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The Web address of this series is http://sfhelp.org/IF/gwc/IF/ifs.htm     

This page continues an introduction to harmonizing personality subselves and reducing false-self wounds - "parts work." Please turn off your browser's popup blocker to access the informational popups in this arti-cle.

        Now - after picking your initial inner-family goals, clarifying your key attitudes, picking your suppor-ters, and "ranking your inner-family work," you're ready to meet some members of your inner family. Your personal uniqueness guarantees that the way you do inner-family work will be unlike anyone else’s way.

        The following steps are offered as options rather than rigid steps. Scan this whole article to get a feel for it’s scope. Then reread in whatever level of detail that feels right. Here’s the menu:

Basic Parts-work Techniques

Preparing for a parts session Communicating with your subselves First meetings: "What should I ask?" Build an inner-family roster Splitting, unblending, and inner chaos "Owning" and naming your parts Re-doing traumatic past events Rescuing subselves stuck in the past

Resolve internal conflicts Giving subselves new roles (jobs) Accept your disowned subselves Build inner trust and teamwork Use parts (inner family) councils What to expect as the work proceeds Assessing your progress <<   Selected Readings  >>

Preparing for a Parts Session

        Optimize the results of your parts work by making some simple preparations for each inner-family session. The more you do the work, the more automatic these steps will become:

• Key: do an honest Self-check

• Reserve enough undistracted time

• Gather helpful materials

• Pick an appropriate site, and...

• review your attitudes and parts-work (recovery) goals.

Do a Self-check

        An unavoidable paradox: the main purpose of parts work is to free your wise, resident true Self to guide, retrain, and harmonize your other subselves. Yet doing this requires your Self to be in charge! So an Initial step before a parts session is to sense whether your Self is present now, or if not, which other sub-selves (usually one or more Inner kids and their dedicated Guardians) currently control your thoughts and feelings.

        If you sense a protective false self is in charge as you start a parts session, evolve a way of unblen-ding that works well enough. Bypassing this key preparation step risks your experiencing dissatisfying results from a session and losing your motivation to do this priceless healing work.

Reserve Enough Undistracted Time

        Like meditating or praying, if you try to jam parts explorations in between other pressing life activi-ties, you risk inner distractions diluting your concentration and efforts. With practice, you’ll evolve a sense of how much time to allocate comfortably to meet with your inner team. Initially, try at least 15". Expect some distrustful, anxious subselves to resist, and reassure them that there’s time enough to attend "the other important things." Next,...

Gather Helpful Materials

        These can include your journal and a pen/cil; art markers or crayons; a newsprint pad; clay; maga-zines for pictures; photographs of key people or places; soothing background tapes or CDs (e.g. harp mu-sic, wind chimes, Nature sounds); candles or incense; an alarm clock; sacred items (e.g. a Holy book, crucifix, icon, crystal, or amulet); toys or stuffed animals; a footstool, tissue; a blanket and pillow; slippers; a special garment; water or fruit; a book of meditations or affirmations; and this article. Don't bring your cell phone, checkbook, Walkman, iPod, or cat!

        Any objects that add to your parts’ comfort and enhance ways they can safely express themselves are helpful. As your parts-work style develops, you’ll evolve your own resource kit. Know that at some point, it may be helpful to add tools to allow safely expressing parts’ repressed anger - like a tennis racket and target pillow, a rolled-up newspaper or magazine, or a padded "encounter bat (bataka)."

Pick an Appropriate Site

        "Appropriate" means a place that...

• is free enough from distracting noise, smells, lights, mementos, movement, and interruptions;

• is comfortable in temperature, illumination, decor, space, and furnishings. Ideally, furnishings will include several comfortable sitting places and a couch, bed, or futon where you can lie down if (someone) needs to. And a place that...

• feels "right." Parts work can be intensely personal, and increasingly spiritual. Doing it in a place that feels like your safe and sacred space (a den, study, alcove, or sanctuary) is a great help. A setting near or in Nature is often optimal. And "appropriate" also means a place where...

• your subselves can express themselves (rage, cry, yell) loudly without unduly disturbing or arousing other people or animals.

        Ideally, do your work in the same place. Accumulating positive inner-family experiences there will strengthen anxious parts’ expectations of safety, comfort, and good outcomes. A strategic exception is when your current work may benefit from visiting places associated with prior traumas. These can include early homes, schools, neighborhoods, churches, cemeteries, and other evocative sites.

Review your Attitudes and Goals

        When you’ve allocated enough time, arranged for no interruptions, and are settled in your "parts space," then...

Read or review your initial beliefs and attitudes and goals from your journal - perhaps out loud;

Close your eyes to shut out visual distractions if that suits you, and mentally get clearer on what you want to do this session. Optionally, invite your inner Health Director to guide the session, trusting that parts who need attention will appear, and help form your work.

Notice without judgment any distracting thoughts, feelings, or sensations that some parts may be giving you. Calmly accept any doubts, fears, worries, or confusions, as their legiti-mate reactions - and use them as opportunities to guide your work.

        As you gain experience, you’ll develop your ability to do effective parts work in an increasing range of situations and places. Evolving your own "teambuilding space" is a helpful way of getting started.

Communicating With Your Subselves

        Our subselves each have unique feelings, wants, and opinions. When they feel safe - or excited - enough, they express these as thoughts, day and night dreams, hunches, intuition, "visions," "senses," "moods," memories, "urges," "impulses," "knowings," and (some) physical sensations. As you explore your inner world, you’ll discover that there’s a lot going on at any given moment!

        The next discovery is that - if they feel safe - subselves will respond to communications from your Self, each other, and "outside" people. Our parts "talk," listen, argue, interrupt, whine, whimper, moan, bellow, demand, and question, all the time.

        Before going on, check these ideas out. Be still, and notice your emotions and thoughts now. Ima-gine each feeling and thought is brought to you by a subself. Ask (think) "who are you?" (or any other question that occurs to you). Notice any reaction - like another thought, a shift in feelings, or a body sen-sation. If you want to, allow an inner dialog to develop. If emotions occur as you do this, those are your selves "activating." What’s going on in there?

        If "nothing," recall that some Guardian parts have the protective ability to "drop a curtain," "numb out," or block your inner perceptions. If that’s your experience now, respectfully ask the part responsible to show you why it needs to do that. It may or may not feel safe enough to answer in some way. Trust the first response you get, without analyzing it.

        If it still seems really weird and unlikely that you can talk to your other subselves (without being crazy!), experiment further. As you do, you should be able to increasingly trust that your Self and your parts really can communicate. Interview them individually, and get to know them.

How Do I Communicate?

        There’s a rich range of ways to learn about each of your subselves. By yourself, you can...

• have inner-thought dialogs;

• write down subself monologs, dialogs, or council-meeting transcripts;

• use pictures or other media; and...

• use your body sensations. 

        You can also ask one part to pass communications back and forth between you (your Self) and another part who isn’t ready to interact directly yet. Like some co-workers in an organization, some subselves will tell you things about other parts which may or may not be accurate (!)

        With a trained parts-work counselor or guide, you can allow...

• indirect and direct access between them and a given subself, where the helper asks the questions; and

• you and a helper can also work co-operatively together to interview, instruct, or negotiate with parts.

Each subself may have a preferred way of communicating. Some will do so via thoughts and/or inner pictures, some will use your vocal cords, and some would rather write prose or poetry or sketch in your journal. Some very young Inner Kids are pre-verbal (or occasionally even pre-birth). They can communicate via body sensations, emotions, or mental images, not with words, so your awareness of these is vital.

        As your parts-work experience grows, you’ll develop a facility with each of these communicating "channels". Let’s take a look at the main modes:

Using Your Inner Voices

        What's a thought? We all have them, yet it’s hard to describe exactly what they are. For most of us, they’re (usually) coherent streams of silent words and phrases - sometimes linked to images or emo-tions, other times not. The inner-family concept suggests that our thoughts are the voices of many (not all) of our parts. Before accepting the reality of subselves, most of us say (or think) "I’m thinking." That changes here to "part of me is ‘talking’."

        Notice your current thoughts, and say out loud "One of my subselves is causing these inner word streams." Notice also that you can allow inner talk to happen or divert it. You probably can't completely stop thinking - right? Try it. Also experiment with "creating" inner sounds, like laughing, bellowing, bells ringing, water moving, thunder, animal sounds, and favorite tunes or lyrics.

        Parts work uses this universal ability to communicate "inside" to interact with subselves. To meet one, you (your Self) focus on them, and think an inner question or comment, like "Are you the one who’s waking me up at night?" Then "be quiet," and notice any response without judgment: a thought, feeling, body sensation, or several of these. "No response" is a response.

        If a thought, image, or "sense" forms, that’s a subself replying to you. By alternating comments or questions from your Self and sensed responses, you can dialog with selected subselves. Allow this to feel alien and weird at first. You'll soon get used to it, and may wonder how you got along without these rich inner dialogs. Typical kids are quick at learning to talk fluidly with their subselves.

        Parts conversations can be internal (silent), or you can speak out loud. I’ve shared profound mo-ments with clients who encouraged a subself to use their lungs and vocal chords to make sounds for the first time in their life. Instead of "I’m talking to my self" which may feel silly or weird, try saying "I’m giving one of my subselves a voice." Experiencing inner conversations, alone or with a helper, can feel much dif-ferent! Pause and notice your thoughts and feelings now. Is anyone commenting on the ideas we just co-vered? Who?

Changing Chairs or Locations

        Psychologists Hal and Sidra Stone have developed an inner-family process they call "voice dialog." In "Embracing Our Selves," they write about many clients who would change their seats during a parts session to access different inner "voices." I’ve experienced the same thing.

        A woman I’ll call Joan would have inner-family shifts regularly during our sessions. An angry ado-lescent part would talk on the left end of the couch; a sad one spoke with a very young voice from a separate chair, and Joan’s Self would speak confidently from the right side of the couch. This evolved spontaneously - it wasn’t true when we began, nor did I coach it.

Imaging and Sensing

        Some people are more visual than others. Others are more oriented to sound or touch. They easily see or sense inner images of both real things ("picture" your car), and non-real things like dream-scenes and imagined sights.

        For instance, see if you can image a mouse and an elephant having tea. if you can’t, you’re still OK! Visual people can develop the ability to see or sense symbolic images of their parts, and often the parts’ actions and surroundings. Such images are rich sources of information about your inner team and it’s members.

        If you are visual, two options for your Self are: (a) intentionally pick an image that seems to fit a given part, or (b) invite the subself to show you it’s own preferred image. I recommend the latter, because asking a part how it wants to represent itself is more respectful than "forcing" an image on it.

        My experience is that - depending on their sense of safety, some subselves will pick an initial image (or none), and then adopt a more "real" one later in the work. Others don’t need to do that. Some subselves  can use several different images at different times, depending on inner and outer circumstan-ces.

        Typical subself images people describe are of full or partial human adults and children, including infants and even embryos. Other images have been "a pile of black dirt," "a ferret," "a huge gray boulder," a "soft white light," "a fairy like Tinker Bell," and other non-human forms. There is no right way to image a subself other than what they and you feel is fitting.

        Note also that, like photographs, the image of a part is a symbol - it’s not the part itself. As with many inner-family explorers, one client discovered that her "Guilt Tripper" (Inner Critic) subself used the image of her younger real-life mother, frowning and angrily critical. Stay clear that such a part is not "my mother." It is a unique subself who uses the image of "my mother" to represent herself, like a costume. This distinction is important to avoid projecting feelings you have about the real person onto a subself.

Memories

        A phenomenon that’s so common as to be unnoticed is our ability to remember past inner and outer events. Memories can be seen as another "channel" some subselves use to communicate with. A related phenomenon is "forgetting" and local amnesia. This may be seen as a Guardian's or Vulnerable's habitual protective action to keep us from expected harm or pain.

        Some (not all) people doing patient meditation and parts work can safely re-gain some repressed memories - i.e. a subself can gain enough trust in current inner and outer safety to "release" the old im-ages. Typically the repressed material is about events which were experienced at the time as exception-ally painful, threatening, or overwhelming. See also "Body Memories" and "Flashbacks" below.

        If you’re visual, use steps like these to develop your ability to "see" or "sense" the images your parts want to use:

Get quiet, relaxed, and physically comfortable, in a non-distracting place. Breathe comfor-tably from your belly (vs. your chest).

"Clear your inner space" in your own way. Perhaps imagine erasing a blackboard, clearing a table-top, being by a calm lake or pond, raking sand into smooth patterns, or focusing on a pleasant pastel color. Quiet your thoughts. Think or say softly something like "I am still now" several times. Breathe easily and naturally.

Focus your thoughts on the subself you want to "see." With peaceful interest and expec-tancy, invite an image to form, or ask the subself to give you an image it would like to use to represent itself. Trust the first thing that happens - including "no image."

Be alert to other subselveds having a significant reaction to the image. If some judgmental or analytic part wants you (your Self) to edit or reject the image that comes (inner voice: "That doesn’t fit - that’s crazy!"), acknowledge and decline their urge. If some parts are up-set, scared, or even disgusted by the image, acknowledge and reassure them - and stay focused. Use such reactions to learn more about those subselves after you’re done with the current task.

Focus on the image and its surroundings. Neutrally notice as much as you can, like an ob-jective reporter. For instance: "My sad part looks like a barefoot 7-year-old girl in a brown dress. She has stringy blond hair, and is sitting hunched in a corner with her arms around her knees. I can’t see her face yet. The corner is sort of dark gray, and bare. The floor seems to be wood. I can’t see anything else now."

Notice your feelings and attitude about the part. If other than a compassionate interest, know that another subself may have blended with your Self. Work with that part to see what it needs, if that feels right at the time (see "Unblending").

When a parts session ends, journal (soon) about both what you experienced and any emo-tional or physical reactions you noticed along the way.

Writing and Drawing

        Some members of your inner family are most comfortable and fluent communicating non-verbally. Here are some options:

Monologing

        Using your parts-work journal or log, focus on a given subself and invite it to express itself by writing it’s current thoughts, feelings, goals, hopes, fears, and frustrations. A key here is to accept and write or draw anything that comes up, without editing or analyzing. As you do, other subselves may want to cri-tique, comment, or block the Writer.

        Reassure them (your Self) that there’s enough time for each part to be attended to, and stay focus-ed: honor the subself that’s currently communicating. As you do, your other subselves will gain trust over time that You’ll honor them, too (if you do!). That’s part of effective teambuilding.

        As your experience with parts-work grows, you may notice that different parts have unique handwri-ting, vocabularies, and styles. This helps in times where you’re not clear on who’s communicating.

Right or Left Hand

        Experiment with writing or drawing with each of your hands. Many subself-explorers discover some inner members have a clear preference or aptitude for one hand over another. Using your non-dominant hand may empower some parts to communicate for the first time. If you have protective parts who scoff at this, acknowledge that with affection - and try switching hands anyway.

Using Different Media

        Try writing or drawing with a variety of media. Some parts may feel freer to express themselves with a pen, a marker, crayons, a pencil, or paints. Some may like prose, others poetry, while still others want to draw, sculpt, make a mural, a collage, or just scribble.

Dialoging

        Sometimes it’s helpful to let a conversation between two or more subselves develop on paper. One way to do this is to divide a blank page into two equal columns with a vertical line. Invite your Self or another subself to write on the left side, and record another part’s responses on the right side. An alterna-tive is to let a dialog unfold on the page the way the lines in a play or transcription are written:

S(elf): "Are you the part who’s giving me the angry feelings?"

P(art): "What if I am?"

S: "I’d like to know more about why you’re angry. Will you tell me about that?"

P: "Maybe. I don’t know..."

Continue learning ways to communicate with your subselves and other techniques...

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Updated February 13, 2010