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On Teflon, the inward loop, and what happens when you finally stop tending the wound.
I’m sitting in a cabin in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Pine trees. Wind moving through the meadow like breath. The grass waving like the ocean.
I came here bracing for something.
Three weeks into a family trip back to the United States—back to people I love and also find come with its baggage, back to a political landscape that diverges sharply from my own, back to the particular weight of being seen by people who knew you before you became who you are—I had prepared myself for friction.
I had prepared, specifically, for defensiveness.
That old familiar rising in the chest. The need to explain myself. To justify the way I eat, the way I raise my children, the career I walked away from, the country I chose to call home. The life that looks, from the outside, like a series of inexplicable departures from the expected path.
I grew up in France, spent two decades in corporate and MedTech leadership, then dismantled all of it—new country, new career, new self. For a long time, every difference between my life and the lives of the people around me came with a quiet hum of insecurity. Any comment that could be interpreted as “you are not doing it right” and a deeper you are “not good enough“ would be met with a wall. With frustration. With the exhausting need to be understood.
I had expected that wall to go back up.
It didn’t.
I’ve started calling it Teflon.
That quality—hard-won, and I want to be honest that it isn’t necessarily permanent; it thins when I’m exhausted or hormonal or back in the thick of daily life—where things that used to stick simply don’t anymore. Where a comment that once would have sent me into a spiral of self-justification now passes through me like wind through grass.
What changed?
I’ve spent years as a coach, sitting with people in their most tender places, listening to the full breadth of human experience. Somewhere in all of that listening, I began to genuinely understand where people come from. How a person’s views, their capacity for love, their blind spots, and their beauty, are all shaped by where they were raised, what they survived, who they learned to be in order to belong.
That understanding changed how I receive people.
But more than that—something shifted in me.
I think of it now as moving from the inward stage to the outward stage.
There is a long, necessary season in many people’s lives—particularly those of us drawn to personal growth—that is deeply introspective. The season of asking: What is “wrong” with me? Who am I underneath all of this conditioning? It is essential work. Necessary and profound. Without it we cannot know ourselves.
But it can become a loop.
A kind of circling inward that keeps us so focused on our own wounds that we lose sight of our life. The work of healing becomes its own attachment. The question what is wrong with me quietly colonises the space where living was supposed to happen.
Defensiveness, I’ve come to believe, lives here—in this loop. It is the wound speaking. The younger part of us who learned that being different, being misunderstood, being not-enough was dangerous. And so she built walls. She learned to explain, to justify, to push back before anyone could land a blow.
She was doing her best. She always was.
The shift—the move from inward to outward—comes not when the wound is gone, but when it has been met with enough honesty and enough compassion that it no longer needs the world to confirm our worth. When we have sat with ourselves so fully, so tenderly, that the question what is wrong with me quietly dissolves into something simpler:
I am good enough. More than good enough. I love who I am.
Not perfectly. Not always. But enough.
From that place, the walls come down—not because the world has become safer, but because we no longer need to defend the territory.
There is a quote I return to often, and I cannot remember who first said it:
We can only meet each other as deeply as we have met ourselves.
I believe this completely.
When I stopped needing to defend myself, I found I could finally see the people around me. Not through the filter of how they were or weren’t meeting my needs, not through the gap between what I wanted and what I received—but as they actually are. Shaped by their histories. Loving at their capacity. Doing their best with the tools they were given.
The family I had braced myself to endure—I found I could simply love them.
The cousins my children hadn’t seen in seven years fell into each other almost immediately, playing basketball and fishing and running nerf gun wars through the woods. The meals were warm. The welcome was genuine. The love was there—it had always been there. I had just been too busy defending myself to receive it.
I want to be careful not to plant a flag here. This is how things feel right now, rested and held by pine trees and open sky, three weeks away from the weight of ordinary life. I know that when I’m tired, or hormonal, or back in the thick of the to-do list, some of this ease will thin. That’s not failure. That’s being human.
What I’m describing isn’t a destination. It’s a direction. A returning. The more I practise, the faster I find my way back.
And the practice, when defensiveness rises, looks something like this:
Notice the sensation before the story. Defensiveness lives in the body first—a tightening, a heat, a bracing. Catch it there, before the mind has built its case.
Allow without resisting. Breathe into the sensation without trying to fix or explain it away. In for five counts, out for seven. Simply be there with what is arising.
Speak to the younger part of yourself who is trying to protect you. I hear you. I love you. You are safe. She doesn’t need to fight anymore.
From that calmer place, choose your response. It might be a walk. It might be a quiet answer. It might be the freedom of not needing to respond at all.
Shift your gaze from the gap to the love. From what you didn’t receive to what is actually being offered. People love us at their level of consciousness, their capacity, their own degree of self-meeting. Choosing to see the love—not its absence—is one of the most radical acts of inner freedom I know.
Defensiveness is not a character flaw. It is pointing back toward a part of yourself still waiting to be met with love.
The work is not to become invulnerable. It is to become so at home in yourself that the world’s opinions stop feeling like a verdict.
We can only meet each other as deeply as we have met ourselves.
And when we do—really do—something extraordinary becomes possible.
We stop tending the wound. We start loving the world.
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