Life often synchronistically provides me with the solution to a problem not long after the problem presents itself.  This happened just this week after I tried to write a post about some of my inner workings, but abandoned it when it was clear it was painting an inaccurate (and unkind) picture of myself.  I simply didn’t have the language to describe what I was trying to talk about, a frustrating place for a writer to find themselves in.

Then not long after, I began reading a book called No Bad Parts written by Dr. Richard Schwartz.  It’s about the therapeutic method he came up with called Internal Family Systems, devised after decades of working with trauma patients.  In his work with them, he discovered that the psyches of his patients seemed to be comprised of ‘parts’, rather than being a monolithic mind as typically conceived of in Western medicine.

At first he wondered if his office hadn’t become filled with people with Dissociative Identity Disorder, but realized that he himself possessed these internal parts.  After considerable research and work with his patients, he realized the same thing that Carl Jung realized: that we contain multitudes within us, distinct personalities within ourselves that drive our behaviors and feed our emotions.  Furthermore, these distinct entities can be interacted with for the purposes of healing trauma and growing the psyche.

I felt so validated as I read these things.  I’ve been doing Jungian archetype exploration for at least five years now, but that was a topic so misunderstood by nearly everyone I talked to that I was often interpreted as being certifiably crazy because they thought I was hearing and seeing things.  I didn’t know how to explain myself in such a way that others would properly understand me.

Imagine my relief to find the exact same processes, only using different language, described in No Bad Parts.  Internal Family Systems, or IFS, isn’t some fringe treatment anymore, it’s considered an evidence-based treatment that insurance will pay for.  In our medical system, that is a huge stamp of approval that opens a lot of doors and provides acceptance for things formerly frowned upon.

Like any good self-help book, it’s filled with exercises.  I read them through without doing them on the spot since as I read, it was evident I had already been doing this work for some time without having a name for it.  I’ve been taking inner “roll calls” for at least five years and making note of how active players came and went and how they interacted, I just didn’t have a language to describe what I was doing.  I was just winging it with the writings of Carl Jung.

One document I wrote about three years ago was called “Pieces and Parts”, of course not knowing at the time about ‘parts work’ in IFS.  I did a brain dump of any aspect of my psyche I could think of, and then wrote something of a little story of how they all interacted.  There were parts for myself at different ages.  There were parts that were basically emotions that had taken on a life of their own.  There were other parts I could only identify as Jungian archetypes.  They were all described as living in something of a neighborhood, with some living next door to one another, or sharing duplexes.  Then I left it and didn’t think of it again until I began reading No Bad Parts.

I instantly thought of it again as I read the book, particularly the exercise asking the reader to ‘map out’ a few of their inner parts.  I’m a writer and an abstract artist, not a realistic one, so I figured it was just as good to give a written ‘map’ as it was to draw one.  I pulled up the document and amended it with any recent arrivals or additions over the last three years, then proceeded to try to draw that neighborhood in which they all lived in a journal.  It was fascinating to see them all color-coded and grouped together, and I felt as though I were watching a picture of myself slowly take shape.

Then my husband said a dirty word to a person like me: spreadsheet.  My mind exploded into a color-coded, sortable spreadsheet that could take the place of the individual documents I had been considering creating as an exploration of each part, and I instantly got to work.  I had a visualization of a massive as-yet-unclear picture comprised of thousands of sliding wooden pieces, which were in the process of rearranging themselves to form the image.

The final result: a breakdown of my psyche using my internal parts and their ages, life events, roles, distorted purposes, healthy functions, and needs.  The initial exercise in the book called for the reader to map out four or five parts: my spreadsheet had 54 rows, one for each part.  Yet that represented years of inner exploration and analysis.  I was essentially tabulating and collating a massive amount of data and analyzing it for its patterns and information.

I filled in the spreadsheet as much as I could using the “Pieces and Parts” document and accompanying journal ‘map’, but had to fill in the gaps using my intuition.  I would look at an empty cell, contemplate it, and simply write down the first thing that came to mind.  I was relying on my long history of having the right answer the first time.

Then I began sorting by the different columns so I could begin seeing patterns, and it was extremely illuminating.  Sorting by ‘age born’ filled me with an overwhelming sense of sympathy for myself, for it was plain to see that my early life was not filled with the happy things that should fill a child’s life.  The first part to make an appearance in my life at the age of 2: Fear, as the result of my father’s drinking, accompanied by Pain.  Grief makes an appearance a year later as the result of his death.

And that was just the first three years of my life on Earth.  Slowly filling in the ‘life events’ column to correspond with the emergence of different parts was heartbreaking.  As I sorted the columns and tweaked information here and there, I was overwhelmed with an unnameable sense of no longer being able to be angry at myself for my various life crimes and mistakes.  Looking at the balance of bad and good in my life and how overwhelmingly bad it all was, I’m not sure how I could possibly have been expected to behave like a ‘normal’ person at all.  When had I learned how to?  People think these things are innate, and they’re not: they must be learned.

Yet filling in the chart didn’t just show me the bad parts of my life and my psyche, but also the good ones, scattered as they were.  Those good parts, such as The Intellectual and The Scientist and The Musician, became valuable inner companions that carried me through and around the bad things, and as such became foundation stones in the bedrock of my True Self.  Accessing the True Self is the goal of IFS, just as it is in Jungian therapy.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the spreadsheet is the ‘needs’ column.  Every part of us is either fulfilled or unfulfilled.  If it’s unfulfilled, it acts out in some way, which means every part has a need that may require addressing.  Filling in the ‘needs’ column and then sorting it to see which ones repeated was very illuminating, and if I had done it outside the context of clearly seeing my inner parts and my history, it wouldn’t have had any impact because I felt no sympathy for myself.

However, seeing the story of my life told in inner parts in that way and in the context of those parts having unmet needs broke down the wall of unworthiness that stood between myself and any notion of being deserving of anything in the ‘needs’ column.  Things like Love, Acknowledgement, Compassion, Connection, Companionship, Exploration, Expression, Respect, and many more.

Once those needs are addressed, each part can begin expressing its ‘healthy function’, because every part has one, even the parts we don’t like.  That is one of the primary lessons of IFS and the lesson inherent in the title No Bad Parts: that even when we have a part of us that we don’t like, such as Anger, it is attempting to fulfill a positive purpose, often protection.  It just doesn’t know how to do so in a healthy manner.  Fulfilling its need transforms it so that it is no longer destructive and instead, becomes constructive.

Having done this project was both encouraging and daunting.  Encouraging because it was clear to see the progress I’ve made these past several years, daunting because it clearly demonstrates how much more work I have to do.  Having the list of needs is good, but in a way it’s not helpful because a lot of those things are foreign concepts to me.  As though I’ve been given a toolbox full of unfamiliar tools but told that’s what I need to use to work on my car now.  I am assured they are improvements over what I’m used to, but they’re new to me so I don’t know how they work, which saddens me.  A person my age should not be so unfamiliar with things such as Praise and Acceptance.

I’m a little unsure how to proceed now, although I get the sense that I need to let the sensations of Understanding and Compassion settle in some more, because they’re activating the Acknowledgement and Love that seem to be necessary to release things like Shame, Guilt, Regret, and Resentment.  I have an overwhelming number of parts based in anger and sadness, and they all need acknowledging.  I feel as though a long-untended and gaping, infected wound is finally being taken care of.  Maybe I should just let it heal for a while.  While I’m doing that, I have this lovely picture now of the person I was, and why, and who I’m supposed to be to motivate me.

She wore her scars as her best attire.
A stunning dress made of hellfire.

Daniel Saint