Tracing forward from these remembrances of things past gives us the chance to re-experience and reframe these beliefs. Doing so liberates us from the confounding forces we label as fate, destiny, or—even more frequently—the other person’s “fault.” We will never sort through them all, of course, but what we don’t sort through impedes our happiness. It tricks us into using the rest of our lives—and the people we love, the professions we choose, the organizations we lead—to try to close the gaping wounds from childhood.

In so many ways, the world affirmed this way of being. I was rewarded with promotions. Years later, and with the benefit of thousands of hours of introspection, I understand why the world affirmed this way of being. When I moved fast, when I spent my days not truly occupying my life, not standing still, not being real, I found it easier to live in accordance with other people’s expectations. By not standing still, I was able to be the object of everyone else’s projections of who and what I should be. Too busy to live my own life, I took direction from the affirmations of others.

When leaders, parents, lovers choose to share the reality of their heart, it gives everyone in their lives the chance to know them, to hold them—to trust each other.

There’s the leader whose childhood was marked by poverty and deprivation and, in a bid to feel safe, nurses ambition and desperate cravings to prove all the doubters wrong. But, given the strictures of their childhood or family structures, given the risk of expulsion from the only tribe they may ever have known, they bury that ambition, labeling the wish for money as “greed” and placing it out of sight, in their shadow, over their shoulder, into what the poet Robert Bly dubbed the “long black bag” we drag behind us.

Or the CEO whose brilliant ways threatened her standing in middle school, and so, more than merely denying her intellect, she actively rejects any challenging books or squirms in a classroom seat, lest her light be revealed, her artistry manifested, and her place in the family threatened. Unconsciously she internalizes the isolation caused by the middle-school bullies, remaining cut off from potential allies and isolated from colleagues. All of it—all the positive, all the negative aspects of our character that make us stand out, be different—is thrown into that long black bag.

For many, that place where we’ve come to think we belong has become stultifying; it’s where we are small, unseen, unsure, and unwilling to claim our strengths, our capacities, our courage, our leadership. We are frozen by the belief that it’s just too dangerous to reach into the black bag and grab hold of the disowned, dismembered parts of ourselves.

All Loyal Soldiers then have one basic task: to keep us safe from the wars that raged in our childhood. No matter how awful these strategies have come to make us feel as adults, they were brilliant in their own ways.