Discovering New Parts

Exploring the human condition. Wisdom to turn pain, trauma, and the human experience into opportunities for growth, purpose, and meaning

Sometimes reverent, sometimes rowdy. This newsletter is beholden to my whims and ever changing interests.

Issue 23 - Read Time: 4 Minutes 53 Seconds

Discovering New Parts

We are a multitude of parts. All of us know this on some level, though it may lie dormant in our unconscious. Part of stepping into wholeness and living the most authentic version of ourselves involves meeting, befriending, and integrating these parts.

And that can be pretty challenging because it requires us to acknowledge things we prefer to leave untouched.

This week you will get:

The multitude of selves (Intro to IFS)

Ego consciousness and resistance

Differing perspectives and integration

The nervous system perspective

The Multitude of Selves

If you are familiar with Internal Family Systems, you know that many different "parts" make up the wholeness of our self. These parts serve different functions, have different roles, and show up in different ways to keep us safe.

In the parlance of IFS, we have the core self, exiles, managers, and firefighters. Each one of these categories has subparts that activate and protect us depending on the situation.

The Core Self is characterized by the 8 C's: Calm, Curious, Clear, Compassionate, Confident, Courageous, Creative, and Connected.

When acting out of the Core Self, we are in touch with these qualities, which are easy to embody.

Exiles hold the disowned parts of parts of ourselves that hold trauma memories and extreme discomfort. Exiles are often parts based in childhood and adolescence.

Managers help us suppress discomfort and maintain the status quo and the distance from our exiles. They protect our life energy and focus on the daily tasks of living.

Firefighters use extreme tactics to protect us when our exiled parts are triggered. Firefighters show up in the form of dissociation, numbness, and extreme behaviors like drug use and other compulsive behaviors.

Ego Consciousness & Resistance

IFS is extremely helpful in understanding the landscape because it delineates all these different parts.

Seen from the lens of depth psychology, we would regard the exile as a shadow quality and work to understand how that shadow quality remains repressed and, through that repression, influences your life.

We must understand that our ego consciousness is triggered when we connect with these hidden parts.

It is triggered because the ego's primary pursuit is security and control. So if something is showing up that threatens the tight containment system of the ego, it will buck against that and seek to maintain control.

Jungian analyst James Hollis describes it this way,

"It's essentially the delusion of the ego that this aggregate of splinter selves and energy systems is under our control, contained within the purview of consciousness, serving our noble intentions. But those splinter selves are essentially fractal energy systems and have the power to oppose our conscious intention at any given moment. Another way of putting this is that certain parts of ourselves haven't been introduced to the other parts, and if they have, they may not be getting along very well."

Integrating these parts

I offer these two perspective because I think it is helpful to understand that these different modalities are saying a lot of the same things, they just have different ways of saying it.

And both modalities will have different approaches to befriending and integrating those parts.

I am not going into the specific approaches each modality might employ, rather I am going to speak more broadly about the utility and honestly, the necessity of integrating parts.

An example:

A couple of weeks ago, I was in session with a client, and we were exploring his relationship with boundaries.

He told me that he has never held boundaries in his life because he believed that boundaries would constrain him and limit his ability to experience life to the fullest.

The only problem was that now, in mid-life, he recognized that lack of boundaries was no longer enlarging him. It was quite diminishing and limiting his ability to feel peace.

But there was still that part inside of him that believed boundaries were limiting.

When we confronted this part directly, I asked him what would happen if he held a boundary. He quickly replied that he would become overly rigid if he held a boundary, and his life would lose creativity.

He paused and was clearly surprised that he had said that.

As we explored further, it became clear to him that he associated boundaries with the religion he was raised with, which he found to be extremely oppressive and limiting.

He had unconsciously associated boundaries with religion and rigidity and rejected that outright because his experience was so traumatic.

So, getting in touch with this part required a more nuanced dialogue about boundaries, the necessity of protection, and compassion for the part of him that felt like it would rob him of life's magic.

Now, I suggest to you that this kind of thing is playing out inside of us ALL of the time. And if you don't do the work to address these parts, they will remain unconscious and rule your life!

So if there are patterns in your life that keep playing out it is worth asking yourself the following questions:

What is my belief about this pattern and how does it serve me?

Does this pattern relate to any other formative experiences in my life?

Does this pattern provide me safety? How so?

Is this safety keeping me from other forms of freedom and liberation?

If I moved beyond this pattern, what opportunities would open up to me?

The Nervous System Perspective

I would be remiss if I didn't connect these concepts to the body. So, let's take a moment to understand how these cut-off parts influence our nervous system.

Let's stick with the example above.

This client's relationship to boundaries and rigidity is not just an experience lodged in his frontal lobe. If it were, it would be as easy as making the insight and choosing to change it.

This is an experience encoded into his nervous system during his developmental years.

An experience encoded through trauma that told him boundaries were oppressive, limiting, dimensioning, and absolute.

So shifting this requires going into the body, finding the sensational experience attached to rigidity, lack of freedom, and stagnation, and updating it to the present day.

That involves getting present to a new type of sensation associated with boundaries. It means consciously attuning to the presence of peace and wholeness when he holds a boundary so that his nervous system can begin to encode a new experience.

And once you start to change the internal, sensational experience, you can create lasting change in your life.

Need More Support?

If you feel like you want some extra support here are some ways Attunement and I can help you:

1. Individual therapy or coaching with a provider at our clinic (In-Person or Virtual Offering)

2. How to Feel Your Feelings Course and Community (Virtual Offering)

3. October Desert Intensive located in central/southern UT (In-Person Offering)

Thank You!

I love that you are interested in exploring yourself in the pursuit of growth and expansion.

And I love that you are diving deeper into the unconscious patterns that limit our capacity as a species to transcend this paradigm.

You are becoming the change you want to see in the world and that is incredibly inspiring!

Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your journey ✨✨

With Love,

Christian