The Squishy Insides Analogy

This analogy states that behind all our armor and shells lay the squishy insides of our heart and soul.

Our squishy insides are shapeless, or rather they can formed to what ever shape we choose or is chosen for us by hurt, pain, or trauma. Imagine a balloon full of water in a weightless environment. We can fit our squishiness into any container (identity, paradigm) we want. As long as the container has enough volume to fit our whole self into it, we can become that new shape. Sometimes the container will be too small but we want to fit into it anyway (we’ve outgrown that identity or paradigm or it didn’t have space for all for everything we value), so only part of us fits into the container and we ignore that part of ourselves that isn’t in the container.

The skin that holds our squishy insides together is very strong. There is very little that can pierce or cut it. In fact, the only way anything can get through the skin of our squishy insides is if we ourselves embrace that thing (we stop believing we can live); even then, it takes a huge amount of commitment on our part (we believe unconditionally) before we can pierce that skin and release our squishiness to the ether (let ourselves die). Nothing can pierce the skin of our soul unless we let it (we don’t die until we give up on life)

We usually don’t believe our skin is that strong because it doesn’t stop things from hurting us. That’s because we misunderstand the purpose of our skin. It’s purpose isn’t to prevent us from being hurt, it’s only purpose is to give us the choice of when we die.

We hide our squishy insides behind armor and shells in order to get our needs met, or protect our squishy insides from the hurts of the world. When we are born we have no shells, no armor.

As we grow we start to define ourselves based on our environment. We start to mold ourselves into various shapes trying out which ones help us get our needs met. When we find something that gets our needs met, we try that shape again a few more times. If that shape continues to help us, we build a shell (a personality) of that shape. In the early years, we find many different shapes to help us get our needs met and we build shells for each one. Shells help define who we are to the outside world without the world having to experience everything we’ve experienced. Some shells might look like “The smart kid,” or “The well behaved kid,” or “The kid that never gives up.” Still others might look like “The difficult kid,” for “The always under foot kid,” or “The rebellious kid.”

When we experience emotions as children we release them to the world and experience the reactions of the world. Over time we decide we don’t always like the reactions of the world. Sometimes those reactions cause more emotions, sometimes they do nothing at all. As we develop shells, we find some emotions help form those shells and other emotions are destructive to them. The ones we find don’t help us build shells get bottled up in our squishy insides. Sometimes we intend to deal with them later, often when we put on a shell we deem appropriate for the emotion in question. Sometimes we just leave them there hoping they will just dissolve and disappear.

In our teen years, we refine these shells into images that help us fit in with our peers. We combine a few, change a few others, and discard still others. We might even create altogether new shells, all in the quest to find our place in the world. Our biggest needs in this stage of our lives are all related to connection. Shells here might look like: “The smart guy,” “The popular girl,” “The rich kid.” We embrace these shells even as they limit our ability to connect because they allow us to represent ourselves to the world without requiring us to overly vulnerable to every person we meet. We learn to live within these shells so we can “belong” to a certain part of the world around us.

In this stage we often chose our shells based on their ability to handle the emotions we’re feeling. Our shells give us a way to release some of our emotions to the world around us in a safe manner with predictable results. Those emotions we don’t release get bottled up with the rest. For some of us, these emotions can become overwhelming in this stage of our lives. The negative ones are heavy and weigh us down. An abundance of these can cause us to wear the negative shells more often than usual. The positive ones are lighter than air and lift us up. Too many of these bottled up in our squishy insides can cause us to live in a dream world where our needs get met without us having to do anything. The struggle here for many teens is knowing which shells to wear when and having the right kinds of shells to allow us to safely express as many of our emotions as possible.

It’s also at this stage of our lives that we start to develop armor around our squishy insides and our shells. These armors are created through hardened emotions. They prevent people from getting close enough to attack our shells thereby piercing through to our squishy insides. The most common of these armor layers is anger, others could be loneliness, resentment, arrogance, cockiness, intimidation, sadness, humor, and very many others. Most of us shape these armors to fit over top of our shells like a glove on our hands. We often have different armors to fit over different shells. For example: “The rich kid” might wear an arrogance armor, while the same person’s “The smart guy” shell might be covered in a humor armor. The armor we create from hardened emotions allows us to enter the wide world of scary situations with some confidence that most of the hurt in the world won’t reach us.

Our adult years are usually just extensions of what we experienced as teenagers. We continue to refine and define our shells while relying on our armor to protect us from most harm in the world. We find comfort in our shells and we learn to trust our armor. It’s only when we meet people we really want to connect with that we might begin to see that these defenses might actually be hindering us. Some of us never learn that on our own.

At some point in our adult years we might feel “empty” or like “there’s something more.” We yearn for purpose or distinction. We may start to consider our legacy. We might wonder “why am I here?” Maybe we lost something or someone important in our lives and we wonder “is this all there is?” it’s at this stage that we might start to look inside ourselves, looking for something to define ourselves that goes deeper than our shells and our armor. It’s here where a few of us find our purpose. Our purpose is in clay jar inside our squishy insides. It has been absorbing all of our unprocessed emotions and unmet needs. Our purpose is permeable and requires connection to release it’s energy into the world.

The problem with shells and armors are that they prevent anyone from seeing the “real you” inside our squishy insides. It’s in the squishy insides that we bury our hurts and pain, but it’s also where our joy and love lives. Next to those things lies our purpose, our destiny if you will, the thing we are on this planet to do. If we never remove our armor, we can never reveal our shells. If we never remove our shells, we can never truly touch someone else in the place where their needs are kept safe from harm. If we don’t show someone our squishy insides, we can never truly connect with another real person. And without connection, we shrivel up and become as nothing until we chose to be nothing and die. Through connecting with the squishy insides of other people, we can share those feelings, and by sharing them, we can experience the real benefits of this human experience.

If we were to touch the armor of other people with the glass bottles containing our deepest emotions, those bottles would break, spilling our emotions all over the place. Depending on the severity of the break and the size of the bottles, those emotions could be spilling out all over everyone around us for days or years. On the flip side, if someone reaches out to us with their own glass bottles of emotions, if we have our armor or our shells on, those glass bottles will break against our hardened armor or our perfectly formed shells.

Only by connecting our squishy insides to the squishy insides of other people can we share the burden of our hurts and pains, or help elevate others with our love and joy. Only by touching the clay jar containing our purpose can that purpose spread its energy out into the world and cause the change it was created for. If we remove our armor and our shells for people we want to connect with, we can cradle anything that they give us with the tender care they need, even if they throw they glass bottle of emotion at us, our squishy insides can catch and cradle it like a swaddled baby. That is how we truly connect and support each other.

I’m not saying we should discard all of our shells and armor. We might still want those to protect us from the dangers of the wider world. What I’m saying is that real connection only happens when we open our squishy insides to the glass bottles of other people and offer our glass bottles to them trusting that they will receive the with their own squishy insides.

If you wan to discuss your own squishiness or share your glass bottles with me, drop me a line and join the conversation.