This is a transcript of a YouTube interview (Josh Trent with a guest) about healing self-sabotage, people-pleasing, and dysfunctional patterns. The guest describes "old contracts"—learned commitments to keep others' emotional experiences safe (people-pleasing/prostitute archetype)—that served survival but later limit freedom. The discussion connects these contracts to nervous-system trauma responses (fight/flight, frozen exiles) and positions parts work/IFS and archetypal reframing as pathways to renegotiate contracts and regain empowerment.
Chapters
What was one of the old contracts that you burned in the fire of transformation as you were compelled to create this program?
There's so many, I would say a big one is the contract that it is my responsibility to micromanage other people's experience of me, which is a huge source of self sabotage, a huge source of, like, people pleasing, which is an expression of the prostitute archetype, you know, kind of like the shape shifter who's trying to be all things to all people. So a lot of that, you know, contract that says someone else's disappointment is my responsibility, someone else's trigger or upset or emotional experience is my responsibility. Therefore it's not okay for me to speak my truth, to step into my power, to live in alignment with what feels true for me because of how someone else might be experiencing that choice. So that was a huge contract that I learned as a child that kept me safe and secure at the expense of my own freedom and empowerment. So what you realize is with all these archetypes, the initial contract is what keeps you safe and secure. It gives you survival, right? It gives you security. But you reach a point, and most people's health challenges or healing crisis starts when that old contract is outdated and the new one needs to be negotiated. Which is what's the new version of this archetype that allows you to step into your own empowerment and your own sense of freedom and sovereignty and let go of some of the old narratives that you had to, or let some of the old contracts go that were just to keep you safe and secure. So I think that's. That's how I would kind of explain what's come up for me and how that kind of journey evolves. And the beautiful thing is, you know, everyone can relate to these patterns because everyone has a saboteur. Everyone has a victim, everyone has a child, everyone has a prostitute, everyone has the mother and father archetype inside of them, but it just gets expressed in different ways. So we can all relate to these patterns, which makes it easier and more approachable to look at. You know, when you realize that everyone has a victim, it's not as hard to look at your own victim because you realize I'm not the only one expressing these patterns.
I love that you said that at the contract creation point, at that source point of the creation, it's about safety. I mean, that is really big because. And I'm curious how you feel about this from like a. Both a physiological standpoint, scientific standpoint, but also an emotional intelligence standpoint. Look at the lens if from 30,000ft in the air, when the child or even the adolescent. And by the way, these, I'm sure you talk about this in the program. These archetypes can come online almost at any time in someone's life. It doesn't always have to be in childhood, but at the core of it, wrapped around it, is a contract for safety. Like, what's, what's actually going on in the physiology of the body? Is it a hormonal cascade? Is it trauma response? Like, and then also what's the emotional side of it? Like, how can we actually allow this traumatic event or painful event when we un, on one side, create a contract for safety which then closes our heart, locks us from life, from a life of freedom, and then on the other side, we can consciously choose, with the right kind of education, from a teacher like yourself. There's a bridge between shutting down and silencing yourself and living a life of freedom. What is that bridge and what's the physiology of that bridge?
I would say it starts in the nervous system, right? Anytime, as we know, that nervous system goes into a fight or flight response, you know, we're shifting into survival mode. And these survival archetypes are the. Are the archetypal forces that show up anytime we shift into survival mode. So if there's a situation as a child in which we feel unsafe processing what's coming up for us, what's going on inside of us, maybe we don't have a mother or father figure that we feel like can be a safe container for whatever process we're going through. There's a trauma response, and the trauma response is essentially, there's a part of our psyche that gets frozen in time. It kind of like fragments off, and it stays in that experience. And when it stays in that experience, we then recruit some sort of protective mechanism, kind of like the ISS type approach. Like, we have these protectors, we have these managers that are there to protect the exiles, which are the wounded parts. And essentially what a lot of people don't realize is parts work is just archetypes. Every part that we're working with from an IFS standpoint is really an archetype, right? So the parts work is really, it's really repurposed archetypal work that we're doing with within ourselves. And it's a really easy and beautiful framework to work with. So a lot of the old contracts with these archetypes are those protective managerial type arts that are there to protect the wound, to protect the trauma.
Why do they actually want to protect the wound. I think our higher self, our most loving self, our most ascended self, knows that the wound is just a teacher. Then why? Why on earth would an archetype try to protect the wound that keeps us stuck?
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