You Are A Living System

Honoring the child within you, especially when they are hungry for love, connection and presence.

Parts work is a way to bring your wholeness into a clear connection. You are a living system, and that makes it a living process. I was skeptical of it at first. If healing leads to wholeness, why would we want to work with ourselves as parts? What I learned from Dr. Gabor Maté is that when we see an aspect of ourselves as a part, it's an opportunity to get to know something within ourselves, a way to temporarily work with it. It gives us the advantage of relating with that part of ourselves. We can liken this to inner parenting, inner loving parenting.

A younger part that shows up

There's a younger part of me that often goes back to preverbal times, when I was a baby. The memories that come up are usually being at the neighbor's house, my mom away at work as a flight attendant, not just a few hours but a couple of days, a couple of nights, without the holding and attunement I needed from either of my parents. I've heard the stories. I cried a lot. The babysitter told me they couldn't get me to stop crying.

This part comes up when people I'm in a close relationship with move away from me, subtly, without communicating, or when there's an inconsistency in their tone, when they start to show up different. Mostly with romantic partners. It's happened with friends too, gently, but it's a lot more manageable there. It makes sense to me that it shows up hardest with partners.

When this part gets activated, I experience stress and anxiety, an upregulation of my nervous system, anxious rumination, a lot of processing, trying to figure out what's actually going on with the other person, a preoccupation with whatever feels uncomfortable. Then there's the process of finding out whether what I'm picking up on is actually happening in the relationship, or whether it's just my anxiety getting kicked up.

Here's the tricky thing about parts work: a lot of the time a younger part comes up rooted in a historical wound that needs fine tuned, detailed attention, and that's how you integrate it. But there's also the present day thing. If someone is doing something that's activating this in me, it's worthy of a grounded conversation, one where I can own my sensitivity from the past without blaming them, and put in a request, a nonviolent request, not a demand.

It's very hard for me when this part gets kicked up. I have a lot of anxiety that's hard to manage, and I've come a long way with it. I can manage it today better than I ever have, which is hard earned, and something I celebrate. It also just takes the time it takes. And when I'm in a bidirectional, secure functioning relationship with reciprocity, consistency, and presence, that part of me isn't really activated. Learning what kinds of relationships and relationship dynamics settle that part is also part of the process.

A part that protects

A protective part, related to that younger part, is a preoccupied, anxious ruminator. It's come up a lot in my processing lately, an excessive preoccupation with trying to figure out what's actually happening. What I understand about that part is that it's trying to protect the younger part in me from feeling the pain of being left, of not being chosen in an adult relationship in some way.

What that looks like is a real inability in myself to relax, an inability to let go of what happened, what's happening, or what will happen, which keeps me from being present with myself, and often from feeling the sadness, the grief, the loss underneath.

How I work with that part is to remind it that it doesn't have to work so hard. When I align with self energy, I can reassure it. That reassurance usually comes after a few rounds of processing, some preoccupied assessing, seeking orientation psychologically in a situation is a valid pursuit for safety, and then it needs from me to be reassured that it's okay to let it be, to trust. I can reassure that part that I'm handling what needs to be handled, that nothing more needs to be done right now, and see if it can relax a little.

There's a trust building that happens, where the part is afraid I'm going to really be abandoned and hurt, but I already was, long ago, by my own parents. That's not what's happening now. Relationships come and go, they begin, they end, they sometimes begin again, and that's life. When I reassure this part that I can handle that, it slowly builds trust in my self energy, and it's free to do other things. If I need it to come online and help me navigate, troubleshoot, be extremely detail oriented, almost like an investigator or a detective, great, I can invite it to join me when I need that. But if I'm not careful, it can blend with the younger parts, the fear, the anxiety, the anger, the upset, the sadness, in a way that's really hard to manage.

Knowing when you're blended

Becoming familiar with the qualities of self through IFS parts work is helpful. There's the P's and the C's — presence, persistence, perspective, playfulness and patience. When I'm in self energy, I embody compassion, creativity, curiosity, confidence, courage, calm and connectedness toward all parts of me.

So when I experience dislike, avoidance, suppression, or judgment toward anything in myself, that's a sign I'm not in self energy. Or if I'm not clear about the resources I have within myself and in my life as an adult, that's another sign. If there's a panicky, anxious energy, a tight throat, a tight chest, an urgent feeling that something really bad is going to happen and I need to do something about it fast, or if I feel small and powerless, sometimes there's language like reaching in the dark and finding nothing. That kind of language is the language of a baby, crying into the dark, feeling nothing, shutting down at some point.

Each part usually has a belief, a primary felt emotion, a body sensation, sometimes a coping strategy, and always a gift. When those things arise and you get to know them clearly, that's a cue that something's going on, a call for your attention internally. Whenever there's a distortion of your presence, a story running, something arising in your system that doesn't totally match what's going on outside you, those are signals to be curious if a part is coming up. It could be more than one.

When a part takes the wheel

I use a close family member as an example. We had plans, dinner at my place before a film, a short dinner, five to five-thirty, a five-thirty departure. Simple. The film was the main event, I offered to make dinner. They told me about their day, decided to run extra errands in the middle of it, which is fine, you just get it done sometimes. But they ended up about fifteen minutes late. I could see their location on my phone, and it upset me, because that wasn't the plan we'd agreed to. I prefer to get to a film early, I don't want to miss the beginning, it's just my style, life is better when it isn't rushed.

I was already activated, already angry, when I noticed they were going to be late. There's a very young part of me that believes I'm unimportant, and that belief got kicked up. When I brought it to their attention, they denied it, dismissed it, defended themselves, and that made the trigger a lot worse, because they weren't willing to be accountable for how their behavior impacted me, or even acknowledge they were late, let alone show any remorse or regret.

We went to the film anyway. I apologized later, though I don't know if they could really take in my apology either. My end of it was that a younger part of me, who grew up with this person and got the message as a child that I was not important, and at the same time extremely important, which is incongruent. Incongruencies, where people say one thing and do another, really impact me, because it's so disorienting. When there's no accountability, no remorse, it's extremely triggering, because I feel a lot of anger. I'm smarter now, more aware, but that younger part comes up, and it's less about them being late and more about their ability to just acknowledge it and actually care that I was upset. This is a theme from my childhood, me bringing something up did not go well, it ended in conflict and no change, more a question of what was wrong with me than the fact that their behavior was causing me harm, even in small ways.

I noticed it was a part of me while we were driving, not long after it happened. This is a long time dynamic with this person that I don't think will ever change, and that's tough. I acknowledged, later, that nobody triggers me as much as they do.

What unblending actually looks like

Unblending is the continued effort to be curious and compassionate toward the younger parts when they are active in your system. I'd recommend doing that in one on one sessions with someone who can facilitate the process. It's delicate, it's layered, and it's best done with support to begin with. It starts with compassionate inquiry, exploring the question or intention, and usually the way we explore that leads directly to a younger part.

There's a repetitive quality to trailmaking. In order to make a trail, you have to clear the way, and you have to keep walking on it. You find the trailhead, you take the journey, and then you take that journey as many times as needed, in future sessions and in the reps you put in between sessions. That matters because you're creating new connective pathways within yourself, and the younger part of you knows it, your entire system knows it.

There's a sincere effort to burrow in, to find the parts that need admiration, acknowledgment, compassion, courage, that need to be nurtured, nourished, and noticed. The more you do that, the more trust builds in your system, and that's a powerful part of harmonizing your inner world.

Unblending is an ongoing practice, an ongoing process. It's a noticing of when things come up, a noticing of when you're no longer in the present moment, no longer anchored in yourself, in your true self, in your essence. I'd say it's knowing that you are not solely the hungry child within. You are so much more than that. And that is something to honor in yourself.

What gets flattened

Parts work could be misunderstood as something dividing, but it's really meant, long term, to be uniting and harmonizing. That happens through acknowledgment, through getting to know what different parts need, what they're attempting to do for you, what their fears are, what their gifts are. It gets you understanding your inner world a lot more.

People who did not get loving parenting from their parents at all, or didn't get enough, or got it in a way that wasn't congruent, confusing, without enough mirroring and attunement to develop a strong inner self, this is especially for them. Sometimes it takes time to really step into self energy, and there can be resistance and anger that comes up first. That happened for me. I didn't want to do that work, because I was still angry and hurt that my parents didn't do it for me, and I didn't want that responsibility. Over time, I saw that it is my responsibility. That's why I do this work today.