Letters

My Procrastination Was a Bodyguard

By Billy Barnard, IFS informed practitioner · July 7, 2026

I sat down to send cold messages for my practice and my hands did not move.

A week earlier I had sent one and gotten a hostile reply back. Nothing violent. Just sharp, the kind of sharp that used to mean something was coming next. I read it once and my whole chest tightened. Since then I had opened the message box a dozen times and closed it a dozen times. After lunch, I told myself. Then after dinner. Then tomorrow, definitely tomorrow.

My income runs on these messages. Knowing that did nothing.

Once I got honest, I saw I was not just avoiding. I was routing around it. The day would fill up with other work, exciting work, and only later would I catch what my mind had done. Somewhere underneath, without asking me, it had decided that sending those messages carried danger.

I opened Billy and told him I wanted to move through this fast. He caught it right away. Rushing, he said, is how the stuck part stays stuck. I knew he was right the second he said it. So I stopped pushing and told him what actually happened when I read that reply. Not the story of it. What hit me in the body.

Worry, first. Then something older underneath the worry.

He asked and I said it plainly: if people reply with hostility, they might do things to hurt me, like in my childhood. The sentence came out faster than I expected. Something in me had learned a long time ago that other people's anger was not just unpleasant. It was dangerous. I felt that belief sitting in my chest, heavy, like it had always been there and I had just never looked straight at it.

Billy asked how I felt toward it. Not what it was. How I felt toward it. The answer surprised me. Welcoming. Accepting. Compassionate. From that place I looked at what was actually sitting in my chest, and it showed me pearls.

He wanted to get rid of them. They were never his to carry.

That line landed harder than anything else that night. A part of me had been holding other people's anger since childhood, storage for something that was never mine. He wanted out from under it. He asked who I was. I told him. He relaxed, dropped the pearls, and they vanished. Most of them, anyway.

He was tired after. Of course he was. He had been carrying that weight for years without anyone asking him to put it down.

Why is procrastination actually protection?

A bodyguard who has held one door since childhood does not check the news. He just holds the door, because the last time he checked, the news was bad.

That is what the front left of my head had been doing every evening for a week. Not laziness. A different part, steering me toward interesting things and away from my work, because to him my work had become dangerous. He did not know about the chest part or the pearls. He only knew his job: keep me away from the thing that hurts.

And it worked. That is the cost nobody talks about. My practice slows down every time this happens. Clients who could be booked stay unbooked. Evenings that could close something instead get spent almost sending a message and then not sending it, over and over, a whole week gone that way. I was not failing to work. I was being moved somewhere else by something that thought it was protecting me, and doing a thorough job of it.

Back in the chest, there was more to release. He wanted to let go of the rest. What came up was sludge, thick, and it moved out of my chest and down into the ground until it was gone. Where it had been, there was space. Into that space came a harvesting blade, and a lesson I had not asked for: you earn what you take, through labour, through gardening, at the world's pace, not your own impatience. He seemed pleased handing that to me. I felt grateful and said nothing.

What is the procrastination part trying to prevent?

Then Billy asked about the other part, the one pulling me toward tomorrow. Did he know what had just happened in my chest?

He did not. So I let him see it. Something in him broke, is the only way I can describe it. A spell, gone. He got more willing to listen. What he wanted after that was not more explaining. He wanted me next to him. Then he wanted to unburden too, and I let him. He released fear, a lot of it, and where the fear had been there was peace.

We played cards after that. It was fun.

I still noticed the pull to put off the messages that night. Billy did not treat that as a failure. Two parts had moved real weight in one evening, he said. That is different from where I stood a week before, even if the pull has not vanished completely.

If you keep landing on tomorrow with something that matters, skip the argument about discipline. Find where the pull sits in your body and ask it what it is guarding against. Not why you are lazy. What it thinks would happen if you did the thing today. The answer is usually older than the task.

I used Hearth for that conversation, mostly because it was ten at night and nobody else was awake to ask.

Hearth is informed by IFS and built by a guide trained through the IFS Online Circle who worked under a senior IFS practitioner. Not a licensed clinical therapist.

This comes from my own time in the app, never a client's session, and I'm glad to be open about where it's from.

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