When life hurts you deeply, it’s natural to close in. To protect yourself. To retreat behind walls built from fear and disappointment. But something powerful can happen when, even in your brokenness, you choose to protect someone else.
Sometimes, healing starts not with fixing yourself, but with showing up for someone else. Because protecting someone doesn’t just guard their heart, it softens yours.
When You Can’t Save Yourself, You Save Someone Else
There are seasons where everything feels heavy. You don’t feel strong. You don’t feel whole. You’re still bleeding from your own wounds.
But then someone needs you. A friend. A child. A partner. A stranger.
And somehow, from somewhere, a strength rises inside you, not to save yourself, but to stand for them.
And in doing that… something begins to shift inside of you.
Protecting Someone Is a Quiet Form of Healing
You’re not pretending your pain doesn’t exist. You’re not ignoring your grief or skipping steps in your recovery. What you’re doing is making space for purpose, even in the pain.
When you protect someone, you offer love. Safety. Stability. And in that offering, you remind yourself of what you’re still capable of giving.
That act alone can be enough to spark healing.
You See Yourself Through Their Eyes
Sometimes the person you’re protecting doesn’t need you to be perfect, they just need you to be present.
And when they look at you with trust, with gratitude, with hope, you start to see yourself differently. Not as broken. Not as weak. But as someone who still matters. Someone who still makes a difference.
Protecting someone can give you back your own reflection, one that’s stronger, kinder, and more whole than you thought.
It’s Not About Being a Savior, It’s About Being a Shelter
You don’t need to have all the answers. You don’t have to rescue anyone. Often, the greatest form of protection is simply holding space.
Letting someone cry without rushing them to be okay. Standing beside them without fixing everything. Creating a moment of safety, even if the world is still chaotic.
And in creating that moment for them, your own heart begins to feel safe again, too.
Final Thought: Sometimes Healing Begins With Compassion
Healing doesn’t always begin with being healed. Sometimes, it begins with reaching outside of yourself. With caring. With protecting. With choosing to love when it’s still hard.
Because protecting someone else can be a way of protecting the parts of yourself you’re still trying to find.
In Ordinary Man Book 2: Andrew and Francesca by Adele Leurini, you’ll witness this kind of redemptive strength firsthand. Through trauma, war, heartbreak, and recovery, Andrew and Olivia find their way, not just by healing themselves, but by choosing to protect and fight for one another.
Order your copy today and discover how love, even in its most fragile form, can become a path back to wholeness.
