Parts
Hi friends! This week I want to share one of the most incredible and impactful tools/concepts I’ve studied and experienced since I’ve started my own journey of wellness. Let’s talk about parts.
“I contain multitudes.” - Walt Whitman
We are more than the singular existence we may see in the mirror. We are a collection of selves, creating and moving through our present experience.
Understanding and connecting with parts has been some of the most meaningful and impactful personal work I’ve done. My collective understanding of this work comes from my training in persona work (via The Hendricks Institute) along with my research into internal family systems (via the work of Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D.).
“We all learned to wear different roles just as we learned to wear different clothes and change expressions when certain people were around. You bring a whole circus of personas to your relationships. The problem is taking them seriously and thinking that your persona is the entirety of who YOU are. Your essence lies at the center of all these layers you’ve learned to wear to get along. If you want to move beyond fitting in, stop working on your personas and start playing with them and getting to know them.” – The Hendricks Institute
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As I’ve studied this concept, I’ve come to understand the parts that comprise us range from specific versions of ourselves, frozen in a place and time, to behavior sets that arise during specific circumstances or in certain environments. In the internal family systems (IFS) world, these parts are placed into three categories: exiles, managers and firefighters. The following definitions and excerpts come from Richard C. Schwartz’s book, No Bad Parts.
Exiles
“After the trauma or attachment injury, the burdens these parts absorb shift from their fun, playful states to chronically wounded inner children who are frozen in the past and have the ability to overwhelm us and pull us back into those dreadful scenes.”
Managers (a protector)
“Some of them take on the role of controlling the outside world so that nothing triggering happens – they manage our relationships, appearance, and performance often by yelling at us the way our parents or teachers once did so that we’ll try harder or look better. These are the parts that become inner critics. Other parts take another approach and try to take care of everyone else while neglecting ourselves. Others are hypervigilant, and some are intellectual and are skilled at keeping us out of our bodies. There are many common roles these manager parts take. What they all have in common is the desire to preempt the triggering of our exiles by controlling, pleasing, or disconnecting us.”
Firefigthers (a protector)
“The world has a way of triggering our exiles at times, of breaking through what psychotherapy traditionally calls our defenses. When that happens, it's a big emergency. To many of your protectors, experiencing the pain of your exiles feels like you might die… [they] desperately (and often impulsively try to douse the flames of emotion, get us higher than the flames with some substance, or find a way to distract us until the fire burns itself out.”
Beyond the parts or personas we carry with us, there is who we truly are – our essence or what the IFS context refers to as “Self.” The goal in this work is to connect with and liberate our parts, restore trust in our essence/Self, create harmony and balance within, and allow ourselves to become more driven by essence/Self.
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One of the most profound experiences I’ve had with this work occurred during a time when I was beginning a career transition. This time came with a lot of emotions… excitement and joy, but also fear. While I was eager to take this leap, there was a lingering fear that it wouldn’t work out, or I wouldn’t make enough money, or there weren’t enough people seeking my skill sets.
As these feelings began to consume my day to day, shifting fear into anxiety, I decided to bring this “stuff” into a course I was participating in. During a meditation exercise, we were asked to visualize the thing we’ve been struggling with — not in a literal sense, but the essence of it. As I did this, I began to experience a pulling in the front of my body — in chest and collar area.
Katie Hendricks, my teacher and facilitator of this exercise, then asked the question, as she often has, “what does this remind you of… how does this feel familiar?” This experience coupled with a layer of curiosity unlocked something for me… something that created a massive shift. My visualization immediately shifted to a child pulling on the front of my t-shirt, trying to get my attention. Who was this child? It was me.
“When parts do take over, we don’t shame them. Instead, we get curious and use the part’s impulse as a trailhead to find what is driving it that needs to be healed.”
– Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts
If you asked anyone that helped raise me, Alexande at five was quite the character. Constantly dressing up and putting on a show, he loved capturing the attention of everyone in the room. What he didn’t expect was the challenge that would be created when he wasn’t the only star in the room. At age five, he was no longer an only child… my sister was born.
Now to be clear, I love my sister and we have become very close friends. But at that time, I wasn’t quite ready to share the spotlight.
Back in my meditation exercise, I began to wonder why this version of myself was so desperately trying to get my attention. What did he need from me? What was he trying to say?
As my inquiry grew deeper and I thought about five-year-old me, feeling into that experience, I realized something quite profound. This fear I have about transition in my career and the unknowns that come with it are centered around scarcity… scarcity of financial resources, scarcity of potential clients, even scarcity of my own talents. Five-year-old Alexande is where it all began. That’s when I first experienced a true sense of scarcity… I was no longer the center of the universe in my family, there was someone else capturing attention and experiencing the love of those around me. Would there be enough to go around?
As I felt into this more and more, it became incredibly clear that I discovered the source of my experience of scarcity — one that I have layered onto many other experiences and versions of myself. What I needed to do now was begin to release it.
During this meditative exercise I visualized myself kneeling down to see my five-year-old self face to face. I told him that I hear him and that he is so loved. I promised him that I would take care of him and keep him safe. I assured him that I knew what I was doing and that we both have so much to look forward to with this big leap. I began to cry as I visualized myself now hugging little Alexande.
Since then, I’ve been able to notice and release feelings of scarcity faster and with ease. I know this fear is rooted in the perspective of a five-year-old child and my “capital S” or essential self knows how to navigate my experiences with much more knowledge and resourcing than I had then.
We (my Self and little Alexande) know now that the most important resources, especially love, don’t come in set amounts. They are infinite and can be generated at any moment, so long as we allow them to be felt and experienced.
By taking time to be with this part of myself with curiosity, judgement-free assurance and love, I was able to begin my own healing.
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I hope this paints a picture of the impact this work can make not only within ourselves, but for those around us.
“If we can appreciate and have compassion for our parts, even for the ones we’ve considered to be enemies, we can do the same for people who resemble them. On the other hand, if we hate or disdain our parts, we’ll do the same with anyone who reminds us of them.”
– Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts
Sources for this article come from No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz Ph.D. and The Hendricks Institute.
Thanks for reading!
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