Parts Work: Internal Family Systems
Connecting with the parts (our inner children) with curiosity towards them leads to compassion and clarity. Ultimately, self-love requires re-parenting ourselves.
Most people are familiar with the idea of having an inner child. However, we are now coming to a basic understanding that we internalize the voices of multiple members of our family of origin. As well as developing parts in response to how growing up influenced what we believed about the world and what we needed to do to survive within it. For this reason, there are no bad parts. There are just parts that need help understanding they are no longer the powerless beings they were back then. Our parts need help healing their pain so that we can have more choices when responding in the present rather than reacting from parts frozen in the past.
Parts can be understood as exiles, managers, and firefighters. Exiles carry the burden and pain of traumatic memories from the past. Managers work hard to hide and protect the exiles who feel fragile and too vulnerable to be allowed freedom to be seen and heard. Managers often manifest as harsh, critical voices that villainize the exiles to try and control their feelings. Lastly, firefighters act out with addictions to substances, toxic people, work, etc., and also to protect exiles from emerging.
You know you are in a part when you are experiencing:
Perfectionism - often the need for control and setting impossible standards for oneself is a result of trauma. Trauma creates black-and-white rigid thinking because it sets the nervous system up to be hypervigilant, and when we are in this state, it’s hard to think outside the box. We get tunnel vision and want to control everything bc we do not trust that others are capable or will show up for us in a way that supports us. The need to be perfect typically comes from an environment that doesn’t feel safe to learn and grow through our mistakes. It made us feel like love was conditional and performance-based, so we have internalized that critical voice and now use it to beat ourselves up when we think we have failed or didn’t do something as well as we should have. This critical voice functions as a protector who wants to ensure your caregivers love and accept you.
Self-aggression - often, as kids, it wasn’t acceptable or tolerated for us to express our anger towards our parents. Parents communicate this directly or indirectly. Indirectly, it can mean that when you are angry, the parent shuts down or gives a look of disapproval. These small signals tell a kid that I will lose approval/connection if I get angry. Loss of connection/approval feels tantamount to being abandoned and unable to survive in the world because our survival system is hard-wired for connection = safety. Kids will learn to turn the anger on themselves to protect themselves from losing connection. So, the harsh critic that torments you fears losing connection and wants to protect you from expressing anger towards anyone other than you.
Regression - parts get stuck at different ages depending on their development. This means it’s expected sometimes to feel younger than you are when you are experiencing conflict or heightened emotions. In those moments, it’s essential to ask yourself, “How old does this part feel?” Stay curious, and the part may even have a memory from the past that surfaces that goes along with how you are currently feeling. See if you can visualize this younger you and offer it what it needed back then, which is often a hug or a sense of you having its back, letting it know you are there to protect it and ensure everything is okay.
Self Sabotage - often, parts get scared when they sense change happening. They feel dedicated to their roles and believe wholeheartedly that doing something different would mean you will set yourself up for experiencing more pain and disappointment than you can bear. We often judge ourselves when we know we are continuing patterns that feel self-destructive. However, looking at it through the lens of a part, we can begin to feel compassion towards ourselves and offer this part our love and support rather than criticism and shame. Parts have to start to learn that they can trust the adult you and that they have resources and capabilities now that they didn’t have when they were kids. This means they need to be spoken to with kindness and respect for the pain they experienced that put them in these roles and created their fears.
Pervasive shame - this is the experience of feeling like “I am bad.” It’s seeing yourself through the distorted lens of trauma. It tells you you are unworthy, a failure, no one cares about you, you will disappoint anyone you let in, etc. This is the voice that children who grew up neglected or abused internalized. It’s the only way to understand why they feel unloved and unsupported. Shame is held in the body in bracing patterns and uncomfortable sensations. When experiencing shame, you may feel numbness, like making eye contact is not tolerable, or an overall sense of shrinking to become small. It’s important to begin to learn how to tolerate these sensations by creating a safe container to process and move them through the body. Learning to be with one’s parts from a place of curiosity and seeking understanding about what happened to them that made them feel or act the way they do is the first step in creating a safer container to begin processing shame and releasing it and creating new felt senses and patterns in the body.
To begin the process of healing, we must begin to identify our parts and learn how to communicate with them. If you would like to learn more about how to have these conversations, please read my blog entry, "Journaling Prompts for Healing the Inner Critic."
