Have you ever felt like, depending on the situation you find yourself in, a different ‘you’ seems to be in charge of the steering wheel? Or perhaps you find yourself in dilemmas where a part of you thinks one thing, and another part something quite different? That’s because increasingly, it’s understood that it’s quite normal to experience different and sometimes contradictory parts of ourselves.
Indeed some of the time, these parts might have positive qualities such as the entertainer that comes out at parties or the wise soul who’s great at giving sage advice to friends and loved ones. However, other times, we can be hijacked by less skilful (albeit well-meaning) parts of ourselves such as the harsh critic, the victim or the people pleaser, who when in charge can lead us into situations or behaviours that increase our suffering.
In this article, we’re going to learn about just why these parts exist (spoiler alert: they’re mostly trying to be helpful), how they come into being, what they might be trying to achieve, and how we can get to know our parts better in order to notice when they have taken over so we can act from a more grounded and centred part of our self.
An Inner Family of Parts
If you happen to have dipped into the world of self development, you might have heard the term ‘parts work’ thanks to the meteoric rise of a psychological model called Internal Family Systems (IFS). At its core, IFS works with our inner family of parts which are often there to protect vulnerable aspects of the psyche that hold raw, unprocessed emotional pain, which can also be thought of as our inner wounded child.
The idea is that rather than having a unified, unchanging self, parts theory helps us to understand why depending on the situation or the people we are around, we find ourselves inhabiting different personas or exhibiting traits that feel at odds with who we are when we are relaxed and at ease.
Most of us wear “different hats” in life, depending on whether we are at work, with our parents, or socialising with our friends and some of these roles might be accompanied by somewhat opposing behaviours. For instance, someone could be a competent and confident boss at work, but more passive and insecure in personal relationships.
The question is whether we are engaging with these different roles consciously, or if the different personas emerge from outside of our awareness in situations that trigger past emotional hurt or trauma, with the corollary that there is an emotional cost to ourselves or to others. For instance, if in the workplace, we have developed a perfectionist and hyper critical part of ourselves in order to avoid the pain of failure or being judged, over time, the cost to ourselves is total exhaustion, a shattered nervous system and feeling of never being good enough. Eventually, we may even experience burn out and find ourselves in therapy wondering why we might be the most compassionate person with friends and family, but have set the bar so high, there is no room for kindness or understanding for ourselves.
What Are Parts?
Many decades before IFS was developed, the Swiss Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst Carl Jung described how emotionally charged clusters of thoughts, feelings, memories and associations that develop around significant and often traumatic experiences in our lives (known as complexes) have “the tendency to form a little personality” of themselves. They have “a sort of body, a certain amount of its own physiology. It can upset the stomach. It upsets the breathing, it disturbs the heart - in short, it behaves like a partial personality.” (Analytical Psychology-Its Theory and Practice by Carl Jung)
If we take our earlier perfectionist/hyper critical part example, we could imagine when “caught” in this part (or partial personality), someone’s thoughts might tightly focus on the need to be the best at what they do, berating themselves for any small failure, they might develop behaviour that sees them working 12 hours a day or being the first in and the last out of the office, consequently, their nervous system is always on hyper alert for any indication of failure, with their digestive system suffering from the stress, not to mention the impact on their sleep and blood pressure. Someone might start to think that’s just who they are. “I’m a workaholic” they might say, becoming so identified with this part that they lose access to any other aspects of themselves, such as being able to be a supportive, romantic partner.
Why We Develop Parts
When we are children, our parents or primary caregivers are our world. We want to do everything we can to please them in order to secure their love and care. We soon work out that if we are “good” our parents are less likely to be angry, more likely to be warm and loving and as a result we feel safe and secure. For our survival then, we learn it is important to be “good” and please those around us, and before long, our own sense of self (and safety) becomes intertwined by the pleasing of others. And as we develop into our adult years, this drive to please in order to secure the love and acceptance solidifies and becomes an autonomous part.
What started out as a learned survival strategy to be loved by our parents becomes our modus operandi in all relationships, often with damaging results. Someone whose sense of self and safety is so tied up in pleasing others, may have no sense of their own needs, Furthermore, when any displeasure is sensed, this can feel so frightening and catastrophic, they are overwhelmed with panic and anxiety.
It would be easy to see how over time, someone with a dominant people pleaser part might find themselves wondering why they always end up losing sight of who they are when in relationships and feel high levels of anxiety when perceiving a lack of acceptance or displeasure in the other?
Getting to Know Our Parts
In Psychosynthesis, the Psychological approach of my training, we are interested in getting to know the diverse collection of sub-personalities (the term we use for parts), bringing understanding to why they came into being, what they are trying to achieve and how they interact with each other. Sometimes, just as we have in our own families, there can be conflict between our different inner parts or sub personalities, whose wants and needs are in opposition to each other. This might be experienced as a feeling of being at war with ourselves, which in parts terms for instance, could manifest in a highly critical or judgemental part berating the anxious pleaser for not standing up for themselves.
For anyone who enjoys journaling, a good exercise in getting to know our parts is to pick one of the most dominant parts and think about a recent time when it has been particularly activated. Think about what happened in this situation that gave rise to the activation of the part? How did the part behave? How did it feel in the body? We then enquire about what this part wanted, what it needed, and what it was most afraid of.
Let’s take as an example someone with a perfectionist part who has been berating themselves for not coming top in a professional exam. This part may have wanted to come top in order to gain professional recognition, but a deeper need might have been a longing for love, acceptance and approval from their boss and peers (and probably their parents). The fear might have been that anything less than getting 100% would lead to disapproval and rejection; a feeling so unbearably painful stemming from their childhood, they will do anything within their power to prevent it. When we consider what drives this part and how hard it is working to avoid intolerable pain, it’s hard not to feel compassion towards its tireless albeit ultimately unhelpful endeavour.
It can also be fun to give our parts a name, for instance, I have a part called “Second-guessing Sally” who becomes particularly activated in new group situations when she anxiously scans the room (and people’s faces/body language) for signs of approval or disapproval, leading to further heightened anxiety.
Through this process, we have an experience of recognising the part as being something outside of ourself, in other words, in the noticing and getting to know these parts, there is an “I” who is the noticer, which in Psychosynthesis terms, is our true self. In that gap between the “I” and noticing the part, lies awareness and choice; giving us the chance to say: “thank you my dear perfectionist part, I know how much you want to do the best you can in order to feel loved, but it’s OK if I don’t get 100%, I know my value doesn’t depend on being perfect, and I will be OK if I don’t.”
It’s important to note that we are not trying to get rid of or banish parts. As much as they have wreaked havoc through their well-meaning yet misjudged efforts, the healing comes in being able to accept them just as they are. Counterintuitively, with acceptance we are able to fulfil the part’s real needs in healthier ways such as showing ourself self compassion, eventually even transmuting their negative qualities into more positive ones.
Psychosynthesis Therapy
It can be incredibly helpful (and liberating) to view our inner experience (and struggles) through the lens of our unique collective of parts and sub-personalities, with the hope that we can eventually find inner harmony and wholeness. It is a slow and delicate process, as many of these parts have been around since our childhood and have become wired into our inner architecture. Which is why, to work safely and at depth, it is advisable to be supported by a therapist trained in working with parts or sub-personalities, such as a Psychosynthesis Counsellor like myself.
Trained at the Institute of Psychosynthesis in London, I am a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and offer both in-person sessions on the Isle of Wight and online. If you would like a 15 minute discovery call to find out more, please contact me here.
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