Serious Sarah is scared of herself
Don’t let your armor wear YOU
I have a client who has two versions of herself.
There’s the warm, chaotic, slightly feral version her team knows. And then there’s the other one: deeper voice, stern expression, the version that comes out when she needs people to stop pushing her buttons. She calls it “serious Sarah.” And at one point in our work together she said something I keep coming back to:
“I don’t want to do Serious Sarah. She scares me.”
She was talking about herself.
Serious Sarah isn’t a character flaw - she’s a solution. Specifically, she’s the solution to not exploding in anger when someone keeps pushing your buttons. She’s controlled because she’s trying to stay in control, but somewhere along the way she stopped being something my client picks up and puts down, and started being someone who shows up uninvited. And now my client is sitting across from me saying she doesn’t recognize herself in those moments, doesn’t know where serious Sarah ends and she begins.
I had my own version of this reckoning when I came across the Adult Children of Alcoholics literature for the first time, and read page after page of things I’d always assumed were just my personality - my patience, my hyper-attunement to other people’s moods, my ability to sense conflict coming and neutralize it before it arrived. I was proud of those things. But they weren’t personality traits; they were coping mechanisms. I built them because I needed them, in an environment where safety wasn’t guaranteed, when I was a child with very little power.
We put armor on to survive something hard.
The thing is, the longer we wear the armor, the more it feels like identity, and the harder it is to take it off. It starts to get itchy and hot and eventually, hopefully, we start to wonder why we’re even wearing it anymore.
But you can’t just take off armor and walk away - you can’t will your way out of a coping mechanism that you’ve worn for so long it feels like personality.
What you can do is get curious. When Serious Sarah walks in, whose threat is she actually responding to? Is it this person, in this room, right now? Or is it someone else, somewhere else, a long time ago?
Because the person across from you isn’t that person. They’re just someone in a relationship that matters, waiting to find out if you’re going to show up for it.
I write about Chain Mail and four other armor types in my new book Trust Physics: How Accountability, Clarity, and Courage Build Trust That Works, out May 15. If you want a preview before then: