same psychological process.

We stay in relationships long after we’ve recognised that something fundamental has changed.

We remain in jobs that leave us drained because admitting we’ve chosen the wrong path feels too painful.

We postpone booking the health check because we’re frightened of what the doctor might tell us.

We avoid opening the banking app because not knowing feels easier than knowing.

From the outside these decisions can look irrational.

From the inside they often feel entirely understandable.

We like to think we see reality as it is.

Perhaps, more often than we’d like to admit, we see reality as we need it to be.

One of the frameworks I use in my coaching practice is called Positive Intelligence, developed by Shirzad Chamine. It explores the unconscious mental habits that influence our thinking, our decisions and our behaviour. He calls them saboteurs because they begin life trying to protect us, yet often end up limiting us instead.

Reading about them was like someone switching on a light.

One of my strongest saboteurs is the Avoider.

Looking back, I can see it throughout my own life. Ignoring red flags in relationships because facing them might have meant accepting that the relationship wasn’t what I wanted it to be. Delaying looking at my bank account because I was frightened of what I might find. Putting off parking fines. Avoiding stepping on the scales because I didn’t want the number to become real.

Each decision gave me temporary relief.

Every one came with compound interest.

The parking fines became larger. The overdraft quietly grew. The weight slowly crept on. The relationship that wasn’t quite right became another year spent hoping someone would change.

The Avoider wasn’t trying to harm me.

It was trying to protect me.

The tragedy was that the protection only lasted for a moment, while the consequences continued accumulating.

I think that’s one of the great paradoxes of being human.

The psychological mechanisms that once kept us emotionally safe can later become the very things that keep us stuck.

What protects us can also imprison us.

The irony is that the truths we spend so much energy avoiding are often less frightening once we finally face them. Reality gives us something that avoidance never can.

Choice.

Once we stop rewriting the story, we can decide what to do next.

We can leave.

We can apologise.

We can ask for help.

We can begin again.

I was pleased to discover that Victoria has since rebuilt her life and remarried. Her story is ultimately one of remarkable resilience. But long after the details of the case have faded, one thought has remained with me.

Perhaps the greatest danger isn’t always the difficult truth itself.

Perhaps it’s our extraordinary ability to protect ourselves from seeing it.

Because reality is rarely what imprisons us.

More often, it’s the story we create to avoid it.