Are We Becoming More Enlightened, or Are Our Protective Parts Just Getting Smarter? An IFS Perspective on Modern Relational Strain

There is a widespread belief that we are living through a period of increasing enlightenment, awareness, and truth. In many ways, this belief is understandable as we have unprecedented access to psychological language, trauma theory, attachment research, and insight into how power, systems, and early conditioning shape human behaviour. Conversations that once lived only in academic circles now circulate freely in popular culture. People speak fluently about boundaries, nervous systems, and emotional patterns. We can “see” more clearly than ever before.

And yet, when it comes to intimate relationships, this clarity does not appear to be translating into ease, stability, or fulfilment. Many people report feeling disconnected, confused, or dissatisfied in romantic relationships, even when they are self-aware, emotionally articulate, and deeply committed to personal growth. There is a growing sense that something fundamental has shifted in how we relate, commit, and attach.

Men, in particular, often appear unanchored, unsure of how to inhabit intimacy in a cultural landscape where traditional roles have dissolved and new ones remain undefined. Women, meanwhile, frequently report feeling more independent and self-sufficient than previous generations, yet also more emotionally alone. This combination of insight and isolation is one of the defining relational tensions of our time.

This tension becomes more intelligible when we view it through an Internal Family Systems lens, particularly when placed alongside the broader cultural themes often associated with the Age of Aquarius.

IFS invites us to understand the psyche not as a single, unified self, but as an internal system made up of parts. Each part carries its own history, role, and survival strategy, shaped by early experiences of connection, disruption, safety, and threat. From this perspective, consciousness does not simply expand in a neutral or linear way. It emerges inside nervous systems that already carry attachment wounds, developmental trauma, and learned protective patterns.

The cultural emphasis on autonomy, individuation, and non-ownership, often associated with Aquarian consciousness, does not land on a blank slate. It lands inside these systems.

For many people, autonomy is not simply a philosophical ideal or a mature spiritual insight. It is a protector part, which is a strategy that once kept them safe when closeness felt overwhelming, unreliable, intrusive, or dangerous. In early environments where caregivers were inconsistent, emotionally unavailable, engulfing, or absent, self-reliance often became essential for survival. Distance was learned.

From this perspective, modern ideals around independence, self-sufficiency, and non-attachment can feel deeply resonant because they align with existing protective strategies. Non-ownership, emotional distance, and an emphasis on personal freedom can offer genuine relief to parts that learned early on that dependence came at a cost.

At the same time, these protective adaptations do not eliminate the presence of more vulnerable parts within the system.

Alongside managers that organise life around control, autonomy, or self-containment, there are often younger parts that still long deeply for connection, safety, consistency, and being met. These parts do not disappear simply because we develop insight or adopt more sophisticated relational philosophies. They wait very quietly and often are carrying grief, longing, or unmet needs that have never had the conditions required to surface safely.

This internal split lies at the heart of the modern relational dilemma.

On a philosophical level, the idea that no one completes us, that love is not possession, and that wholeness is internal can be deeply true. These insights can loosen unhealthy forms of dependency and challenge relational dynamics rooted in control or fusion. But on a psychological and biological level, humans remain attachment-based beings. Our nervous systems are wired for co-regulation. Emotional safety, identity, and meaning are shaped in relationship, not in isolation.

Insight alone does not undo this wiring.

When autonomy is driven primarily by protective parts, it can easily be mistaken for wholeness. Independence can feel like growth, maturity, or enlightenment, while simultaneously keeping vulnerable parts at a distance from the very relational experiences they need in order to heal. Awareness increases, but integration lags behind. People can name their patterns with precision, yet still struggle to remain present when intimacy activates old fears.

From an IFS perspective, this is not a personal failure. It is a predictable outcome when cultural narratives reinforce internal protective strategies without attending to the underlying system.

In relational counselling, this gap between awareness and embodiment is often where the real work lies. Not in choosing autonomy over attachment, or attachment over autonomy, but in learning to recognise the different parts involved. To understand which parts are reaching for freedom, control, or distance, and which parts are still longing for closeness, reassurance, and emotional safety.

The work is not to silence protectors or override them with insight, but to approach them with curiosity and respect. To understand what they are protecting against, and what they fear would happen if they stepped back. As internal safety increases, new relational possibilities emerge, not through force or ideology, but through integration.

From an IFS-informed perspective, the deeper task of this era is not to transcend attachment, nor to return to outdated models of fusion or dependency. It is to cultivate a Self-led capacity to hold both autonomy and connection without forcing either into dominance. To allow relationships to become places where freedom and commitment coexist, rather than cancel each other out.

This requires moving beyond purely cognitive understanding and into nervous-system-level change. It asks for a relational capacity that can tolerate closeness without collapse, difference without withdrawal, and dependency without shame.

We may not be becoming more enlightened in a linear sense. But we are being invited into a more complex and demanding form of awareness, one that asks us to relate not only to each other differently, but to our own internal systems with greater honesty, compassion, and responsibility.

That, to me, feels like the deeper invitation of this moment in society, and the heart of the work I am committed to supporting.