How to: An example of Parts work for emotional processing
A tool to help you feel emotions without identifying with them
Many of us with long covid and other chronic conditions have found that processing repressed thoughts, emotions, and trauma are critical to recovery. Our nervous systems simply can’t function properly if we have years or decades of repressed issues gumming things up. However, processing emotions or repressed thoughts, especially darker or depressing thoughts, can be especially difficult if we identify too strongly with what we’re thinking.
Most of us have heard that we are not our thoughts, and perhaps we’ve been advised to notice our thoughts and not identify with them. This is good advice, but it can be hard to practice when we’re overwhelmed by challenging thoughts and emotions. I’ve found Parts work to be a powerful tool for witnessing emotions without identifying with them as strongly. So today, I’ll walk through that process a little.
A quick introduction to Parts Work
Parts work is based off of IFS Therapy, which was developed by Richard Schwartz. It’s the idea that each of us is not a single, unified mind, but rather, there are lots of “parts” within us. This is not multiple personality disorder. It comes from the common experience of feeling like a “part” of us wants to do one thing, like eating a pint of ice cream or binging TV, while another “part” wants the opposite. Especially in people with dysregulated nervous systems, conflicts between these fragmented parts within us may be the driving forces behind emotional repression, physical symptoms, and fears of what’s happening inside of us. If you haven’t listened to it already, I highly recommend, Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts, by Richard Schwartz to learn more about what Parts work is and how to practice it.
Anyone who’s done inner child work has, to a certain extent, already begun doing Parts work. With Parts work, we’re acknowledging that there isn’t just one child within us who needs help: there are many. When we can address each individual part, we can break down the emotional overwhelm and focus on just the emotional experience of that one part. Moreover, by identifying and communicating with our “parts” we also develop a better sense of our “core self,” which is another component of emotional processing and recovery. To help get you started, I want to share a couple of ideas about how to access your Parts and feel more comfortable with addressing various repressed thoughts and emotions.
How to start a Parts dialogue
I do want to be clear up front: these are two ideas I came up with, and they may or may not help. Although this is something I practice, it is not something I’m an expert in, and some of this may represent my own personal modifications to how Parts work is traditionally practiced.
Option 1
Consider a time that you had conflicting preferences about something, or maybe even consider an issue you have now that’s triggering a mild internal conflict. I recommend starting with something that only triggers mild emotions. Tonight, for example, I was trying to get this newsletter finished. Part of me wanted to try to write this while watching TV, while another part of me knew that was a ridiculous idea because I’d already spent all afternoon trying to write this with the TV in the background, and nothing got done.
When you have an idea for a non-threatening internal conflict, sit or lie down, breath into your body, and see if you can start to feel where those conflicting ideas reside in your body. For me, when I sat and focused on it, I felt the desire to watch TV was residing in the far left side of my chest, while the urge to turn the TV off and just get this written was centered up and down the middle of my torso.
You may or may not be able to feel where in your body the sensations seem to be coming. Especially early on, it may feel like all your thoughts or sensations are centered in your head or chest. Regardless of whether you can feel the conflict coming from different parts of your body, you should be able to sit for a minute or two and be aware of the fact that these conflicting ideas exist inside of you.
Next, see if you can identify emotions associated with these different parts. In my example, the part of me that wanted to watch TV felt like a little kid pouting, while the part of me that just wanted to get this done felt exasperated. I could also sense a part of me that was disappointed and frustrated that I didn’t get this done earlier and was procrastinating yet again.
These are examples of your parts. According to Schwartz, it’s not uncommon to have 5 or 6 parts (or more) for any given issue you’re working through. By just moving through the steps above, by sitting and being aware of your parts, you’re taking a first step toward witnessing the parts, rather than identifying with them. Rather than believing that “I” was frustrated or disappointed or exasperated, I could step back and see that, although each of those parts are within me, they do not define me. I could more easily stop identifying with those feelings once I could see them as parts.
If I wanted to go deeper into this, then I would turn to JournalSpeak, and I would use that tool to have a conversation with one or many of those parts. In fact, a benefit of Parts work is that it can help break up big emotional events, so that rather than facing huge emotional overwhelm, you can address each individual part of the event. For example, I could just focus on the young child part that was resisting writing the newsletter, or I could just focus on the part that was frustrated about my procrastination.
Option 2
Consider a feeling that you identify with strongly, but that you wish you didn’t identify with. Sit with that feeling for a minute, and then ask yourself, “Do all parts of me feel this way?”
For example, earlier today, I was feeling a little sad and depressed. When I asked if all parts of me felt this way, I could sense a resounding “No!” coming from most of my body, but there was also a single, little Eeyore voice saying, “I’m sad.” That meant that a lot of me was not sad. Although I had identified strongly with the part of me that was upset, it didn’t represent the whole of me. Once I realized that it was just one part of me that felt this way, and that so much of the rest of me did not feel this way, I was able access more of my core self and witness the emotions rather than be absorbed by them. At that point, from the perspective of the core self, I could hold space for that part of me that was upset. Plus, the image of a little Eeyore inside of me made me smile.
If this is your first time doing an exercise like this, it may not be easy to distinguish different parts with a single question. You may feel muddled or confused or it may still feel like you only have the one emotion that you’re identifying with. It might help to ask some additional questions:
Does any part of you feel sad?
Does any part of you feel angry?
Does any part of you feel shame?
Does any part of you feel happy or excited?
Does any part of you feel fear? (I find that if I fear the emotion I’m identifying with, it means that there are parts of me that aren’t feeling that emotion, even if I can’t access them yet.)
Are there any other emotions?
I find it helpful to think of each separate emotion as a Part. For me, this serves a couple of purposes: 1) the act of identifying the emotion as a Part continues to reinforce the idea that the emotion is a part of me, but it doesn’t define me, and 2) “I” am the one who is asking the questions, which suggests that “I” must be separate from the emotion.
It may take time to build up more awareness about if and how different parts of you are responding to the questions. As with Option 1, you may want to use JournalSpeak as a tool to help you dive deeper into your different emotional parts. And again, it’s probably easier to start with normal, day-to-day instances where you identify with your feelings, but your feelings aren’t too strong.
As a reminder, there are many tools and techniques to help us recover from chronic illness or chronic pain work. They all work by retraining our brains and nervous systems to respond differently to symptoms and emotions. For me, Parts work was one of the most powerful tools because it allowed me to more successfully access and process some of the more difficult or repressed thoughts and emotions. Again, consider giving Schwartz’s audiobook a try. It also has some meditations that walk you through his Parts work, and it can take you more deeply into the practice.