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Intro to Protectors: The Missing Step in PTSD Healing
Why You Keep Getting Triggered: Understanding Your PTSD Protectors
From Triggers to True Self: A New Way to Heal PTSD
How “Protectors” Keep Trauma Survivors Stuck (And How to Heal Them)
PTSD Processing Bootcamp: Meet the Parts of You That Are Trying to Help
When Your Inner Protector Takes the Wheel: Trauma, Triggers, and Healing
Turning Trauma Walls into Inner Strength: The Protectors Framework
Is It Really You… or a Protector? How PTSD Hijacks Your Reactions
From Self-Sabotage to Self-Love: Rewiring Your Trauma Protectors
How to Stop Overreacting After Trauma: The Truth About Protectors and Parts
Host: Brad Schipke • Overcoming PTSD Podcast • Recovery Secrets Daily Coaching
In this Processing Bootcamp episode, Brad introduces “protectors” — a simple but powerful way to understand why you get triggered, shut down, or overreact after trauma. Instead of seeing these reactions as random or broken, Brad shows how they’re actually protective parts of you doing their best to keep you safe.
You’ll learn how to recognize your “true self” — the calm, loving, grounded version of you — and how trauma slowly builds walls around it in the form of protectors. Using visuals like castles, walls, cars, and even purple paint, Brad breaks down a complex inner world into something you can actually work with.
This episode lays the foundation for the rest of Processing Bootcamp week, where Brad will walk you step-by-step through how to identify, understand, and eventually heal these protectors with honesty, patience, and self-love. Today is all about awareness, language, and perspective so you can finally see what’s really happening when PTSD takes over.
By the end, you’ll walk away with a hopeful and practical frame: there is nothing “wrong” with you — there are just parts of you that were hurt, got stuck in time, and are trying (sometimes in messy ways) to protect you. And they can be healed.
💡 What You’ll Learn
How protectors form after trauma to keep your true self safe
Why PTSD triggers feel like “someone else” took over your body and mind
The difference between your true self and protector parts
How to spot protectors in your body through tension, stress, and emotional spikes
Why overreactions, shutting down, or lashing out are signs of protectors at the wheel
Simple ways to start naming and mapping your own protectors
How to respond with love instead of anger toward your protectors
How to recognize protectors in other people and deescalate with compassion
Why healing protectors actually makes your true self bigger, stronger, and more whole
🧠 Key Takeaway
Anytime you’re not acting from calm, love, and peace, it’s not that you’re broken — it’s a protector trying to keep you safe the only way it knows how.
🔗 Next Steps
Subscribe for new weekday episodes from the Recovery Secrets Daily Coaching archive.
To go deeper or work with Brad directly, visit https://overcomingptsd.com/consultation.
CHAPTERS:
Topics Covered:
PTSD recovery • trauma healing • protectors and parts work • inner child work • emotional triggers after trauma • nervous system regulation • emotional regulation tools • trauma coping tools • processing traumatic memories • self-love and trauma recovery • honesty and patience in healing • dissociation and PTSD • understanding overreactions • how to stop PTSD outbursts • healing through self-compassion • Recovery Secrets Daily Coaching • Overcoming PTSD Podcast
